probablypower

18 ms·

91.
by probablypower 6y ago
This comment doesn't seem grounded in reality. In Europe it is far more common to have 1.5-2 year masters degrees (half a year saved by overloading) followed by a 3-4 year PhD. It is almost a universal truth that a PhD shouldn't t
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by probablypower 6y ago
Grid operators have many ways to measure the severity of an outage. In Europe, this is commonly done using the Incident Classification Scale [0]. The term "giant" is not any official terminology, but that particular outage would b
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by probablypower 6y ago
It is pretty much right. Neither country took responsibility for the demand (X), and so the market wasn't aware of the demand, and therefore the generation provided by the market was lacking X. When there is more energy being taken out
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by probablypower 6y ago
Your post is mostly right. I haven't read the article itself (paywall) but I already knew about this particular issue through work. You've touched on a lot of the "pull" factors that cause the Baltic states to connect to
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by probablypower 6y ago
You will notice that this article is from an icelandic newspaper. The electricity in Iceland is almost exclusively 'sustainable' energy (hydro and geothermal) and the Icelandic power system is one of the least carbon intensive in
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by probablypower 7y ago
That sounds ideal, but it fails for a few reasons: 1. When upper middle class people go off grid, it drives up electricity prices for poor people (fewer people paying for the infrasturcture), making them poorer. Adelaide, Australia is a goo
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by probablypower 7y ago
The ownership of utilities and the cost of their infrastructure investments has nothing to do with the 'freeness' of electricity markets. The performance of utilities is more a function of regulatory power and willingness to regul
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by probablypower 7y ago
Nice project. Can't fault your intentions. The name seems odd to me however, as I read it from the perspective of electrical energy. Most countries already have extensive electrical infrastructure (i.e. collective energy) so the name e
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by probablypower 7y ago
You're right that a lot of people eat more than they should, and exercise less than they should. We aren't efficient in this regard. Yet when a human exercises, they breathe more, and produce more CO2. There is an internal carbon
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by probablypower 7y ago
Yes, fossil fuels are originally from organic life, which resulted directly or indirectly from photosynthesis. Plants do their best to suck up all the CO2 in the atmosphere. Yet CO2 is being added to the atmosphere faster than photosynthesi
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by probablypower 7y ago
That is an absurd argument. The modern food chain is not carbon neutral [0]. If I start running to work, I have to consume more food. If I have a vegan diet I am eating the direct result of photosynthesis. That is, we could imagine the embo
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by probablypower 7y ago
It is likely that you provide more context than necessary. For example, you could've asked: "My emails tend to be too long. Does anyone have tips on writing concise emails?" Obviously your post was not an email, so the additi
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by probablypower 7y ago
If I decide to learn an entirely new skill 'X', my steps are generally: 1. Imagine how I would do 'X' 2. If I hit any walls, I look up that specific step 3. Eventually I end up with a complete idea of how to do X, so tha
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by probablypower 7y ago
I saw "stoic" and "bayesian" in the first 5 minutes of browsing your page. That's enough for me to decide to spend some real time digging into it later. I'm looking forward to digging your brain!
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by probablypower 7y ago
This was really well written, but I couldn't help laughing at the comma splice errors in his own prose after calling out his students for it in the first paragraph. example: > Soon we hurdled through the turnstiles, joining the thro
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by probablypower 7y ago
This is an important point. Increasing renewable penetration into a power system leads to: -> reduced inertia -> increasing Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF) -> reduced time to react If you rely entirely on manual systems to reac
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by probablypower 7y ago
This is exactly what is done in practice. Critical systems (i.e. control room software and hardware) are air gapped and operate in a DMZ. The only real vector one has into such a system (assuming you can't physically access it) is by a
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by probablypower 7y ago
This is one of those rare posts on hacker news that I'm qualified to reply to (I normally lurk - had to make an account). I work as an expert in power system operations for a national grid. So with that disclaimer out of the way, I wan