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From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvemen

by tedd4u 2y ago

From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind. South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar accounted for 100 per cent of local demand. No other gigawatt scale grid in the world has come close to this amount of “variable renewable energy”, or for such a long time. RenewEconomy reported on Monday that South Australia had just enjoyed a seven day run of wind and solar that produced more than 104 per cent of average demand. Closer inspection proved it was even more impressive than that. According to Geoff Eldridge at data providers GPE NemLog2, the supply of wind and solar averaged 100 per cent of local demand for 10 days and 9 hours (a total of 249 hours) from 08:20 on Friday, December 9, to 1720, Monday, December 19. [1] [1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-per-cent-renewables-run-extends-to-over-10-days/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...

TrainedMonkey 2y ago
[flagged]
- ropejumper 2y ago
  Why would ChatGPT have any idea about this at all? Its dataset wasn't made up of estimations for energy funds, and it makes absolutely no sense to ask it about that? I'm not sure why these figures or even their ratio would be trustworthy.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    ChatGPT didn't use it's dataset for the numbers sourced in the linked chat. That said you do have to still go validate the sources it finds and see they say it says what they say it says, which I don't think is true for the second claim.
- nindalf 2y ago
  It’s terrifying that people are using chatgpt for questions like this. Isn’t it obvious what it is and isn’t good for?
  - throwAGIway 2y ago
    It's more terrifying that people have claims about things they didn't even check. Why exactly is it bad? Do you really think that a human quickly skimming few web pages is better than a bot quickly skimming few web pages? Or did you think it's pulling the data from its trained weights?
- anakaine 2y ago
  ChatGPT fails miserably at questions like this. It cherrypicks various data points and arbitrarily runs sums.on them, convoluting nuance and meaning, conflating disparate or overlapping measures, and presents them as fact. Always ask it to quote all its sources, and check them. You've been heavily downvoted for good reason.
- sethammons 2y ago
  We need to rebrand chatgpt and this generation of AI as "the Internet (tm)." "Asking the Internet and it says..." Well, yeah, the Internet is full of crazy ideas and people untethered from reality and scientific inquiry. But enough people have put samples of things we do know, so sometimes The Internet gets things right.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  People slam this for being ChatGPT but I wonder how often the references it finds on the web are more relevant than ones in this [1] style of HN [2] comment that often get to the top of this type of thread yet lack any deep analysis either. Slamming it for not validating the sources support the claim at least makes sense but isn't really specific to the ChatGPT fixation. Perhaps somewhat telling on that is the comments are focusing on how the source was found rather than debating or correcting the figures themselves. The first figure sourced seems both accurately sourced and accurately estimated. The second figure I'm having trouble finding in the linked source and the figure seems to be more based on renewable energy investment not renewable energy research. I'm also having a hard time finding any good source for current renewable energy research investment to replace that with though so I can't say much in regards to how the final conclusion fairs.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    The problem is that even when incorrect, typically someone intended the correct information to on a website. Where LLMs are just an inference of related words. So by your scenario, the LLM also picked up the incorrect answer on a website and included it into its inference. He isn’t downvoted for being lazy, he’s downvoted for using a language model as a fact model. Even if sometimes it does work.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      The problem has nothing to do with how you're finding your sources and everything to do with the lack of bothering to verify and understand them properly. What does it matter if you got your source list from tea leaves so long as you validate the information in the sources? Nothing replaces actually going out and verifying anything yourself (yet) but that doesn't make tools which do a first past somehow to blame for someone's laziness while tools that put no effort in at all are supposed to be just fine.
- 7952 2y ago
  That is an apples to oranges comparison. You are comparing r&d on an emerging technology to deployment of a mature technology. Its like spending on developing a new plane to purchasing an existing one.
belorn 2y ago
Those sounds interesting and is likely a nice achievement, but averages really hide the critical information here. What was the min and max, and how did they deal with periods of low supply? Denmark is a nice example why this matter. During optimal weather their wind power produce around twice their local demand. However, in terms of actually consumption each year they need to import about 50% of their total amount of energy. This despite the fact that they export more energy than they import. The only way that would make mathematically sense is if export and import occur during different periods over the year. This has multiple issues. The biggest being that they are heavily dependent on nearby countries fossil fueled power plants. A secondary problem is that prices they get for exports are low, since optimal weather conditions means a general surplus of energy in EU, while periods of bad weather results low supply and very high import costs. Their exports do not pay for their imports, despite exporting more than importing (in terms of energy, not money). One can not remove the word averages and conclude that they ran fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. It would be the same as saying that Denmark is running fully on wind a decade+.

