Start by checking out this video:

When I was in college I took flight lessons in an old Cessna 152 at a little grass airstrip in South Jersey. The Cessna had dual carburetor heaters to maintain safe combustion during altitude changes, and the cockpit reeked of gasoline and burnt oil.

As a Solar Nerd I had to share this video of Siemen’s full electric aerobatic aircraft. Electric propulsion is lighter than fossil fuel propulsion, with a better torque ratio and higher reliability. Weight is a huge factor in aircraft design, so the next generation of light weight battery technology will further increase the operational range of these aircraft.

Electric aircraft are quieter and more powerful than their gas powered counterparts.

I’ve been driving a plug-in electric car since January, my Chevy Volt is faster off the line (in Sport mode) than most of the V-6 Lexus models I’ve owned over the last 20 years. Don’t be fooled by the tortoise slow Prius, real electric cars like the Volt and the Tesla are really fun to drive. My daughter calls my Volt “the spaceship”.     

Just watching the video above makes me want to fly one of these aircraft!

Electric propulsion works for any prop-driven aircraft, but nothing electric can match the output and high altitude capabilities of jet powered aircraft. Fossil fuels will stick around for many decades, but our power grid, cars, trucks and small aircraft will  eventually be powered by solar mixed with super high capacity batteries.

My personal goal is to help 2 to 5 homeowners transition to solar each week. Each household that goes solar means less coal being burnt, which means cleaner air for my children and their children!

Ben Alexander

April . 2017

What if electric cars could actually prevent blackouts?

The current electric grid is an aging industrial age monster that still relies upon coal, natural gas and nuclear generation; technology that has not changed much since the 1950’s. Most of your power generation is many miles from your home, requiring a massive infrastructure of wires, substations, capacitors and telephone poles to heat up your coffee in the morning.

When (non-solar) homeowners start to crank up their air conditioning during a heatwave it can cause cascading failures, resulting in blackouts and brownouts. The grid can also be taken down by hurricanes, drunk drivers careening into telephone poles, and even solar flares from outer space!

If you’ve never heard of the Carrington event check this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

In my previous post I wrote about the next generation of batteries and future electric cars capable of driving 1,000 miles on a single charge. One might think that 100 million electric vehicles plugged into the grid would cause MORE demand and more blackouts, but the opposite is actually true.

As the driver of a plug-in electric car for the last 4 months I began to not only consider solar for my home, but I actually got into the solar business!

People who drive hybrid or full electric vehicles are more likely to install solar. Once 10% of the homes in an area install solar the rest of the community is soon to follow. There will always be holdouts, those Amish folks that don’t own a microwave oven or use the internet. There will also be communities that can’t afford the investment in solar, another conversation altogether.

Imagine for a moment a grid tied subdivision with a couple hundred electric cars, and a couple hundred homes with rooftop solar.

In a blackout, even at night, the grid could switch to drawing power from plugged in electric cars. As the owner of the car you would control the parameters of the draw, and at what rate. For instance, you might only allow the grid to draw 200 miles of charge from your car, at 8 cents per kilowatt hour or higher. The app on your phone would notify you as the power is being exchanged, maybe even send you a competitive price bid for the remaining electricity stored in your vehicle!

During the daytime the rooftop solar in that area could supply all the power for the community, even to the homes that don’t have panels. Non solar homes would pay a set rate for their electric, with part of those funds going to the solar homeowners who generate the most energy during the blackout.

All the computational technology is already in place, there is already an app to monitor the energy consumption in my Volt and the power output from my panels. We don’t have the electric cars with a 1,000 mile range… but that tech is coming soon enough.

Residential solar, electric cars and a high tech grid could work together to ensure clean power for everyone.

Blackouts will become a thing of the past. Any neighborhood with enough rooftop solar and electric cars would never miss a beat.

Ben Alexander

April . 2017

Let me start with a graph on the price of solar:

The price of solar is finally LOWER than the cost of electricity from the local utility!

You will save more by installing solar now (and actually buying it, NOT leasing your panels) as opposed to waiting for prices to go down another 2%.

