Australian Solar Panels Manufacturer Uses ICO, Crypto Tokens for P2P Energy Trading

Power Ledger, an Australian solar power panel manufacturing company expects the Blockchain to improve efficiency in the energy market by enabling peer to peer trading, to make solar panels (for example: RENOGY 100W ) cheaper.

Now it is seeking support through the pre-sale of POWR tokens.

The ultimate aim of the POWR token is to enable peer to peer energy trading.

Blockchain is becoming a hot topic in the power industry today. For example, Austrian and German energy provider Switch has recently begun accepting Bitcoin for gas and electricity bill payments.
Energy trading

Excess electricity generated by individuals (say through a solar panel on the rooftop) may be sold to other individuals who need them.

By cutting out the middleman in power trading, costs are expected to come down. This may result in more people installing solar power panels and using renewable sources of energy. Ultimately higher demand could result in economies of scale for solar panel manufacturers and costs may come down.

A virtuous cycle could be initiated, where lower prices fuel further demand.
Business model

Unlike other ICOs where the developers have nothing but a white paper backing them and yet manage to raise millions of dollars in a matter of minutes, the ICO of Power Ledger is backed by an established business model.

The energy trading platform built by Power Ledger is fully commercially deployed and supported by multiple energy providers (including Vector NZ, Western Power WA).

The company will utilize funds raised to continue its expansion into various other markets, including India and other emerging markets.
Anti-whale provisions

The pre-sale of POWR tokens does not have a minimum subscription size, but has a spending cap of $25K per subscriber.

This provision is to ensure that the presale is not dominated by a few whales and enjoys broad-based support.

Power Ledger expects this support to give stability to the value of POWR tokens. Multiple tokens have been subject to market manipulation, with whales resorting to pump and dump schemes, leading to small individual investors getting disillusioned. The company is currently selling 100 mln tokens at a fixed price of $ 8.8c in its presale. The company will sell 250 mln POWR tokens in an unrestricted ICO in September, which will determine the final price of POWR tokens.
ICO gaining support

As per a Bloomberg report, the pre-sale was 57 percent subscribed since opening on Sunday.

This indicates that subscribers had paid around $5 mln to obtain POWR tokens. If the pre-sale is completed successfully, the company will have raised ~ $9 mln of funds.

If the price discovery at the ICO is in line with the fixed price at which the presale tokens were sold ($ 8.8c), the total money raised by the company could be $30 mln. Considering the amount of money raised by other ICOs with only a concept backing them, this should not be a tough call.

If demand during the ICO is high, the total money raised by the company could reach $100 mln.

What Can You Do About Existing Ice Dams?

Most home improvement and hardware stores also sell pellets or tablets that are made to be thrown up on the roofing contractors in Bronx New York to the ground. These tablets then allegedly will melt the ice out of the roofers Bronx as they dissolve into the water that is running down the roofing Bronx NY to the ice dam. I have zero experience with these products so that I can't say for sure if they operate as intended or not. But some people say they've worked for their ice dam problems. A few things I'd worry about as a Bronx roofing company is potential damage to the shingles by the chemicals these tablets are made of (sodium is not any good for asphalt shingles), as well as perhaps staining the roofing Bronx with those same chemicals. And even in a base case scenario, this product is still only a band-aid to get a greater problem.

Proper Roofing Techniques For Cold Climates

In addition to making certain that the roof repair Bronx has proper ventilation and attic insulation, there's an additional degree of security against ice dam issues and brick pointing contractors that all accountable and moral Bronx roofing contractors should be taken in cold weather climates with respect to pitched, asphalt shingled brickwork pointing contractors. Every time a brand new brick Masonry contractor is installed, nowadays, an additional layer of protection called ice and water membrane should be installed from the edge to at least 3 ft up the brick pointing Bronx.

This extra layer of security will help prevent leaks if ice dams do grow along the brick pointing NYC. Water and Ice membrane won't stop ice dams it only is added security to help protect the plywood sheathing under the asphalt shingles and prevent leaks should an ice dam form.