by tedd4u 2y ago

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

[flagged]

ropejumper 2y ago
Why would ChatGPT have any idea about this at all? Its dataset wasn't made up of estimations for energy funds, and it makes absolutely no sense to ask it about that? I'm not sure why these figures or even their ratio would be trustworthy.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  ChatGPT didn't use it's dataset for the numbers sourced in the linked chat. That said you do have to still go validate the sources it finds and see they say it says what they say it says, which I don't think is true for the second claim.
nindalf 2y ago
It’s terrifying that people are using chatgpt for questions like this. Isn’t it obvious what it is and isn’t good for?
- throwAGIway 2y ago
  It's more terrifying that people have claims about things they didn't even check. Why exactly is it bad? Do you really think that a human quickly skimming few web pages is better than a bot quickly skimming few web pages? Or did you think it's pulling the data from its trained weights?
anakaine 2y ago
ChatGPT fails miserably at questions like this. It cherrypicks various data points and arbitrarily runs sums.on them, convoluting nuance and meaning, conflating disparate or overlapping measures, and presents them as fact. Always ask it to quote all its sources, and check them. You've been heavily downvoted for good reason.
sethammons 2y ago
We need to rebrand chatgpt and this generation of AI as "the Internet (tm)." "Asking the Internet and it says..." Well, yeah, the Internet is full of crazy ideas and people untethered from reality and scientific inquiry. But enough people have put samples of things we do know, so sometimes The Internet gets things right.
zamadatix 2y ago
People slam this for being ChatGPT but I wonder how often the references it finds on the web are more relevant than ones in this [1] style of HN [2] comment that often get to the top of this type of thread yet lack any deep analysis either. Slamming it for not validating the sources support the claim at least makes sense but isn't really specific to the ChatGPT fixation. Perhaps somewhat telling on that is the comments are focusing on how the source was found rather than debating or correcting the figures themselves. The first figure sourced seems both accurately sourced and accurately estimated. The second figure I'm having trouble finding in the linked source and the figure seems to be more based on renewable energy investment not renewable energy research. I'm also having a hard time finding any good source for current renewable energy research investment to replace that with though so I can't say much in regards to how the final conclusion fairs.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  The problem is that even when incorrect, typically someone intended the correct information to on a website. Where LLMs are just an inference of related words. So by your scenario, the LLM also picked up the incorrect answer on a website and included it into its inference. He isn’t downvoted for being lazy, he’s downvoted for using a language model as a fact model. Even if sometimes it does work.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    The problem has nothing to do with how you're finding your sources and everything to do with the lack of bothering to verify and understand them properly. What does it matter if you got your source list from tea leaves so long as you validate the information in the sources? Nothing replaces actually going out and verifying anything yourself (yet) but that doesn't make tools which do a first past somehow to blame for someone's laziness while tools that put no effort in at all are supposed to be just fine.
7952 2y ago
That is an apples to oranges comparison. You are comparing r&d on an emerging technology to deployment of a mature technology. Its like spending on developing a new plane to purchasing an existing one.

belorn 2y ago

Those sounds interesting and is likely a nice achievement, but averages really hide the critical information here. What was the min and max, and how did they deal with periods of low supply? Denmark is a nice example why this matter. During optimal weather their wind power produce around twice their local demand. However, in terms of actually consumption each year they need to import about 50% of their total amount of energy. This despite the fact that they export more energy than they import. The only way that would make mathematically sense is if export and import occur during different periods over the year. This has multiple issues. The biggest being that they are heavily dependent on nearby countries fossil fueled power plants. A secondary problem is that prices they get for exports are low, since optimal weather conditions means a general surplus of energy in EU, while periods of bad weather results low supply and very high import costs. Their exports do not pay for their imports, despite exporting more than importing (in terms of energy, not money). One can not remove the word averages and conclude that they ran fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. It would be the same as saying that Denmark is running fully on wind a decade+.