I’d rather pay down the balance on my panels each month, compared to sending my monthly $200 to the local utility where my money is GONE FOREVER.

My electricity is still linked to the local utility, during the day my panels will generate power for my home, any excess goes back to the grid for a 1 for 1 credit, at night the utility powers my home. Even on cloudy days my panels will generate power, and my solar is seamlessly blended with power from the electric company.

One question I get all the time is: “Why don’t you get a battery pack and totally go off grid?” There are a couple reasons for NOT going off-grid in 2017, one being the extra cost, but the main reason is the current level of battery technology on the market.

Even the longest range electric cars can only go about 280 miles on a single charge. Most cell phones can only hold a 2 day charge… most laptops 16 to 24 hours… all three use  lithium ion batteries.

There are many new battery technologies in development right now, from solid state lithium ion to carbon nanotube to graphene batteries.

Here is my prediction, based on watching and studying green tech over the last 2 decades:  A new battery technology will hit the market by 2021 that is LESS expensive yet stores far more energy than lithium ion technology. I don’t know WHICH new tech will win, but whatever makes it to market will represent a leap forward from current energy storage.

You’ll know the next generation of batteries has arrived when this happens:

Your recently upgraded cell phone can hold a 2 week charge.

An affordable electric car enters the market with a 1,000 mile range… and you can charge it from zero juice to 1,000 miles in just a few hours.  

By 2022 a home battery pack will allow you to:

Store 3 to 4 weeks of power.

AND

Disconnect from the local electric company, forever.  

There are billions of dollars being spent in research and development to invent the next generation of affordable energy storage. The company that cracks this code will earn billions in profits.

Oil companies won’t like it, but an electric car with 1,000 miles of range (priced below $25,000) will eliminate the demand for 4 cylinder gas burning commuter cars.

Homeowners with solar (installed now) and equipped with the new generation of batteries (installed in 2022) will leave the electric grid behind.

Of course, there will still be many people who hang on to their $3,000 per year electric bill (with inflation over the next 5 years your bill might even be higher). You’ll still see folks driving cars with huge gas burning engines, even when gas climbs to $4, then $6, then $8 per gallon at the pump.

The blog above this entry will discuss the impact of 100 million electric cars plugged into the grid….

Ben Alexander

April . 2017

Remember the name Connor Krukosky.

The young man in this YouTube video will either be a billionaire or a genius laboring in obscurity for a tech giant while earning a nice income:

It takes until the 25 minute mark until he gets it working.

I have to give huge kudos to Connor’s parents for supporting his magnificent obsession.

It makes one wonder how many young people in the upcoming generation are self taught geniuses, and how well are we developing them to their full potential?

At the end of the video he talks about his future… it looks like the video already got him a job with IBM:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063265/this-teenage-ibm-employee-got-his-job-by-buying-an-old-mai

IBM is smart to hire him now. If they pay him $100K a year and just let him wander around the company he’ll randomly come up with a novel way to add an extra $100 million to the bottom line.

Ben Alexander

April . 2017

Take a minute to look at the diagram above. Note the bidirectional meter in the upper right part of the diagram. If you live in a standard home with an electric bill your electric meter only flows electricity into your home, from the electric company to you.

When you install solar panels the local electric utility switches out your old meter for a bidirectional meter that measures the flow of electricity in and OUT of your home. This is what a bidirectional meter looks like in real life:

At least in Florida there is no cost from the utility to install this meter, the new bidirectional meter replaces your old analog meter.

The old analog electric meter on your home costs the electric company more money because it requires meter readers. The new bidirectional meters allow your electric company to measure your usage remotely without the labor costs of an employee.

Most of the current electric grid is a “dumb grid”, this means that the electric company has no idea how much electricity is needed at any given time in any given area. This is why during the summer months the local utility has to generate more power to keep your air conditioning running.