Roofing Repair and Service

New York roofer repair

Despite the fact that adding completed by experts assures housetop's trustability and its own major purpose - safety against atmospheric rainfall, nevertheless eventually absolutely essential of repair develops. New York roofing, aside from its type, is divided into current and cash. Recent fixing contains eliminating little defects in level (breaks, lumps, depressurization of bones), and if necessary, elements' partial replacement. The main overhaul suggests changing NYC roofing contractors, containing dismantling of outdated covering, repair of commercial roofing NYC composition, installation of thermal warmth, installation of fresh coverage and painting (if required).

Appropriate conduction of recent repairs enables to keep up the roofers New York in exceptional condition with minimal resources and efforts. Lasting maintenance performed by pros is vital to discover and correct disorders.

Roofing companies NYC maintenance

To be able to expand roofing contractors NYC life and eliminate the importance of major repairs, presence is executed, implying detailed examination and reduction of active flaws. Different types of masking demand specific tactic and superior professionalism. The examination must be completed at least twice per year for appropriate detection of possible problems. Roofing company NYC could also contain roofing cleanup spillway chutes and pipes, securing aspects of roofing contractor NYC, washing trash, snow and snow from your roof, painting aspects that have dropped their original look and many other items.

Drainage systems agreement

The business of gutters is an important activity in building any NYC roofing contractors. For pitched homes exterior drainage program is employed, comprising pipes and gutters manufactured of metal or PVC. Effectively structured water disposal shields act and basement from premature deterioration upon contact with moisture and, additionally, enables presenting your house more finished desirable look.

Selection of product and model of the discharge components is formed by buyers financial resources and individual aesthetic choices. In most cases, adding PVC gutters is less costly, but because of their qualities to improve the impact of heat, plastic pipes and gutters can result in escapes. Modern rain systems' producers for this function build special sealants shipped with PVC gutters, which could considerably prolong their lifespan.

Copper cunettes are considered to become probably the most durable, but different metallic watercourses also provide a great performance and certainly will serve for decades. "Basic Designer" offers solutions for smooth homes, where central runoff techniques, including spillway funnels, pipes, and ties, are structured. Professionals' engagement is necessary for the optimal calculation of heap, imposed on the drainage system. Works must be performed with apparent communication to requirements specified in regulatory papers, taking into consideration structure's pitch, proportions, and lots of different aspects.

Solar Energy Has Big Apple Potential But New York Real Estate Entrepreneurs Haven't Seen the Light

I love New York. I can walk outside, look up and get a lesson in history just from looking at its buildings. Not only is it the birthplace of the American dream, its skyline is an icon of industry, capitalism and our intention to always go bigger and do better. As a local contributor to that skyline, it’s personal, but this home of mine is slower in keeping up with the sustainability Joneses than a city of 8.4 million people should. Meanwhile, smaller cities in California and Arizona are saving money big time by installing solar panels on large commercial buildings -- something that NYC lacks.

Don’t get me wrong, New York State is one of the top 10 “solar states”, but when you break it down per city, per capita, medium-sized cities like Phoenix and Denver are ahead of NYC, and you can’t blame it on sunlight either. Indianapolis, which gets less sun than New York, ranks higher. In larger cities like NYC, the arguments against solar panels are starting to fall short, especially because solar panel installations have become “ridiculously cheap” according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Another example is  Goal Zero Yeti 150 solar generator - price continues to decrease.



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Chart from: CleanTechnica



With Mayor Bill De Blasio’s ambitious goal for NYC to hit 80 percent renewal by 2050, why is New York still seemingly behind the times?

I have a couple of educated guesses:
The cost factor.

Currently, while there are a slew of federal incentives to promote sustainability, state-level credits vary dramatically. California gives an investment tax credit (ITC) that comprises 30 percent of the total system cost, on top of an existing 30 percent federal tax credit. New York isn't quite there, but does offer a close 25 percent in tax credits.

