NZ Book Council video

Surgical strike in progress!

Wow - fast moves on the part of Julia Gillard. In an hour or so we will know if she will be the first woman Prime Minister in Australia. Peter Costello, eat your heart out!
But, if she has the numbers, will she get the voters? Its one thing to win an election and be made PM, its another to (possibly) oust the tottering PM with surgical precision and then win the hearts and votes of the people. Something the factions may not know too much about!
Abbott is probably laughing all the way to the Advertising Bureau.
Too bad about World Cup Soccer!

The Deepwater Oil Spill

I came across this NT times Graphic on the Oil Spill in the Louisiana Gulf recently. So far BP and associated entities have been unable to completely seal off the spill resulting in enormous damage both to the environment, livelihood as well as BP's reputation and share price.
A number of news reports and blogs talking of less than best practice in the well engineering & implementation as well as the inability of the company to fix the leak has lead to the grilling of BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward being grilled by the US Congressional enquiry yesterday. According to the Australian ABC report "Mr Hayward has been accused of evading questions and ducking responsibility for what has become America's worst environmental disaster."
Yesterday we hear Mr Hayward has been moved aside and will no longer manage the oil spill. Private industry can move swiftly when it wants and needs to lift its public image.
Accountability of large corporations has always been problematic in our current democracy. With their large power base, earnings and multinational base, evading social responsibility has been the norm and our laws are made to allow the transfer of these too hard problems onto governments.
Thus the public again pick up the costs - monetary, environmental, social problems.
We will see if President Obama has the ability to call BP to account. It will also be interesting to see if the "no drill" rhetoric lasts much beyond the immediacy of the spill.
But when will the oil stop leaking???

My Electricity Bill Arrived

A brown recycled paper envelope appeared in the mail last week. Yes the long awaited Electricity Bill arrived. Yeah!! The first bill since the installation of the Feed-In Meter for my Solar Panels. On opening the bill a number of questions were immediately answered.
1. Was the Bill accurate?  - Yes it seemed to be as we had taken various readings throughout the months - amount of electricity generated, used from the grid and exported to the grid.
2. Did we retain our Peak/Off-Peak Tariff? Yes indeed we did - with a charge of 26.381 c/ KwH Peak, and 9.818 c/KwH for Off-Peak.
3. Did we get the 0.66cents Feed-In Tariff promised by our suppler. No!! This created some consternation which was satisfied by reading the fine print on our suppliers web page. It seems that the 66 cents Feed-In Tariff  needed to be gained by signing a contract which, on reading, indicated we would lose our Peak/Off-Peak rates. As we had asked to keep these we don't get the 66 cents rate. The billed Feed-in rate is 23.5 c/KwH instead.
4. How does this affect the yearly electricity costs?? Out comes our Excel sheet and using the figures from 2009 winter usage and the meter readings for Jan - Mar 2010, we are ahead by almost $100 by keeping the off-peak.
5. Can we negotiate having the best of both worlds? 66c and Peak/Off-Peak. I will try, but am not sure the supplier will come to the party. I'll keep you posted on that.

So more calculations will come to develop an accurate cost & usage picture for the year.