I discovered that I have a vampire 👹 living in my kitchen with my Kill a Watt Meter. Hungry little beast!
My microwave averages 1.8 watts when plugged in but turned off. That’s 302 watt hours per week, completely wasted as I never bother to even set the clock.🔌 In contrast I use my microwave about 10 minutes a week. When it’s operating at full power it uses 1,300 watts or roughly 217 watt hours per week. That means my microwave uses more energy plugged in and turned off each week then it does cooking food. Hungry little vampire you might say. ⚡
While I may save only $2.35 a year by unplugging my microwave, 💡every bit counts, and it will save roughly 16 lbs of coal from being burned and 10 lbs of coal ash and scrubber residue from being landfilled.
I finished up the five episodes of NPR’s Embedded podcasts on Coal Stories. 🔊I cried a little bit when the final podcast came to an end as I knew how it would end.
Except for the brave wayward tourist or maybe the backcountry hunter few non local people ever spend much in Appalachia off the beaten path🚧 of the expressway and the tourist trap. It’s hard to fall in love with a land at seventy miles per hour or by staying only in designated locations. Many people believe that the world ends once you pass the last stop light,🚥 descending into a dark place highlighted by Deliverance. Despite what television says, there aren’t people hiding in the woods hoping to make you squeal like a pig 🐷.
Appalachia with its mighty mountains, 🗻twisty narrow roads with steep decents and quaint villages in the river valleys is a special, wild place in many ways. It’s a place filled with amazing people, spectacular scenery and fascinating accents, traditions and customs. It’s a place of remarkable natural resources like fish and wildlife,🐡 poor farms carved into hillsides and fertile valleys🐮, timber🌲, rock, oil and gas and most importantly coal.
While the best of Appalachia’s coal has long been burned, there are still substantial reserves of this dirty but cheap fuel, especially the low value soft bituminous coal.🏭 Loaded with sulfur and heavy with carbon atoms, mining has provided good paying, if not tough jobs in area where there is few other jobs – as Appalachia is already poor and provides the big bustling metropolitan areas🏢 with cheap, but very dirty electricity.
Sure there are other jobs in Appalachia, but for the most part they pay less. Most people, especially those in Appalachia know that coal jobs are disappearing 🌁due cleaner and easier to burn natural gas, greater efficiency, and more renewables. Even in deep Appalachia wind turbines dot the ridges and solar panels cling to hillsides, but nothing pays quite like coal when it comes to natural resource production – despite being an industry that is only becoming more troubled. Coal is not unlike the dairy industry in New York – dairy ain’t the best sector of agriculture in the state but it has steady milk checks year round.
Coal allows people to stay in Appalachia, at least the lucky few that can score the remaining jobs. It’s tough nasty work, an industry that every local knows is poisoning the land but is also putting dinner on the table, paying for a nice house and pickup truck, a deer rifle for hunting season and a four wheeler.🗻 Coal allows people to remain in the land they love, the blessed hills and hollows, the twisty steep roads off the mountains where people hunt and fish, at least where acid mine discharge hasn’t poisoned the steams.
Make no mistake, coal is not an easy industry to break into. Only a few percentage of people in Appalachia are lucky enough to have scored a job in the coal industry. 👷But for the lucky few, it’s a good job in a wonderful community. And that was the whole story of Embedded’s Coal Stories.
I highly recommend listening to the Embedded Coal Stories. 🎧Don’t be afraid to exit the four lane, explore the quaint villages that time and tourists has forgotten between the mountains,🏰 take many narrow and steep roads through the mountains. Speak jealously about the few people lucky enough to carve a life out of what so little remains of the hills and hollows of Appalachia.
Climate change is a serious problem but I reject undermining environmental laws, 📚threatening endangered species and paving over farm land, wildlife habitat and destroying our public lands to address mitigate it. 🌲🌳 Protecting the environment from badly thought out renewable and fossil energy projects is important.
I oppose solar farms on farm land and forests but I support solar panels on existing roof tops such as homes and business. If it’s already developed, there is no harm on strapping a slab of silicon on the roof.🏠 Wind turbines on farms make a lot of sense as they provide additional revenue to farms and are less disturbing to wildlife. Wind turbines take up some land and cast shadows but their impact is relatively small.🚜🐮 Obviously they are not appropriate in areas with good quality muck soils.
I reject the attacks by activist Eleanore Stein and certain politicians on our environmental laws and local control.⚖🏘 While it’s important we continue to invest in increasing our supply of renewable energy, it should not come as a cost to our quality of life or to the environment.🌇
Climate change is a serious threat to our environment and quality of life but so are renewable energy projects if it’s not installed in an environmentally sensitive manner. 🏭🏭🏭 Some in the environmental community will claim that the ends of unmitigated climate change will justify the means but they are wrong and must be repudiated firmly.😡
While this article doesn't make it clear, only 1 out of 3 coal jobs is in actual mining. 2 out of 3 coal jobs is in operating the power plants, most of which can relatively easily be converted to burn gas or other cleaner fuels.
Fossil energy generation has to go and with some redesigned infrastructure, can go. It's not going to be cheap or easy, but just because we are getting rid of one source of generation, doesn't mean that jobs will disappear. They'll just go to other sources of generation, because something has to keep the electrons flowing so the lights remain on.
"A study of the photovoltaic industries in the US and China shows that China's dominance in solar panel manufacturing is not driven solely by cheaper labor and government support, but by larger-scale manufacturing and resulting supply-chain benefits."
I think in a few years, as solar prices continue to decline, and so does the solid state equipment that ties you into grid, solar panels will eventually become standard equipment on most buildings, just like electrical lights are right now.
