szvsw

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181.
by szvsw 2y ago
Yep, those are just forms of batteries though so I think my point stands? There is lots of cool stuff you can do with PV+TES without even needing true thermal batteries, just using smart electric hot water heaters and dispatch, and even coo
182.
by szvsw 2y ago
Well, my original point at the top of this thread was specifically about how battery mfg/infra/costs/dispatch (especially at grid scale) and so on seem like the limiting factors/primary challenges still being worked on,
183.
by szvsw 2y ago
I guess be careful how you use prosumer in this kind of thread, since it often might refer to a producer-consumer (ie someone who can get paid $$ to export energy back into the grid, as opposed to just saving $$ from avoided grid import). I
184.
by szvsw 2y ago
Yep, that’s what I figured! And hence my original post at the top of this thread, suggesting that it’s easy to feel like we have sort of “solved” solar from a panel efficiency perspective and it’s everything else that we still need to imp
185.
by szvsw 2y ago
I guess I meant from a technical efficiency perspective, rather than the social infrastructure around it. It’s unclear to me (and frankly seems unlikely?) that few more percentage points will fix the very real structural issues you raised!
186.
by szvsw 2y ago
> the morality of memory allocation as it relates to market economics … that you could only produce if you are truly clueless I’m actually very curious to see that! I’m not sure what the angle espoused there is, but it seems fun at least
187.
by szvsw 2y ago
Great response, thanks for taking the time to write out the numbers! What do you think about the implications for transportation, maintenance and land use? I have zero idea what the balance of those costs would be for a grid-scale solar far
188.
by szvsw 2y ago
This still doesn’t address the duck curve aspect, or overnight usage. It is fundamentally impossible to use PV to directly power your wonderful super efficient heat pump to warm your home at night. You will still need batteries!
189.
by szvsw 2y ago
Isn’t GP effectively saying $/W? I assume that’s how most people evaluate price… “I want to install a system that will pay itself back in the smallest amount of time while staying below my max budget.”
190.
by szvsw 2y ago
Lots of discussion of this in other comments in this thread, but at least theoretically, for a system of the same size, a change from 20 to 25% efficiency would reduce: the number of frames to manufacture, the weight of the transported good
191.
by szvsw 2y ago
That’s in a residential/urban context. I would assume (but have no actual idea, just common sense) that weight matters at least somewhat significantly in an industrial/grid scale context, where shipping and labor are for MW scale
192.
by szvsw 2y ago
Let’s assume a system outputs 2 MWh annually at 24%. Let’s bump up to 25.5% efficiency, and we get 2.125 MWh. Let’s assume a 30 year lifespan. This gives us an extra 3.75 MWh total over the lifetime. Let’s round down to 3 MWh to very conser
193.
by szvsw 2y ago
To be fair, it didn’t start that way and there are decades of design, legislation and safety regulations around all this, along with infrastructure for licensing/certifying capabilities, tracking and policing capabilities and mistakes
194.
by szvsw 2y ago
Great responses, thank you! How plausible do you think it is that perovskite cells will see commercial adoption in the next 5 years? This [1] makes it seem like it is possible we will see the first roll out in 2025 but with significant unce
195.
by szvsw 2y ago
> “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.” It’s so easy to forget
196.
by szvsw 2y ago
It developed out of a dissertation at MIT (honestly a pretty damn impressive one IMO) and it seems like without some sort of significant support from universities, foundations or corporations, it would be pretty difficult to “monetize” - th
197.
by szvsw 2y ago
Duplicate post from 23 hours ago with 100+ points and 50+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40674835
198.
by szvsw 2y ago
Glad that the article discussed lots of the challenges/issues with carbon capture in re: accounting/offsets etc. I hadn’t heard of this idea yet. It’s quite interesting compared to other CCS tech (eg DAC or post combustion capture
199.
by szvsw 2y ago
Ha, interesting timing, last post 6Hr ago. Sounds like they are dogfooding it at least which is good. And I would agree with the assessment that 1.x is fairly feature complete, at least from my experience using it (scientific computing). An
200.
by szvsw 2y ago
I’ve been in love with Taichi for about a year now. Where’s the news source on development being stalled? It seemed like things were moving along at pace last summer and fall at least if I recall correctly.
201.
by szvsw 2y ago
I’m a huge Taichi stan. So much easier and more elegant than numba. The support for data classes and data_oriented classes is excellent. Being able to define your own memory layouts is extremely cool. Great documentation. Really really reco
202.
by szvsw 2y ago
The one area that I think Apple might be setting themself up well for is the longer term edge device AI race. It’s reasonable to think that AI will become more and more embedded in all aspects of computation and communication, and with tha
203.
by szvsw 2y ago
Another advantage is when you have very slow code, you can use cells as caches, essentially without having to worry about serialization to disk. This often makes it much easier to interactively explore/develop downstream methods withou
204.
by szvsw 2y ago
Sharing a drawing machine I designed and wrote about a few years ago but never published: an analog mechanism for producing digital conic projection perspectives inspired by Piero Della Francesca’s “Other Method,” which is essentially a 15t
205.
by szvsw 2y ago
Oh 100% - I am part-time employed by one such company and am currently pursuing a doctorate. I was just trying to point out that it’s always worth it IMO to be trying out all sorts of crazy stuff like this even if it doesn’t pan out as a de
206.
by szvsw 2y ago
Yeah scale is always the hard part; but it’s academia’s role largely to turn over stones and see what’s under them. It’s industry’s job to figure out which pathways are actually worth pursuing and which can be scalable/economically fea
207.
by szvsw 2y ago
> background car noise […] the sound of a background highway almost everywhere in the USA To each their own I guess. Grew up in LA and the persistent thrum of the faraway highway at all hours of the night is a beautiful sound to me (but
208.
by szvsw 2y ago
Isn’t working on these tools a form of working on math? Math is a language unto itself.
209.
by szvsw 2y ago
Chess and Go are some of the simplest board games there are. Board gamers would put them in the very low “weight” rankings from a rules complexity perspective (compared to ”modern” board games)! Mathematics are infinitely (ha) more complex.
210.
by szvsw 2y ago
Antora is one example: https://antoraenergy.com/ In addition to a few hundred mil in funding, they have support from NREL/DoE, eg https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2024/how-nrel-helps-st

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