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5 year study by NAIT shows angle of panel is more significant than snowfall in Northern Alberta

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Study looks at impact of snow and angle of solar panels Old Man Winter takes a lot of flak in Alberta for everything from costly heating bills to frozen car batteries. But when it comes to the impact on solar panels, winter gets an unjustified bad rap.
A five-year study led by NAIT’s Alternative Energy Technology program found that snowfall on photovoltaic solar panels results in about a 3% energy loss. That’s significantly less than the 20% drain that industry had traditionally estimated despite a lack of data.
Tim Matthews, a technologist and one of the leads on the study, says the results will improve modelling used to estimate solar energy production that determines return on investment. Ultimately, that means a win for consumers.
NAIT launched the reference array snow study in 2012 with the City of Edmonton and Solar Energy Society of
Alberta. A system of 12 solar modules was installed atop the Shaw Theatre on Main Campus to not only measure the impact of snow on the system, but also how the tilt of each module affects energy production.
“The rule of thumb throughout industry was to design a system as if it had no snow and then wipe 20% of energy production off the slate – we’re going to lose 20% because we’re in Canada,” says Matthews. “Everybody was terrified of underestimating the impact of snow and latitude [on energy production].”
They found that the angle of the solar panels has a far greater impact on energy production than snowfall. Solar modules were fixed at six different angles – 14, 18, 27, 45, 53 and 90 degrees – which represent roof pitches commonly found on commercial buildings and homes. Six modules were cleared of snow every day, while the remaining six served as a control.
The least efficient was the module set at 90 degrees, like a wall-mount system, which saw a 24% loss in performance. The
module tilted to 53 degrees was most efficient, which confirmed an industry standard that solar systems are optimized when tilted to the equivalent of a city’s latitude.
The ideal angle for maximum production with snow accumulation was 45 degrees.
Matthews cautions that even five years worth of data is a small window when dealing with fluctuating variables such as
weather. But for a homeowner or business who already has historic data on their energy consumption, the tilt and snow impact clear up what had been a cloudy picture in predicting the cost-benefit of solar.
“Having this information raises the level of precision when it comes to engineering, design and production modelling,” says
Matthews. “A company that’s doing solar installation and design can go to a client and say, ‘This is precise. You can take this to the bank.’”
Crunching five years of data The work of crunching through all the data fell to students (and now grads of the class of ’18) Christian Brown and Jackson Belley as the basis of their final course project, or capstone.
That’s no mean feat considering energy performance data was collected from all 12 solar modules every five minutes every
day for five years – enough to fill 6,000 spreadsheet files.
“It was an insane amount of data,” says Brown. “That was not quite half, maybe the first third of the project. Months of work. It was a lot of learning.”
After five years of getting up at all hours to clear snow from the reference array – including Christmas – Matthews is glad
to be rid of that daily chore. For anyone who operates a solar system, he cautions that snow should only be cleared if it’s
safe to do so, such as on a flat commercial roof.
“Should you clean the ones on your [pitched] roof? Heck no,” he says. Nor does he recommend asking a contractor to
remove it. It’s just not worth it for the minimal gain in power efficiency from a snow-free solar system.
“Our recommendation is that it makes no sense. One hour of time from a professional or an apprentice is just not worth
it.”
Data was gradually exported by day, month, season and year, making it more digestible and user-friendly for industry,
government and institutions, but also the schools and not-for-profits, who are interested in the information.
The study’s interim findings are available online, while the students’ final report with datasets will be published on the
Alternative Energy Technology program page this fall. It’s expected to be a hot commodity. (Anyone can request the data now).
“The amount of requests that we get [for the data], it’s obvious people are interested and they want to know how does snow
affect solar modules,” says Belley.
Brown adds it’s a pretty cool feeling to work on a class assignment that has a major real-world impact. “The idea of solar won’t be as much of a gamble any more.”
Plans are also in the works to submit the findings for peer review and publication in a scientific journal.
After reading this report and remembering that both the Province of Alberta and the City of Red Deer are looking into a program that would pay for the program and be billed via your property taxes over 10 years.
The province and the city were very much forward thinking, I would offer and if snow loses only 3 % of power it does make more sense. Right?

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Addictions

Why can’t we just say no?

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk

Drug use and violence have become common place in hospitals. Drug-addicted patients openly smoke meth and fentanyl, and inject heroin. Dealers traffic illicit drugs.  Nurses are harassed, forced to work amidst the toxic fumes from drugs and can’t confiscate weapons. In short, according to one nurse, “We’ve absolutely lost control.”