This increase in power demand (on a 95 degree summer day) is the reason that we have rolling brownouts and blackouts. Recently higher than normal temps in Australia have caused blackouts:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-08/sa-heatwave-forces-rolling-blackouts-angering-government/8252512

As residential solar becomes more commonplace, the electric company can use the data from bidirectional meters to allocate power in a more efficient way. For instance, a housing development that contains 30 or 40 homes with solar will be able to self-generate enough extra electricity to keep the AC running for other non-solar homes in the same subdivision. This is less strain on the grid during a high demand period.

Residential solar connected to bidirectional meters will make the entire power grid smarter, more efficient, and more reliable. If a car accident or storm takes down local power lines the smart grid should be able to divert rooftop solar power to that area.

Over time more local energy storage will be built into the smart grid, and daytime solar will be stored for auxiliary power at night. One place to store extra energy might even be electric cars, but this won’t happen until battery tech takes another leap forward.

That will be my next blog post!

Ben Alexander

March . 2017

I started building a team with LIFE towards the end of 2014, since then the business has quickly evolved, from a business that focused on leadership training to a focus on helping middle class folks get out of debt. Our LIFE team has several movers and shakers in Tampa, Orlando and Los Angeles. It’s small for now, but you have to start somewhere.

Because of the LIFE training I’ve paid off just over 172K in debt, this came from listening to LIFE’s Financial Fitness program, increasing the profit margins in Balloon Distractions, and focusing on decreasing our debt total on a monthly basis.

Some of the debt reduction came from my wife’s income and my extra income from the LIFE business, we also reduced some ongoing monthly costs as well; eating out less, never using credit cards, and using Netflix instead of $100 per month cable TV.

Recently I’ve been delving into residential and commercial solar sales as well. I have spare time and 25 years of sales and team building experience, my goal is to earn an extra 50K this year in green tech. That might happen, it might not. Maybe I’ll only make an extra 30K… and that would be pretty good as well!

Take a minute to watch the video, especially if you are interested in entrepreneurship. I have a ton of respect for Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady, they live what they teach.

Ben Alexander

March 2017

UPDATE: I got out of the LIFE business and sold Balloon Distractions about a year after I wrote this post. Around the time this post was written I started doing solar sales with Tampa Bay Solar, later getting their sales team up to $1 million a month in sales and becoming a shareholder in that company.

There was a better financial opportunity with solar, vs LIFE and the balloon twisting business.

Here are several green tech links that I’ve been checking out:

Electric Vehicle News:

http://www.electric-vehiclenews.com/

Green tech:

https://cleantechnica.com/

The best solar panels:

https://www.youtube.com/user/SolarWorldAmericas

Global Energy Industry news:

http://www.globalenergy-news.com/

I’ve been following these sites as a way to keep up to date with the advances in several fields that really cross-over; electric vehicles, solar tech, politics and green tech economics.

Enjoy!

Ben Alexander

March . 2017

Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian economist born in 1883 who wrote about how new technology tends to replace and destroy old technology. The automobile replacing the horse and buggy, MP3 players replacing CDs, or solar panels replacing the traditional power grid.

Schumpeter called this process “Creative Destruction”.

My wife is a realtor, and we were talking about how realtors are starting to be replaced by online listing services. There are many sales people who have been replaced by technology already; travel agents, life insurance agents, even retail salespeople in chain stores like Kmart and Sears.

The internet has replaced millions of jobs, in Balloon Distractions I use an online scheduler to organize entertainers from California to Texas to Florida. Without the internet and our software I would need a full-time staffer to handle that function, but our online scheduler does it all, from scheduling to billing.

These job losses are obvious, toll collectors in Florida are almost gone, replaced by EZ pass. There is now automatic check-out at retail stores and McDonald’s. Online banking is replacing bank branches. The next decade will see more of this.

When solar becomes widespread the electric utilities will either go bankrupt or switch to a new business model entirely. Brick and mortar retail is going to disappear, along with millions of jobs. Truck drivers are going to be replaced by super safe robot drivers, probably before 2025. Jobs in fossil fuels will still persist until around 2035, but college students would be silly to pursue a long term career in coal mining, oil exploration or natural gas fracking.

