Software engineer at the Nucleic Acid Observatory in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
Have you check if you are receiving some subsidies for it?
I think natural gas in the US is effectively subsidized by underinvesting in export infrastructure? This country produces a lot of gas.
Talking to a friend who works in the energy industry, this is already happening in Puerto Rico. Electricity prices are high enough that it makes sense for a very large fraction of people to get solar, which then pushes prices up even higher for the remainder, and it spirals.
If the cost of power generation were the main contributor to the overall cost of the system then I think you'd be right: economies of scale and the ability to generate in cheap places and sell in expensive places would do a lot to keep people on the grid. But looking at my bill (footnote [1]) the non-generation costs are high enough that if current trends continue that should flip; see my response to cata, above.
I'm not claiming here that it's currently cheaper, but that it will soon be cheaper in a lot of places. Only 47% of my bill is the actual power generation, and the non-generation charges total $0.18/kWh. That's still slightly more expensive than solar+batteries here, but with current cost trends that should flip in a year or two.
Looking at their breakdown (footnote [1]) it seems to be mostly the cost of getting the electricity to the consumer. Since they're a monopoly, there's not much getting them to be efficient here, operating a high-uptime anything is expensive, and MA is an expensive place to do anything.
That's a very different product, using UV inside HVAC systems as an alternative or supplement to traditional filtration. Because the delivery rate of HVAC as a fraction of all air in the room is so much lower than the fraction air above people in a high ceiling room, this is much less valuable.
Very roughly, the main ways people use UV to clean air to reduce spread of diseases are HVAC / in duct, far UV, and upper room. I'm only trying to talk about the last of these here.
The way you demonstrate that there are not long-term side effects is that we have very accurate ability to measure UV, and so you can show that the system being on vs off has a negligible impact on the amount of UV where people are. Long-term impacts would be downstream from this kind of easily detectable effect.
(I think this is very different for far UV, where you intentionally shine it in a way that does include the people. That is potentially a much better approach, because you can clean the air between people instead of only above them, but while the research on far UVC safety looks pretty good to me, it's a much harder system to gather safety evidence on.)
You do need to pay attention to what paint is on the ceiling and measure to verify that levels are low in the places people are, but pointing UVC up is something we've done safely for a long time in many places.
Thanks!
35min is pretty optimized if I'm starting with "all components loose in a bag" -- it used to take me almost an hour. It's a lot of stuff that needs to get plugged in: https://www.jefftk.com/p/rhythm-stage-setup-components
But setting up a pedalboard so I don't need to manually connect dozens of things (this post!) is also optimizing the process.
I don't know the details in the Leverage case, but usually the way this sort of non-disclosure works is that both parties in a dispute, including employees, have non-disclosure obligations. But one party isn't able to release their (ex) employees unilaterally; the other party would need to agree as well.
That is, I suspect the agreements are structured such that CEA releasing people the way you propose (without Leverage also agreeing, which I doubt they would) would be a willful contract violation.