“Defining deviancy down” is a cultural philosophy that emerged in the United States during the 1990s.

It refers to society’s tendency to adjust its standards of deviancy “down,” so that behaviours which were once unacceptable become acceptable.  Over time, this newly- acceptable behaviour can even become society’s norm.

Of course, the converse must also be true — society looks down on those who label social behaviours “wrong,” deeming them moralistic, judgemental or simply out of touch with the realities of modern life.

Thirty years later, this philosophy is entrenched in British Columbia politics and policies. The province has become a society that cannot say “no” to harmful or wrong behaviours related to drug use. It doesn’t matter if you view drug use as a medical issue, a law-and-order issue, or both – we have lost the ability to simply say “no” to harmful or wrong behaviour.

That much has become abundantly clear over the past two weeks as evidence mounts that BC’s experiment with decriminalization and safe supply of hard drugs is only making things worse.

recently-leaked memo from BC’s Northern Health Authority shows the deleterious impact these measures have had on BC’s hospitals.

The memo instructs staff at the region’s hospitals to tolerate and not intervene with illegal drug use by patients.  Apparently, staff should not be taking away any drugs or personal items like a knife or other weapons under four inches long.  Staff cannot restrict visitors even if they are openly bringing illicit drugs into the hospital and conducting their drug transactions in the hallways.

The public was quite rightly outraged at the news and BC’s Health Minister Adrian Dix quickly attempted to contain the mess by saying that the memo was outdated and poorly worded.

But his facile excuses were quickly exposed by publication of the very clearly worded memo and by nurses from across the province who came forward to tell their stories of what is really happening in our hospitals.

The President of the BC Nurses Union, Adriane Gear, said the issue was “widespread” and “of significant magnitude.” She commented that the problems in hospitals spiked once the province decriminalized drugs. In a telling quote, she said, “Before there would be behaviours that just wouldn’t be tolerated, whereas now, because of decriminalization, it is being tolerated.”

Other nurses said the problem wasn’t limited to the Northern Health Authority. They came forward (both anonymously and openly) to say that drug use and violence have become common place in hospitals. Drug-addicted patients openly smoke meth and fentanyl, and inject heroin. Dealers traffic illicit drugs.  Nurses are harassed, forced to work amidst the toxic fumes from drugs and can’t confiscate weapons. In short, according to one nurse, “We’ve absolutely lost control.”

People think that drug policies have no impact on those outside of drug circles – but what about those who have to share a room with a drug-smoking patient?

No wonder healthcare workers are demoralized and leaving in droves. Maybe it isn’t just related to the chaos of Covid.

The shibboleth of decriminalization faced further damage when Fiona Wilson, the deputy chief of Vancouver’s Police Department, testified before a federal Parliamentary committee to say that the policy has been a failure. There have been more negative impacts than positive, and no decreases in overdose deaths or the overdose rate. (If such data emerged from any other healthcare experiment, it would immediately be shut down).

Wison also confirmed that safe supply drugs are being re-directed to illegal markets and now account for 50% of safe supply drugs that are seized. Her words echoed those of BC’s nurses when she told the committee that the police, “have absolutely no authority to address the problem of drug use.”

Once Premier David Eby and Health Minister Adrian Dix stopped denying that drug use was occurring in hospitals, they continued their laissez-faire approach to illegal drugs with a plan to create “safe consumption sites” at hospitals. When that lacked public appeal, Mr. Dix said the province would establish a task force to study the issue.

What exactly needs to be studied?

The NDP government appears to be uninformed, at best, and dishonest, at worst. It has backed itself into a corner and is now taking frantic and even ludicrous steps to legitimize its experimental policy of decriminalization. The realities that show it is not working and is creating harm towards others and toward institutions that should be a haven for healing.

How quickly we have become a society that lacks the moral will – and the moral credibility – to just to say “no.”

Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-care Crisis.

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Brownstone Institute

The Teams Are Set for World War III

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Toby RogersTOBY ROGERS

I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.

Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:

  • Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
  • EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
  • “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.

So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.

And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.

Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.

I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.

Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).

Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.

Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.

The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.

Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:


TEAM TYRANNY

Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.

Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.

Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.

Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.

Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.

Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.

Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.

Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.


TEAM FREEDOM

Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.

Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…

Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.

Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.

Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.

Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)

Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).

Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.

What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Toby Rogers

    Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.

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