I’m 43 years old, so the folks who are my age in these industries might make it to 60 and still maintain employment, but younger folks should gravitate to the industries that are going to grow between now and 2060; solar and renewables, robotics, artificial intelligence studies, composite and nanotech materials technology, battery technology, genetics engineering and biomedical, or even basic studies in entrepreneurship and leadership.

The future will require skilled entrepreneurs with leadership ability who can take a business concept and bring it to profitability in the global marketplace.

I started delving into leadership studies back in 2014, this has deepened my understanding of what it takes to develop and grow a team. I’ve applied this to Balloon Distractions as well as Life Leadership, and both ventures are now profitable.

In the last few years I’ve been learning about green tech (and writing about it as well). Sometimes learning comes before earning, there is a trillion dollar opportunity in solar for any entrepreneur who understands how to sell the new technology.

Solar is starting to pop up on roofs across the United States, so anyone who facilitates this process will profit accordingly.

Look at your current job and think about how artificial intelligence, robotics or the internet might replace you in the next decade. 

NOW is the right time to start a business on the side, you might want to dig the well BEFORE you need the water.

If you’ve been in a job your entire career you can still learn how to be an entrepreneur. This is a great skillset, and entrepreneurial skills can be used in any business model, with any product, no matter how advanced technology becomes.

Ben Alexander

March . 2017

In the pic above: 1400 panels on The Florida Aquarium, installed by Tampa Bay Solar.

————————————————

Most homeowners think they have to pay an electric bill for the rest of their lives.

Do you have to stay with FrankenElectric, ’til death do you part?

Not anymore.

It still makes sense to maintain your connection to the power grid, but the grid does not have to be your sole source of energy.

If your summer bill is $300 per month or higher you can get a solar system that will knock your bill down to less than $20 per month!

A rooftop solar system will reduce your electric bill to pennies, with nothing spent out of pocket, provided your credit is decent. Solar panel prices have dropped 99% in the past 25 years! Solar is now LESS expensive than electricity from the local utility.

The tide has turned, the tipping point for solar is now, the year 2017.

When you install solar today you know that your system will be paid OFF at a specific date in the future, and the panels we install today will last until 2040, or even longer. There is a light at the end of the tunnel!

Tampa Bay Solar is putting a system on the roof of my home, and I’m excited about what they can do for thousands of homes across Tampa Bay.

You don’t have to be married to your electric bill, go solar today!

www.tampabaysolar.com

There is ZERO return on a dollar sent to the electric company, but a 10% to 12% return on every dollar you invest in solar!

Ben Alexander

March . 2017

You don’t need industrial size vats of Dawn dishwashing soap to clean off ducks when everything is running on solar.

Put the panels on your roof, plug in your electric car, and enjoy life.

Some things will still need fossil fuels, like jet planes… but cars and trains and 18 wheelers will all run on electrons before long. There will be high efficiency solar panels on the roof of every train car, every trailer hauling freight, every home and business.

Battery technology is poised to take leap forward and when it does we’ll see inexpensive electric cars on the market with a 500 mile usable range, and you’ll be able to fully charge your car in a few hours. No one will worry about the range of their electric charge anymore, if you top off the charge on your car every few days you’ll always hundreds of miles of range on your electric car.

The old tech will still be around, gas stations and even diesel engines, but the efficiency of electric and solar and the low cost will move everything in that direction. When solar is everywhere electricity will get even cheaper, far cheaper than fossil fuels.

You’ll be able to charge up your car with 1,000 miles of range for $50. The same distance in a gasoline powered vehicle will cost $100 or $200 or maybe even more.

Blackouts and brown-outs won’t happen anymore, every home and business will have solar with a battery back-up storing an extra month of electricity, in case of an emergency.

There will be spare energy, for free, everywhere. Fast charging stations will be in the parking lot of every business you visit, if you need an extra 300 miles of range in your car just plug it in, no charge.

All of this is coming, so if you’re an entrepreneur looking to build a business think about the possibilities that will pop up as society makes this massive shift…

Ben Alexander

March . 2017