patrick.net

Where is this house you have your dreams pinned on?

On the East Coast, Near where I live now. :)

EastCoastBubbleBoy says

On the East Coast, Near where I live now.

Well at least he's pretty specific. :) I have my eye on a little piece of heaven on this backwater planet called Earth, It's on the edge of the Milkyway galaxy, far for all the busy rat race at the galactic core.

TMI.

Or it could just be that the building permits are running and construction has to begin. I also find it interesting that the full development of this project is spanned out for well over 10 years. My sense is the developer is under pressure to start this project and is hedging its bets by stretching completion out over a decade. During the boom years, this project would have taken 5 years at most to complete.

Appreciate the wishful thinking Nomo, but I fear that is all it is.

Sounds a little tight to me, You have 230 acres available to build on, you burning 67 acres on park space, that leave you with 163 acres, there's 43,560 sq ft in 1 acre giving them rough 7 million sq ft to work with. For 4,780 housing units, that leave less then 1,500 sq ft per unit without roads, parking and commercial space. When you subtract 1 million for commercial space, your left with about 1,200 sq ft per apartment. Naturally these buildings will be multi-story building but from the art pictures they are only 3 floor high at the most. By the time you add in roads and parking, it sounds awful tight to me. I wager that the "park space" will include the walkways between the buildings with some grass and a few shrubs on the side of the path. I very much doubt there is going to be a 60 acre park to enjoy, your park will be the walkways between the buildings.

hooch_raider says

During the boom years, this project would have taken 5 years at most to complete.

So if you would have started your project in 2002 at the beginning of the bubble, you would complete your project by 2007, after the market passed it's peak. I think it's a great idea to start construction during a recession, get all your infrastructure and basic foundations in place so when the next boom hits, your well positioned to take advantage of it. I just think this project is too much for the amount of space they have to work with. I think smaller development projects do better anyway, there less construction time, so you can throw up a couple of buildings and sell them as your expand your development, with a high rise building, you cant start selling units until most of the building is complete, you can leave some finish work for each unit, but overall the bulk of construction has to be completed before people can move it. You can pre-sell of course, but then you get people backing out of there contracts if the market falls before you can get them into the unit.

the other reason to have projects permited now is the new "green" building laws that start 1/1/11 have not been blocked yet, and they are so friggin stupid and costly that new construction under the new "green" laws would cost 30% more, with the end product not being something produced from public demand, but something produced by NannyState demand.

Just imagine something along the lines of those stupid assed twisty bulbs and how the NannyGreenState was able to force stupid crap on the consumer - only on a much larger scale.

Where are those WikiLeak docs on global warming, anyway?

I agree with the chart. I think the $300ks homes have or are being gobbled up in parts of the bay area which then in turn go to the next range of homes 400-600k and so one. Laws of supply and demand come into play here people. Interest rates being low, suckers ready to buy into the market, the $300ks are almost gone or going quickly.... then the next motivated buyers come along with the american dream to buy a home.... people who read the data can see this. Prices will go up. What may take a dent in this is if the tax breaks expire Dec 31st. It will hurt the Bay area more than the rest of the country because the dual income families here making $250k and above are going to get dinged. This may put a dent in everyone's pocket around here. Yeah, yeah, I dont have the data of who makes over a $100k, but I can probably bet most dual income families fall into or close to $250k.

Whats great is that no matter how many times I float around these forums and read everyone's feedback or opinions (and mine is simply an opinion and I never assume Im correct by any means)... nobody gets it... I think the Bay Area is one of these markets that is so dynamic, trying to predict what it will be like in 3 months is anyones guess. So these forums offer a little insight. The camp on the left says the sky is falling, stock up on water and baby food, save yourself... the other camp saying prices have bottomed out and we moving up... slowly... very slowly.... The reality is that we are all screwed until California digs it way out of its own deficit and crappy union contracts. I mean really.. Calpers borrowing 5.4 billion from the feds absolutely makes me sick. If that is going on behind our backs.. what else is. And it will boil down to is taxes will be raise and services will be cut back more.... which in turn punish the people who live in the fair weather state. The sun still shines elsewhere and most likely people are finding that out slowly and moving on out. And as the smart ones move out, the california dreamers move back in. Its like a revolving door. Which leads back to predicting the outcome of housing........ who knows... but sure is fun reading and making our own opinions.

bash away fellow patrick.net errrs

I'm not much of a technical analysis guy, but I do believe a lot of short term price movements are simply based on self fulfilling prophecies of recognizable technical patterns. I have found myself waiting days or weeks to pull the trigger on something purely out of fear of the technical analysis drones. Same goes for so called "bullish" patterns where I end up pulling the trigger right away. In this day and age of algorithmic trading, I have a hard time believing that "bullish" patterns wouldn't automatically create a short term price spike simply because, they all are programmed to say "bullish pattern, buy buy buy", then they dump and the price goes to where it should have gone in the first place.

