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It's been entertaining to watch an industry that is completely unused to technology change start to encounter technologies with exponential change in performanc
by epistasis 4y ago
It's been entertaining to watch an industry that is completely unused to technology change start to encounter technologies with exponential change in performance (e.g. cost, for solar).
So much of the industry is caught completely flat-footed, and projections and modeling are tweaked and changed until the projections for solar, wind, and storage, are often out of date and wrong by the time they are published.
Utilities are used to planning with five year time frames, but they will often use estimates from publications that are years old, and the publication may have been under review for a year, in addition to data collection time. So it's not unusual for utilities to do planning with numbers that are 10 years off of where they should be. It takes private citizens to cajole utilities and Public Utilities Commissions to practice basic good decision making.
There are two exceptions to the complete lack of innovation in the industry: Renewable Portfolio Standards that force utilities to change their production by force of law, and open markets in places like Texas where people can see how bad the decision making is from the old school and outcompete with their own generation sources. (and each of these states has had their own planning failures, both connected to improper governance at the PUC level, which is likely due to captured regulators.)
- vkou 4y agoNothing in life is exponential, but there are a lot of people who confuse the first half of a sigmoid curve for it.
- epistasis 4y agoOf course, but we are without a doubt experiencing exponential technology change. All models are approximations, and an exponential approximation is far better than whatever is going into EIA and IEA advice to policy makers. We have not yet hit the linear part of the sigmoid, and are not close. But the good modes out there take that sigmoid shape into account. (Also, why don't Singularity advocates know about sigmoids?)
- kelseyfrog 4y agoSince the early parts of sigmoid and exponential curves are indistinguishable, the singularity advocates opt for the more interesting of the two. The question people are most interested in "what's the saturation level?" of sigmoids has such a large prediction interval that it's next to useless to estimate from data.
- graycat 4y agoRight, extrapolation from the present and past where the growth has been exponential is not promising. But if somehow know the saturation level, upper asymptote, then what are doing is more like interpolation than extrapolation. Then the sigmoid curve is the solution to the differential equation I posted here a few minutes ago here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31429475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31429475 and there is just the one free parameter k. Sometimes in practice have a shot at estimating k.
- flir 4y ago> (Also, why don't Singularity advocates know about sigmoids?) They think the curve goes so far up the y axis before it flattens off that it might as well be exponential to us monkeys stuck at the bottom of the slope.
- ben_w 4y agoWhile I think this, I have definitely seen at least one attempt to argue that progress follows a doubling time itself regularly halves and will actually reach infinite “real soon now”. I also see, as a common trope, people talking about “the knee of the exponential”; as they clearly don’t know how the exponential function works, I have no idea what they think.
- flir 4y agoOh well that's just nuts. Can't help those guys.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- graycat 4y agoYup: For time t, upper asymptote b, arbitrary constant k, value at time t y(t), d/dt y(t) = k y(t) (b - y(t)) Solve that and get a sigmoid, lazy S, curve. Yup, the solution, easy closed form, first calculus, is in terms of exponentials. Could use that to model, say, the growth of immunity to Covid-19. Once it was used to project the growth of FedEx -- pleased the BoD and saved the company. Addition: Ah, will save you a little first calculus. In TeX, $$ y(t) = { y(0) b e^{bkt} \over y(0) \big ( e^{bkt} - 1 \big ) + b} $$
- esturk 4y agoHow about the expansion of the universe?
- ben_w 4y agoDefinitely not exponential. Based on available evidence, it was much faster in the inflationary epoch, then slowed down, and is now speeding up again.
- jiggawatts 4y agoThis kind of thinking is something I internalised while doing 3D game engine development during the early era of hardware GPU cards. The growth curve was incredible! I learned quickly that the constants were the slopes of the best fit on a log graph. And that you could never intersect that curve with $today, you had to estimate your delivery date and use the intersection at that point for all planning. E.g.: vram budget for textures, polygon count limits, etc… I’ve never seen this kind of thinking by management at any level, in any industry outside of computer game development. I’ve tried explaining it to IT managers to no avail. E.g.: don’t get a 10% discount now by buying 200 servers up front in a single sale! Buy 100 now at full price and 50 servers that are twice as powerful two years later. Nope… got to get those sweet volume discounts…
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoProblem is, this applies "in reverse" to battery technology. Don't buy 1TW of storage today, buy 500MW and wait to see what's coming. Defensible, but possibly not what we actually need.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoThe jurisdictions buying storage today (California, Australia) are driving down the costs for those who will buy it tomorrow. As costs decline, the market expands, as storage paired with renewables (rapidly approaching $0.01/kWh at utility scale) is cheaper than existing thermal generation.
