A good friend invited me to Hutchinson, Minnesota last weekend to celebrate a joyous life event. Working in the Midwest most of my career, it is often easiest just to drive rather than fly to neighboring states. Earlier in my … Continue reading →
A cool thing happened to me a few years ago. Rob Clark, of The Tall Family, moved into my community. At the time, I didn’t know anything about The Tall Family, with billions of views on multiple social media platforms. … Continue reading →
After all is said and done, this residential solar array in the non-winter months offset 67 percent of home power production. This chart is monthly solar production and household consumption in kilowatt hours (kWh). While it required both the solar … Continue reading →
A year contains half a million minutes. The residential solar panel data arrived in five-minute increments, or about 20 percent of the annual minute universe. Adding in the utility generated data, the two data sources delivered about 130,000 data points. … Continue reading →
Modeling tools are used for more than forecasting. To complete the analysis of household energy consumption, forensic data modeling was required. Data from two different datasets were needed, and was in slightly different formats that prohibited a smooth alignment. The … Continue reading →
In February, I asked my Electric Cooperative for help in understanding our solar panel output for 2024. They responded with 10,000 data hourly power consumption points over the 12 months of 2024 and the first two months of 2025. As … Continue reading →
This post continues the deeper dive into power production of a residential solar array. The last post on solar output looked at daily variability of this solar array in June 2024. Variability from cloud cover in this geographic location, 45 … Continue reading →
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index (CPI) carries significant weight in the flow of decisions and confidence in the US economy. Does the CPI mirror authentic food purchases? YES! Are household food expenditures and the Food … Continue reading →
Food Price Fun compares the theory of food prices to practices of buying food. On the one hand the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index (CPI) food prices provide the benchmark for the macroeconomy of food. But … Continue reading →
This chart is from the USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS), USDA Agricultural Projections to 2034, released on 2/18/25. The 2025 USDA Agricultural Outlook Forum occurred the following week, 2/27-28/25. This series of events mark the end of the last US … Continue reading →