In the grand scheme of things, I really don't care. I don't really make trades often. I just sit and wait for my pitch. When I see something grossly undervalued by my estimation, I buy. I did it with Silver in late 2008. I did it with Mining stocks in 2008 to 2009. I did it with Singapore/Hong Kong in 2009. I did with oil in December of 2008. I did it with wheat and potash in 2010. As far as gold/silver go, I've been consistently buying since 2007. At this point, I'm pretty much done buying once Gold reaches $1500 & Silver reaches $35. I'll start taking profit when gold goes to $2000 and Silver goes to $50.

Currently, I'm betting on bottoms in Natural Gas and The Nikkei. I think the big home run in the future will be to find a way to play the slaughtering that's ahead for all these bond funds.

One thing I like about Fresno is that it's may be really hot in the summer but it's "a dry heat" and with rooftop PV, cooling is free. Every house I look at in Fresno, I check the roof orientation for PV suitability.

The dumb thing is peak grid overloads come right when we're getting peak insolation. HELL~O!

I'm pretty confident that within 50 years we'll be totally off imported energy for 80% of our needs -- buses, cars, A/C.

Though we might run into a different resource problem chasing down strategic metals and stuff for all this fancy new energy technology.

What KING-OIL are you taking about - are you aware that almost negligible percentage of electric energy is produced by burning oil?

What is the price per MW of installed capacity for solar power plants? Then multiply it by 3 to account for unavailability of solar energy throughout day.

Solar energy is OK for rich individuals - it is not a proper solution on a countrywide scale. We should build a few nuclear power plants instead. Let others develop solar energy on their dime. Once that technology is competitive price-wise, build power plants on a larger scale.

@Troy - don't folks in Fresno use swamp coolers? They're a nice option for dry climates, and are cheaper to operate than A/C.

IMO the proper kind of solar energy for a civilization worthy of the name is multi-GW solar power satellites beaming down power via microwave to ground rectennas, the weather- and atmosphere-related problems go away and you get 24/7 power at much higher power densities than ground-based solar. There is a largish amount of infrastructure work to be done first to enable this though, and nothing wrong with solar cells on the roof as they make economic sense (ex-unsustainable federal subsidies), too.

oddhack says

at much higher power densities than ground-based solar

There is only a factor of 6x higher insolation (power flux, as in "Watts per square meter") outside the atmosphere than at the surface of the earth.

That factor of 6x is not sufficient to offset the huge expenditure of oil equivalents (yes, ENERGY) and capital needed to lift the solar equipment and panels into orbit, relative to just placing them on the ground.

Not only is the required energy huge, but the energy efficiency of space vehicles is lousy. For the space shuttle case, have a look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Energy_efficiency

Before anyone says "space elevators": they are not feasible yet and they still use lots of energy. In theory, they are more efficient than the space shuttle. In practice, you cannot build one.

The bottom line is the 6x factor: Even if elevating panels into space was free, you can only get 6x more energy per meter^2 this way. It would take an incredible amount of effort and expenditure to get the total system efficiency to be even 1x compared to land-based solar.

Nomograph says

nosf41 says

What KING-OIL are you taking about - are you aware that almost negligible percentage of electric energy is produced by burning oil?

Think electric cars vs. internal combustion. This isn’t exactly rocket surgery.
nosf41 says

What is the price per MW of installed capacity for solar power plants? Then multiply it by 3 to account for unavailability of solar energy throughout day. We should build a few nuclear power plants instead.

As I said, conservatives will cry foul for a variety of reasons. Don’t be so black-or-white. Consider a future where *numerous* sources of renewable energy are in play, depending on what makes most sense for a particular area. Haven’t you considered that solar might be best for some areas and nuclear might be best for others? After all, you can’t exactly put a nuclear power plant on your rooftop to run your home, and likewise solar isn’t going to do much good in Seattle.

It may not be a rocket science but things are not as simple as you suggested:
What is the capacity of solar power plant at night when most of electric cars are supposed to be charged?

Solar energy is good for shaving daily energy peaks - not for charging electric cars as there is no good large capacity storage for electric energy.

We don't need power at night, we currently have enough power to recharge 85% of our cars at night if they were all electric! We dump power at night! Our power stations can't just turn off, so they keep running. It's a horrendous situation, it's likely never being able to turn your car off. You would burn up so much more fuel if you had to idle it while you where at work/home!

What we need is peak power, which coincides with solar pretty well. We are running low on power during the day, not at night.

Solar is a great alternative right now because it works during peak hours. It's coming down in price, and there are a lot of companies producing little enhancements that when combined will make it much more affordable. It's gotten a lot better in the last couple of years though. From what I can tell, 50% of the cost goes to actual installation, 25% of cost is actually solar panel production and 25% to solar cells themselves.

