The Perfect Energy Source September 3, 2010March 18, 2017 DCTH This bullish analysis came out Tuesday calling DCTH “a great buy at these prices.” If you own the stock, you’ll enjoy it. The bearish case, from a month ago, is here. (The bearish analyst see the stock as worth about what it’s selling for now – around the same $5.37 we initially paid for it – so at least he’s not saying he thinks it’s greatly overpriced here.) Guru summarizes: “At the moment, Wall Street believes in the bear case. I think over the long run the consensus will move closer to the bull side, but will probably take more time than I thought.” And there’s always the chance it will not work out at all – so, as always: only with money you can truly afford to lose. DRYING TOWELS Linda Tam: “Re the horror of your dryer’s electricity consumption (‘Turn it ff! Turn it off!’) – I’ve been trying to cut back on dryer use for a few years now. We don’t like how the clothes/towels feel if they 100% line dry, so I hang things up until they’re about 80% dry (I just use a couple little racks indoors near the laundry room, no trouble at all), then finish ’em off in the dryer. We still get that soft fluffy feeling and the dryer-sheet benefits, but we definitely saw a difference in the electric bill when we started this habit. So, as you say, you don’t have to go all the way to get some good results. (Doing this, I noticed that our nice, heavy, all-cotton t-shirts stay wet on the rack even longer than the towels do. I would never have guessed this, but those puppies must suck up a lot of dryer power. You’d think 100% cotton is a good thing, but the blends dry a lot faster. So, maybe polyester is good for the planet?)” ☞ But polyester is petroleum-based and blends are an abomination. Nothing is easy. Which leads me to . . . NATURAL GAS Coal is dangerous for the miners and bad for their lungs, causes acid rain and contributes massively to climate change. Nuclear entails potential catastrophic threats, however remote, along with the waste-disposal problem. Corn-based ethanol (the bi-product of corn kernels and Iowa’s lead-off position in the Presidential primary schedule) is inefficient and leads to Third World starvation. Offshore drilling has its much-noted downside. Imported oil impoverishes us. Wind is terrific, but I was just up listening to the three 400-foot-tall General Electric windmills on Vinalhaven that 12 residents are complaining about. “Let’s wait until the plane passes,” I said to my guide as we approached (you could hear a distant plane in the background), “so we can hear them on their own.” Ah, but there was no plane. And solar panels, my Vinalhaven guide told me, are made with Chinese slave labor (not sure of his source on that one) – but my point is, there seems to be only one source of energy that doesn’t have some potential downside . . . . . . and it’s not natural gas. Indeed, extracting natural gas may contaminate your drinking water. No, the one source of energy with no downside is using less of it. Like hypermiling or Linda Tam’s laundry drying technique. Meanwhile, speaking of noise pollution and energy generation: MICRO-PIEZO – “E”-GAD Judy Lawrence: “After years of sitting in a cube listening to the constant keyboard clicking going on all around me, my idea was to install a tiny friction device on every keyboard key to capture that energy. It would add to the cost of the keyboard, so maybe we only put it on the most frequently struck keys [maybe just the “e” key]. While it certainly would be a tiny amount of energy captured, just think how many gazillions of times it would occur every day! It’s no crazier than the people who want to harvest the energy of our body movements, right?” ☞ Egad.