- MikeCapone 4y agoThe problem with battery supply is that it would be better to use that supply on EVs to displace oil rather than on massive stationary grid storage for intermittent sources. Instead, for the maximum cleaning up of energy, we should build nuclear for the grid and use batteries on transportation.
- ncmncm 4y ago
- vegetablepotpie 4y agoCompetition in the energy market is key to bringing more renewables online. With Texas style retail choice we’ve seen 10% of their power come from wind, and that’s not for environmental reasons. It’s just pure market dynamics at play. But we’ve also seen blackouts ~$10,000 residential power bills come out of Texas, so that’s what utilities focus on when there’s talk of competition in other markets. There are other forms of competition that work better. The form used in CA, OH, and MA is community choice aggregation, which lets municipalities buy electricity for their residents. Newton MA procures 80% of its electricity as renewable. Marin County CA is at 100%. CCAs reduce residential electric bills by 2-9% vs monopoly utilities. With CCA you get the price reductions of the free market, combined with the protections of regulation. The only opposition comes from utilities.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 4y ago> There are other forms of competition that work better. There certainly are. The one that works best is the free market.
- ncmncm 4y agoThere is no such thing as a free market.
- WalterBright 4y agoYou're right, perfection is never possible. Free markets, however, have the wonderful property that the closer one gets to them, the better they work! On the other hand, the closer one gets to socialism, the worse it works :-(
- ncmncm 4y agoIt just means markets have to be managed. Better management makes better markets, but politics only tolerates so much management merit. Socialism is politics.
- WalterBright 4y agoSounds like classic problems with socialism and central economic planning.
- epistasis 4y agoI would say decision making in general. Don't forget that all those optimization methods developed by Soviet mathematicians found great adoption by corporate planners in capitalist societies! The book Red Plenty is a great book about both these ideas and the history of the USSR. I can't recommend it enough for technical folks, it's a book that made me interested in economics like never before. With companies like Amazon taking over large sections of retail consumption and allocation in our economy, the ideas are extremely relevant today. What could Amazon do with a massive AI that the USSR could not do? Definitely more, but they probably can not solve the computation problem of an entire economy.
- ncmncm 4y agoLenin copied his government from Ford Motor Company. He was a huge admirer of Henry Ford. A corporation is a command economy. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos differ from Lenin and Mao mainly in firing people instead of executing them.
- epistasis 4y agoMarx viewed capitalism as an essential step towards communism, and that we needed the abundance that capitalism provided in order to transition to the next stage. The biggest refutation of historial materialism is that it was Russia and China, nearly feudal societies, that tried to adopt his ideas and skip the capitalist stage, or at least have the capitalist stage be managed by committed Marxists that would shepherd the transformation. Of course the USSR faltered, and China has adopted more and more capitalism as of late, and it's hard to classify as Marxist other than it is authoritarian and oppressive, a natural consequence of any society build on Marxist ideals. And perhaps all these capitalist societies in the West will eventually become what Marx envisioned, once there is adequate abundance, but I personally doubt it heavily. Marx's conception of the labor theory of value, in addition to historical Materialism, are pretty well shot down as terrible theory, IMHO. And I say that as someone who aspires to a socialist society. Marx had some good ideas and some really terrible ones, but I think Marxists of today are some of the biggest obstacles towards advancing to more socialism, just as much an obstacle as Libertarians or all stripes of conservatives. I would also note that opposition to Marx has been a consistent thread throughout socialist history, so I'm not alone on this.
- fooblaster 4y agowhy does solar produce an exponential decrease in cost over time? I understand how cmos lithography reduces costs. over time smaller and smaller features drives chips smaller which increases yields. I don't understand how that is true for solar - I don't see panel efficiency increasing dramatically. why are the cost curves different for solar than any mass manufacturing, like stamping steel chassis for cars?
- lovemenot 4y agoIt's just a traditional learning curve. More similar to panel than cmos. The reason we are getting steady cost reduction is steady volume increase in production. For decades we have been massively under-served in PV production volume. Even now, we are still somewhere in the middle of that S-curve. I haven't seen such data, but panel in the early C20th probably followed a similar learning curve to PV now.
- michael1999 4y agoCar production costs did fall dramatically in their first decades. Production learning curves tend to be log log over cumulative volume. So the early gains are gone. It’s easy to forget that mass production of automobiles has gone on for a century.
- epistasis 4y agoMass manufacturing of solar panels is a lot more complex than stamping steel parts. For example, one of the big wins was diamond (I think?) cutters for crystalline silicon, which allowed panels to be made rig far less inputs. A big competitor before that was thin film, and maybe you have heard of Solyndra, who had a heat tech that was made obsolete because this advancement in cutting silicon. Any improvement along the chain of silicon production to siping to assembly has a chance to reduce costs, and it's usually small incremental bits of 1% here or 2% there.