The whole space transfer thing just doesn't cut it. The complexity of using space, designing for space and maintaining in space is just too complex. We would use up more energy doing those activities than we would actually get from the project itself.

As far as "solar is the only way", it's not. If you look at our energy needs they are just enormous. We can't just switch to one or another and have things work. Oil is hugely energy dense (coil, gas, etc) so weening ourselves of it will require going to nuclear, geo thermal, wind, solar, ocean/waves and others. Solar is nice because it's slightly more expensive today, but provides power exactly when we need it, during peak times.

Developing alternate energy sources is an obvious place for government investment, because if left to markets, we would continue relying too much on fossil fuels for too long leading to economic disaster that markets are too myopic to care about.

By "markets," obviously I am including big corporate oil and the part of government that they overly influence. Maybe it should only be framed this way,as an economic argument, without hardly considering the environment, because that's an issue of the left wing america haters.

Nomo says

"As usual, southern California is an early adopter of new ideas .... the rest of the nation will eventually follow."

Being that California if basically a bankrupt, failed Socialist/Welfare state, your assertion isn't very comforting.

RayAmerica says

Being that California if basically a bankrupt, failed Socialist/Welfare state, your assertion isn’t very comforting.

Nomo:
You're so silly! California is the only place in the entire world - regardless of the political views held by that area - that is experiencing an economic crisis, and yet you post some silliness about California being a leader in "new ideas." Perhaps if you represented yourself as the ultimate expert on pretty much everything who is a victim of the liberals, you would see the error of your ways.

At best, I'm sure that you're making an uneducated, uninformed guess about the issue. Perhaps if you got yourself some learnin' you'd realize that the way out of the economic crisis that only California faces is to follow the lead of Nevada (rely upon one single income source based on the rest of the world's economy), Michigan (rely upon an industry that pulled out years ago), New York City (thousands of workers laid off), Greece, Ireland, Dubai...

Nomograph says

As I said, conservatives will cry foul for a variety of reasons. Don’t be so black-or-white. Consider a future where *numerous* sources of renewable energy are in play, depending on what makes most sense for a particular area. Haven’t you considered that solar might be best for some areas and nuclear might be best for others? After all, you can’t exactly put a nuclear power plant on your rooftop to run your home, and likewise solar isn’t going to do much good in Seattle.

Why diversify when you have such awesome examples as the ones I mentioned above - and you have an "expert" who is eager to shove his offensive opinions down everyone's throats?

I hope you see the error of your ways now. ;)

Everyone should watch this documentary ---> http://www.oilcrashmovie.com/index2.html
It's available for instant viewing on Netflix.

pkennedy says

We don’t need power at night, we currently have enough power to recharge 85% of our cars at night if they were all electric! We dump power at night! Our power stations can’t just turn off, so they keep running. It’s a horrendous situation, it’s likely never being able to turn your car off. You would burn up so much more fuel if you had to idle it while you where at work/home!

What are you talking about? No one dumps power at night. Dump it where? Of course power generating plants can be turned off.

Renewable energy will always be a boom bust cycle until there is some kind of floor under the price of oil and coal via a tax on hydrocarbons. Oil generates 24% of electricity, coal 48%, nuclear 21%,(these numbers fluctuate) the other 7% is everything else hydro,geothermal,solar,wind etc.. As long as the price of coal and oil can drop investing in renewable energy will be limited. Even if there were a predictable return on investment for renewable energy it will obviously be a very long time before it will seriously replace coal and oil.

Actually power plants can't just be turned off. They need to keep running, like a giant idle engine. They don't need to run at peak, but they do need to keep running. Like an idle engine, they either don't produce power or it's used to store energy for later, such as putting water into a water tower. In most places it's about creating new energy only for peak power. We'll need to replace the other power at some point, but our power needs continually grow, which means we need more of each year.

Your naming is off, it's not 24% oil, it's 24% natural gas, which is a clean burning fuel to start with. Petroleum is 1%.

Poor guy. I can identify, tho. This morning I had $20.00 and now I only have $8.00 left. What to do?

Nomograph says

I don’t see his posts now that the ‘ignore’ feature is online. Life is too short to waste with that kind of person.

Every now & then I check out his comments - such as the lovely ones that he made regarding my vacuum cleaner. I'm a little bit optimistic, but I believe that he can change and become semi-human.

I wonder if Mrs. rayray has an ignore button?

Buy two or three houses in Las Vegas.

sponsor a local dirt track racer ... and buy two or three houses in Las Vegas

Zlxr says

And we are running out of space to dump garbage

Tokyo doesn't have that problem. They use trash to make landfills in Tokyo Bay.

Win-win AFAICT. They do a good job separating the trash and cleaning it, and they get new bayside real estate.

