dpierce9

46 ms·

181.
by dpierce9 10y ago
Because this compares present day cost to all earners (not sure how they normalized for graduate degrees, etc.), there is a huge recency bias. I majored in humanities and minored in sciences/math about ten years ago. Even counting my p
182.
by dpierce9 10y ago
Batteries would be great but they are not necessary unless you want to replace all generation with solar which would be a gargantuan undertaking. As part of the current generation stack, even at expanded scale, solar works very well without
183.
by dpierce9 10y ago
They claim their ramp is faster than pumped storage, ramp is an ancillary service here. Also being smaller than pumped storage means they can be optimized to respond to smaller ancillary service requirements. In general there is no silver b
184.
by dpierce9 11y ago
There are still plenty of incentives for grid storage that have nothing to do with residential rates (peak shaving with pumped storage, day/night price arbitrage). Surely not all incentives have to work for every valuable technology.
185.
by dpierce9 11y ago
Not to be too picky but it is actually the swings in supply they can't handle. Demand is inelastic and pretty much constant in the near term. The problem is that the clouds roll in, supply from solar drops off, conventional gen must co
186.
by dpierce9 11y ago
One wrinkle here is that some debts have variable rates. For instance, if you have a balance with a 3% variable rate and one with a 5% fixed rate, but you are in a rising interest rate environment, the 5% fixed rate loan is effectively a he
187.
by dpierce9 11y ago
Here is my point, suppose a kWh costs 10 cents retail. This represents an average cost of maybe 1 cent of profit, 1 cent of admin costs, 3 might be transmission costs, and 5 might be generation costs. In a 1-1 net metering scheme, I generat
188.
by dpierce9 11y ago
In the US wholesale energy prices are locational and determined by three things: the cost of energy, congestion in the transmission network, and losses in delivery. Retail rates are also locational but principally determined by state-level
189.
by dpierce9 11y ago
This is a good point though one thing is that we can pretty much always use more electricity (Alcoa can start smelting more or something) and since we don't have feed-in tariffs I am not sure we will see those same market signals.
190.
by dpierce9 11y ago
I was coming at it from a US perspective. In the US retail is still dominated by natural monopolies with service areas and captured customers so those costs are low. There is a huge push toward the kind of retail competition you are talking
191.
by dpierce9 11y ago
They kind of are like this: there are real-time electricity markets in the US. One issue is that a lot of demand is inelastic because price signal transmission is very hard. Grandmas don't want to be adjusting their Air Conditioner on
192.
by dpierce9 11y ago
I don't know why your first point is relevant, the marginal cost of billing is incredibly minute. The second point is interesting but calling it poaching is tendentious. No one is saying power stations, transmission lines, distribution
193.
by dpierce9 11y ago
No. Solar consumption does peak midday but that is trivial because electricity is nearly always used when it is produced. Electricity demand, which is basically the same thing as consumption, peaks midday (as do prices). And solar productio
194.
by dpierce9 11y ago
Well in general demand peaks midday while household usage is u-shaped (morning and evening peaks). This makes sense, since when people go to work they are not at home and their work energy use tends to be higher than home energy use. But if
195.
by dpierce9 11y ago
One reason net-metering is close to fair is that we are talking about delivered electricity. Every unit I send back to the grid is a unit that doesn't need to be delivered by the power company but the power company can sell it to my ne
196.
by dpierce9 11y ago
Hume was deeply concerned to distinguish empirical reasoning from math and logic (matters of fact vs relations of ideas). Induction doesn't work in the sense that it doesn't guarantee its conclusion but of course even Hume thought
197.
by dpierce9 11y ago
They did this for solar lead generation with project rooftop.
198.
by dpierce9 11y ago
I printed a student loan form and the last page that printed contained only the Paperwork Reduction Act notice. I have to say, it was beautifully Orwellian.
199.
by dpierce9 11y ago
Free enterprise? This is an embarrassing extension of the idea of enterprise (Since when can enterprises tax anyhow?). This is racketeering 101 plain and simple. I will burn your business down unless you pay me to protect your business. It
200.
by dpierce9 11y ago
Just to be clear, the order to show cause process of a civil case involving the SEC is this: pay up or prove to the agency beyond some standard of proof that you didn't do what we said you did. The differences are that they don't
201.
by dpierce9 11y ago
Are civil penalties against corporations (e.g. SEC/CFTC fines, mortgage crisis fines) examples of civil asset forfeiture?
202.
by dpierce9 11y ago
Electricity costs vary considerably and solar is already at or better than grid-parity in a lot of places (e.g. Hawaii, Germany). Grid-parity is obviously a goal but does anyone think the current price of electricity contains the fully-load
203.
by dpierce9 11y ago
^This. If you don't take into account inflation and don't plot on a log scale, you can't make any sense of a long term stock or bond price chart. It really doesn't make any sense (though it would be nice if this chart we
204.
by dpierce9 11y ago
The conclusion of this article is that a life cycle analysis of solar with storage is better than the marginal contribution of greenhouse gases from operating a traditional plant but not by a lot. Has anyone seen a life cycle analysis of de
205.
by dpierce9 12y ago
Well blinds would presumably block the light you want in (visual spectrum). Furthermore, anything that isn't reflected back out serves to heat the building. Absorbing the energy in a PV material takes some fraction of energy that would
206.
by dpierce9 12y ago
This is a great point. We shouldn't ignore other efficiencies though. When used on the building envelope, light energy that would otherwise heat the building is converted into electricity instead. Assuming a reasonable efficiency for t
207.
by dpierce9 12y ago
I agree but here is some idle speculation: perhaps this laptop is so light that the force needed to effectively hold the magsafe onto the laptop is large enough that it wouldn't really release without pulling the laptop over anyhow.
208.
by dpierce9 12y ago
^This. When you say 'medieval' and start talking about Galen, you have lost me (even if you point about the medieval period is correct).
209.
by dpierce9 12y ago
The FCC is an 'independent' agency which means that while congress can ask questions, make suggestions, apply pressure, and vote on members of the commission it cannot force the FCC to introduce, accept, or reject any proposed rul
210.
by dpierce9 12y ago
I was simply talking about operating externalities. I haven't spent as much time looking at the construction externalities but my educated guess is that on a per watt of generation capacity, the net out of construction and operation fa

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