3 ms·

The efficiency matters cause of the cost and waste of panels and maintenance. I don't know exactly how expensive transmission is, but there's probably a reason

The efficiency matters cause of the cost and waste of panels and maintenance. I don't know exactly how expensive transmission is, but there's probably a reason wind/solar power plants are so big and centralized rather than being smaller and spread out closer to homes, which must still be far more efficient than homeowners doing the job. About reliability, the transmission network still needs to handle peak load during a cloudy week. At least A/C usage would be lower then. Speaking of software, crowd computing via widely distributed CPU-heavy jobs to home PCs is fading away. It's just so much more efficient to do that stuff in a datacenter, especially if there are specialized accelerators involved.

ok_dad 4y ago
On the last note, most companies in the building management software industry these days run a computer at the edge so that if there is no connectivity they can still process the control signals on-site. It was common a few years ago for us to be doing it in the cloud, but today it's starting to cost a lot more due to the massive numbers of buildings installing BMSes, and therefore these same companies are shifting to "edge computing" for as much of the site control as possible. Only analytics that cut across customers or aggregations and data storage are done in the cloud, and even then we're all trying to push as much as we can to the edge. My company is specifically rebuilding our infra to push the control loop and everything else we can to the site edge computer because doing it in the cloud is not efficient for our cost structure, and we have a $1000 industrial PC sitting there already, so why not use it? As far as distribution goes, the goal is to not need long-distance transmission infra in the future, via a mix of several types of renewables, energy storage, and even adding some emergency carbon generation in the mix if required. Today we need the transmission infra, but the goal is to reduce that by an order of magnitude which will reduce costs and maintenance by at least the same amount.

ok_dad 4y ago

On the last note, most companies in the building management software industry these days run a computer at the edge so that if there is no connectivity they can still process the control signals on-site. It was common a few years ago for us to be doing it in the cloud, but today it's starting to cost a lot more due to the massive numbers of buildings installing BMSes, and therefore these same companies are shifting to "edge computing" for as much of the site control as possible. Only analytics that cut across customers or aggregations and data storage are done in the cloud, and even then we're all trying to push as much as we can to the edge. My company is specifically rebuilding our infra to push the control loop and everything else we can to the site edge computer because doing it in the cloud is not efficient for our cost structure, and we have a $1000 industrial PC sitting there already, so why not use it? As far as distribution goes, the goal is to not need long-distance transmission infra in the future, via a mix of several types of renewables, energy storage, and even adding some emergency carbon generation in the mix if required. Today we need the transmission infra, but the goal is to reduce that by an order of magnitude which will reduce costs and maintenance by at least the same amount.