I wish we'd do this for the southern arm of the SF Bay. There's only about 300 people living between me and the bay, but it's just mud so the whole bay thing is just an economical dead zone.

Fill the Bay is what I say!

It's about collecting up viable amounts of energy. Collecting methane from sewage is likely not viable, or they would be doing it now, because it all collects in what amounts to blenders, putting a lid on it and siphoning off the methane probably wouldn't be hard.

Cows produce between 300-500L of methane gas per day! Methane is about 300 times worse than CO2. They've looked at ways of collecting methane from cows, but its horrendous. We do some pretty vile things to those animals as it is, hooking up "methane collecting" devices to them would probably be over the top. But if we were to start looking at harvesting energy from methane, that would be the place to do it.

We have lots of land area for waste, we don't really produce all that much. We produce a lot, but in the grand scheme, it's not that much. Finding a nice local area for it isn't necessarily easy. No one wants to haul garbage 100-200 miles to get away from cities, they want to dump it as close as possible which means dumping it in valuable land where people will actually notice it.

pkennedy says

Actually power plants can’t just be turned off. They need to keep running, like a giant idle engine. They don’t need to run at peak, but they do need to keep running. Like an idle engine, they either don’t produce power or it’s used to store energy for later, such as putting water into a water tower. In most places it’s about creating new energy only for peak power. We’ll need to replace the other power at some point, but our power needs continually grow, which means we need more of each year.
Your naming is off, it’s not 24% oil, it’s 24% natural gas, which is a clean burning fuel to start with. Petroleum is 1%.

Some power plants cannot be turned off on a daily basis (nuclear and large coal fired power plants). However some other types (hydro, gas) can be turned off.

A so-called unit commitment program has to be run on day-ahead basis to determine which plants will be turned On/Off to cover the forecasted load.

I just got off from work after working a 12 hour shift as one of the Reactor Operators at a nuke plant. We run as close to 100% power 24/7 unless we are in an outage, we are doing some testing requiring us to down power or something went wrong (RX trip or a down power for equipment issues).

I do think there is a place for alternatives for peak loads. I also think we should have a base load powered by nukes. We run a 24 month refuel cycle. This means for about 700 days, we can keep that turbine rolling day and night.

eewww .... neg-a-tory!

wait ... how much cash are we talkin'?

This place is a bomb! Plenty of room to spread out in complete privacy. Close to libraries and post offices, this property offers it all! Quaint rustic cottage, ready for your personal touches. A MUST SEE!

Like they used to say on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, "a million dollars here, a million dollars there... pretty soon we're talking real money."

thenuttyneutron says

I just got off from work after working a 12 hour shift as one of the Reactor Operators at a nuke plant.

Homer! I'm your biggest fan! I even bought a sculpture of your industry's creation:

http://mombocompany.com/index.htm
I bought at a gallery in New Orleans in 1995 or so, the guy's studio in Waveland MS was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina and I don't know if he's ever recovered.

Comes with booby traps?

I was referring to listing(not sold) price in 2009.

nosf41 says

pkennedy says

Actually power plants can’t just be turned off. They need to keep running, like a giant idle engine. They don’t need to run at peak, but they do need to keep running. Like an idle engine, they either don’t produce power or it’s used to store energy for later, such as putting water into a water tower. In most places it’s about creating new energy only for peak power. We’ll need to replace the other power at some point, but our power needs continually grow, which means we need more of each year.

Your naming is off, it’s not 24% oil, it’s 24% natural gas, which is a clean burning fuel to start with. Petroleum is 1%.

Some power plants cannot be turned off on a daily basis (nuclear and large coal fired power plants). However some other types (hydro, gas) can be turned off.
A so-called unit commitment program has to be run on day-ahead basis to determine which plants will be turned On/Off to cover the forecasted load.

Anyway my point was there is no dumping of electricity or energy. Why would any operator dump expensive energy or electricity? The stockholders would have a lynching party. There is enough load on the grid even at the lowest point that it will more than take up the production. Plant operators would obviously prefer to have high utilization rates since selling electricity is what pays the bills. Most nuclear, and coal/fuel oil steam plants run at full capacity all the time, called base load power plants. This is the most efficient use of these plants for both technical and financial reasons. Natural gas/fuel oil turbines and hydro are usually run as load following power plants. These get ramped up and down as the load increases and decreases.

You can store excess capacity. In Britain they do a lot of pumping. The excess electric capacity from nuclear and coal pumps water up to behind dams so it can be used for hydro generation during peaks. The US grid is so big and diverse it's not common here.

Yes my naming was off. I meant to type oil and natural gas. Oil is 3% by the way.

thenuttyneutron says

I just got off from work after working a 12 hour shift as one of the Reactor Operators at a nuke plant.

Curious: what's your professional opinion of thorium & "pebble bed"?

.... offers an open, airy, living space ...