mlyle

22 ms·

481.
by mlyle 1y ago
In my market, we're already at fractions of renewable where prices go negative > 20% of daylight hours (doubled in last year), and still produce lots of CO2 in late afternoon. I think the time to start worrying seriously about stor
482.
by mlyle 1y ago
I'm not proposing to run it at a 10-15% capacity factor like a fossil gas peaker. That's a great strawman you have there. I'm proposing we run it at a close-to-100% capacity factor, and overprovision solar by less. Make the
483.
by mlyle 1y ago
I think most age verification ranges from silly to chilling to speech. But I don’t think we can somehow punt these problems to the quiz from the beginning of Leisure Suit Larry (which never stopped 10 year old me).
484.
by mlyle 1y ago
They should buy the electricity because it is better than leaving the electrolyzers idle when there is no surplus of renewable power alone, and higher utilization spreads capital costs over more production. It can be a tiny portion of the
485.
by mlyle 1y ago
Current prices of installed systems at peak scale are 150-350k/MWh. Replacing it all on a 20 year cadence seems like a reasonable assumption. Arguments assuming a positive return to scale 4 orders of magnitude out may be true— or may b
486.
by mlyle 1y ago
Sure. Plenty of my stuff “lives” similarly to the mid-90s. But that is not the way of the world and is increasingly giving up a lot.
487.
by mlyle 1y ago
I think what I am describing is worse. I have a harder and harder time as software and the resultant supply chain surface grows. And my chance to filter, monitor, validate, and audit software gets correspondingly worse as systems do more
488.
by mlyle 1y ago
Sure— but now everything has so many dependencies; dependencies are recursive, and the scope exceeds any reasonable audit. And at least getting lucky enough to spot malfeasance is getting less and less likely as performance and noise grows
489.
by mlyle 1y ago
Malware used to be pretty obvious for performance penalties. But we are getting so much faster, and networks are doing so much weird inscrutable stuff now that it’s a lot harder at baseline. And, of course, the baddies are getting sneakier
490.
by mlyle 1y ago
> Power2gas+solar+wind is still cheaper than nuclear power even though it's quite expensive. The costing mistake people always make is assuming p2g infrastructure can be operated at high duty cycle with an all renewable grid. If yo
491.
by mlyle 1y ago
If I wasn’t clear: 3 percent of gdp is the ballpark perpetual capital cost with present technology and a 20 year storage system life. Just capital costs and just storage. Versus all of energy being roughly 5pc of global GDP now. That is as
492.
by mlyle 1y ago
You’re again not considering electrification of current loads that burn fossil fuels. Unfortunately, a lot of these loads are closer to 24/7 and will require more storage. The IEA net zero scenario assumes 100TWh of storage and may no
493.
by mlyle 1y ago
US electric demand is 4 trillion kWh per year. Moving to EVs alone will be about 1 trillion kWh more. And that is leaving out transport, building heat, and industrial use. I suspect you are quoting an EV-only number. Alternatively, you mi
494.
by mlyle 1y ago
I don’t think we can scale up storage enough at any reasonable cost.
495.
by mlyle 1y ago
> and that condensation means it doesn't get any extra novel benefit from expensive-but-consistent nuclear over cheap-but-predictably-intermittent renewables This assumes you can do just the condensation during the day— E.g. you are
496.
by mlyle 1y ago
They are related in that we use different petroleum products for different purposes and today extracting petroleum means burning most of it.
497.
by mlyle 1y ago
We need a lot more. Right now only about 25 to 33 pc of our energy consumption is electric. Some of the rest will get significant efficiency benefit like you mention — cars, building heating, etc. Others, much less so— high temperature i
498.
by mlyle 1y ago
Reducing carbon emissions means electrifying a lot of things that were not electric before. We are going to need a lot more base generation than we have now. Large grids, overbuilding renewables, diversity of renewables, short and medium t
499.
by mlyle 1y ago
There are perfectly rational things that qualify as higher powers even if one doesn’t have religious belief. Those vast physical laws, the trajectory of the universe, the grand story of humanity, our quests for understanding. Rejecting rel
500.
by mlyle 1y ago
Metallic mercury doesn't really exist as something one could ingest unless you break a thermometer or something. People get mercury poisoning, but they get it from inhaling fumes (not too much like the plutonium risk) or from ingest
501.
by mlyle 1y ago
Again, I think ingesting mercury salts is worse than the long-lived isotopes of plutonium. I'd rather avoid eating heavy metals in general, though.
502.
by mlyle 1y ago
> Elemental mercury is not absorbed at all. You’re probably thinking of methyl mercury and various mercury salts (which, by the way, are not very common). Basically any mercury that I'm going to ingest accidentally is likely to be
503.
by mlyle 1y ago
We know: * Plutonium is not well absorbed by ingestion compared to other heavy metals and know ballpark ingestion toxicities * We also know that pretty much all the plutonium except the long-lived isotopes are gone on a timescale of tens of
504.
by mlyle 1y ago
Yah-- nuclear isn't going to win on its own, but no one technology is going to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess. We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big so
505.
by mlyle 1y ago
Eh, I don't think I agree. Let's talk about the long-lived isotopes: Pu-239 and Pu-242. Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier
506.
by mlyle 1y ago
The trick depends upon different implementations doing different things. Not likely for Word (though I suppose it is -possible- across different versions or different OSes).
507.
by mlyle 1y ago
I do feel it's a bit excessively "this is very deep." But I don't think he's equating himself to Escher; I think he's just saying that Escher's work is a good metaphor for the kinds of thoughts he's
508.
by mlyle 1y ago
Yes, but you also paid half the cost to acquire the car. You're just paying less in depreciation for the time you use it.
509.
by mlyle 1y ago
Saying you can't compare car prices to inflation because cars are in the CPI... We're really doing this? New cars make up about 4% of the CPI, and used cars around 3%, so together they’re only a small part of the inflation basket.
510.
by mlyle 1y ago
Externalities also exist-- funny how the dead seafloor and collapsing local fisheries don’t show up in the export statistics.

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