Given that New York is a highly developed state with world-class economic, social and political institutions, it is surprising that it lags ever-so-slightly behind California. After all, not only is it easier and cheaper to install solar panels than ever before -- it's untapped money. Our West 42nd Street Atelier property, for example, recouped the installation cost of our solar panels within two years. Clearly, there isn't just a "green" environmental dimension; there's also a "green" financial one as well.

To complicate the discussion further, the outcome of the recent presidential election has thrown the future of the solar installation program into jeopardy. According to the analysts at S&P's Global Platts division, we could see a cut in the solar installation ITC under the Trump Presidency:

"Trump's possible efforts to end incentives for alternative energy development would boost near-term demand for fossil fuels," said a report by analysts at S&P Global Platts. "A potential cut in the Investment Tax Credit to 10 percent from the current 30 percent would slash solar installation demand by 60 percent."

In other words, the cost factor, which wasn't much of an issue in 2016, may become the decisive factor for developers in 2017. For now, it's too early to tell, and developers don’t like the unknown.

3 Ways You’ll Be Using Facebook Video Differently in 2017

What a revolution the Internet brought to publishing.

Through the late 90s and early 2000s, we’ve seen barriers to sharing the written word completely flatten out and disappear. Anyone with a keyboard could start a blog. Then social networks came along and suddenly, ordinary people could become influencers, too!

Smartphones gave us the ability to develop content from wherever we happened to be at any given point and upload it to the web, where social sharing meant our words, images and video could be seen by hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.

Now, an executive at Facebook is predicting that in just five years time, Facebook will be “definitely mobile,” and “probably all video.”
Can you imagine a digital world devoid of written text?

It might seem crazy, but it’s not all that far fetched to think that video will soon take over. For starters, it’s so much quicker and easier to create video than to sit down, collect your thoughts, write them all out and edit it into something fit for public consumption.

CONFESSIONS OF A WATCH GEEK

At the start of 2016, I had a bad feeling. Time was not working right. Some weeks were as snappy as days, others were as elastic as months, and the months felt as if they were either bleeding into one another three at a time—Jabruarch—or segmenting into Gregorian-calendar city-states. Feb. Rue. Airy. Something was wrong with the world.

One day in February, I took a ride on the subway. This was a rare occurrence. Since turning forty, I’d started to suffer from a heightened sense of claustrophobia. A few years ago, I was stuck for an hour in an elevator with a man who weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds and his two grocery carts crammed with bags of Tostitos and bottles of Canada Dry, an experience both frightening and lonely. The elevator had simply given up. What if a subway train also refused to move? I began walking seventy blocks at a time or splurging on taxis. But on this day I had taken the N train. Somewhere between Forty-ninth Street and Forty-second Street, a signal failed and we ground to a halt. For forty minutes, we stood still. An old man yelled at the conductor at full volume in English and Spanish. Time and space began to collapse around me. The orange seats began to march toward each other. I was no longer breathing with any regularity. This is not going to end well. None of this will end well. We will never leave here. We will always be underground. This, right here, is the rest of my life. I walked over to the conductor’s silver cabin. He was calmly explaining to the incensed passenger the scope of his duties as an M.T.A. employee. “Sir,” I said to him, “I feel like I’m dying.”

“City Hall, City Hall, we got a sick passenger,” he said into the radio. “I repeat, a sick passenger. Can you send a rescue train?”

A rescue train. My whole life I have been waiting for one. Sensing the excitement of someone suffering more than they were, the other passengers moved to my end of the car to offer advice, crowding in on me and making me panic all the more. One man was particularly insistent. “I’m a retired firefighter,” he said. “I’ve been doing this twenty years, folks. Seen it all. This man here is hyperventilating. That’s what he’s doing. Twenty years a firefighter, now retired.”

“I’m going to take an Ativan now,” I said, fishing a pill out of my breast pocket.

“Do not do that,” the retired firefighter said. “It will only make you hyperventilate more. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

A middle-aged woman approached me. “You have to imagine,” she said to me, in a Polish accent, “that eventually the train will move. That eventually we will come out of the tunnel.”

Shamed into not taking the Ativan by the retired firefighter, I looked down at my wrist. I was wearing a new watch, the first mechanical watch I had ever owned. A brief primer: Since the late nineteen-seventies, most watches have used a quartz movement, which is battery-powered and extremely accurate. Mechanical watches, by contrast, are powered either by hand-winding or, in the case of an automatic watch, by the motion of the wearer’s wrist, which is converted into energy by means of a rotor. Mechanical watches are far less accurate than quartz watches, but often far more expensive, because their bearings are more intricate. All contemporary Rolex watches, for example, are mechanical. The difference between quartz and old-fashioned mechanical is that your child’s Winnie the Pooh watch will likely keep better time than a seventy-six-thousand-dollar Vacheron Constantin perpetual calendar in rose gold. A quick way to tell the two kinds apart is to look at the second hand. On a quartz watch, the second hand goose-steps along one tick at a time; on a mechanical watch, it glides imperfectly, but beautifully, around the dial and into the future.

Looking at the smooth, antiquated mechanical glide of my watch’s second hand, I felt, if not calm, then ready for whatever happened next. As the conductor’s radio flared on and off with promises from City Hall (my rescue train never came), as the passengers around me discussed my fate, I wondered: Can you hold your own world together while the greater world falls apart? The visible passing of time, second by second, seemed to provide a kind of escape route, even as my body remained within the metal shell of the stricken N train. Three seconds, inhale. Three seconds, exhale. The watch was a Junghans, from Germany, derived from a design by the Bauhaus-influenced Swiss architect, artist, and industrial designer Max Bill. I had bought it at the moma shop for what in my early, innocent watch days seemed like the astronomical price of a thousand dollars. Its no-frills, form-follows-function shape evoked civility in a time of chaos, a ticking intelligence in the face of a new inhumanity. The train slowly moved again. The Polish woman smiled at me. We shuddered into Times Square and I was, for a few moments in time, safe.

10 Habits That Change Boys Into Men

The demise of our culture will result from the demise of its men if something isn’t changed quickly. Far too many men remain directionless, devastated and scared children.

Male suicide rate increased to three to four times higher than the female suicide rate. Men are twice as likely as women to become alcoholics. And males are far more likely to commit juvenile crime.
Much has been said and written in recent years about the challenges of men and boys. A sampling of book titles includes:

• Why There Are No Good Men Left
• The Demise of Guys
• The End of Men
• Why Boys Fail
• The End of Men, And The Rise of Women
• Boys Adrift
• Manning Up: How The Rise Of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys

A common theme is that men and boys have become increasingly confused about their identity and role in society. Kay Hymowitz, author of Manning Up, put it this way:

It is the norm in Hollywood films, TV and cable shows, and even commercials to portray men as incompetent, immature, or self-absorbed. This underlying message has subtly and increasingly become the collective unconscious with devastating repercussions.

Managers: let your reports fail

After excelling as an individual contributor, you were selected to become a people manager. Can you succeed? Not if you aren’t willing to re-learn what success looks like. If you want to make your team members good at their jobs, you need to get yourself comfortable with their mistakes.

Giving your team total responsibility is the difference between training a team of diligent executors, and growing your people into critical thinkers who can tackle bigger and bigger problems.

You may be tempted to handle the ‘hard’ stuff — like jumping into the fray whenever workloads get overwhelming or when higher executives are watching results. You may be tempted to think that only you can truly champion the team.

After all, a screw-up from your team could reflect poorly on you, and you’re good at your job, so you aren’t about to let that happen. And in the end, the team (with you at the front) ships the results and gets accolades, so everything’s great, right?