The age old battle of Sun versus Cloud. Sometimes the Cloud blocks the sun, and sometimes the Sun burns off the clouds. The age old battle between thin clients and local iron ebbs and flows as the earth rotates.
Now most people in the country have not seen smart grids so maybe I'm being to hard on you. Or maybe I explained it poorly in my first post.
. Wind and Solar need buffering. That's what I said in the parent post. How much? well less that you probably think. There's two aspects of it. the first is predictable variation. July will suck for wind but be great for solar. The other is daily variation with clouds. Large grids pretty much buffer local variations out. See the article I linked to. But instant variation? well we actually have that right now and it's an issue for existing power supply now. But smart meters address this quite nicely. They mean you need LESS spooled up backup power not more as you think. Your water heater can pause for a while and pocket a rebate to boot. It's all fast auctions that you never see. Maybe you have some thermal storage units-- well charge them up when power is cheap at auction. The result is load shifting that buys time for alternative sources to spool up if there's a concerted change in demand or concerted loss in production. But it also means they may not have to spool up at all if the fluctuation is transient.
Smart grids are coming on line in selected communities. Often ones with a lot of renewables by the way such as in New Mexico. It is still a pilot effort. But it will spread.
I was just thinking what a shame it is that the Americas have a long north-south aspect ratio. If we could just rotate the planet axis so that the north-south axis of the Americas aligned with the east-west equator we could have rolling generation across dozens of time zones. I suppose other countries might object to this pole shift, though they might make nice ski resorts for us.
More seriously, it seems like europe and aisa do have more time zones all together. Do they share solar power across their borders? Making every country solve this problem independently withing its own bordered seems like a poor approach.
Cost of silicon is now 40 cents per Watt peak. The cost of the energy to grow the silicon is included in that.
Thanks for that very informative number. Help me understand what that means as it strikes me as too low.
Suppose electricity from a wall plug is 10 cents/KWHr and I could replace that with rooftop at 40cents/Watt (peak) how long would it take me to ammortize that fixed cost?
40cents/W = $400/KW
so it seems like in 4000 hours I wold have paid for my panel. Now that's 4000 peak hours. Lets say we get about 4 peak hours per day. That would be then 1000 days or a little under 3 years to pay for it. And that ignores all the energy I would get outside those 4 hours, which presumably is probably about an equivalent amount all total.
This seems to be way faster payback than I would expect it to be.
Perhaps however some of my figures are wrong. Obviously I'm assuming I can sell back my power because I probably can't actually use it during the day. But to a certain extent power follws people around. If I'm not home, I'm at work using power. So I'm guessing power demand will be available to sell into.
NREL forecasts that if we build a modern grid and implement smart metering then we can potentially beat the problems of regional and daily variability in Solar and wind. But short of that these will cap the amount of this that can be deployed in the intial stages.
If you don't do that then you can run into a problem where you need to have energy sources spooled up but not producing to cover short falls, expected and unplanned.
Thus what we need is a breadbasket of many different renewable energies including geothermal, ocean, hydro. We may need things like the thermal-solar plants not just for their own power production but as batteries to store energy from PV solar and wind.
If we just keep pushing the thread on the cheapest possible renewables (PV solar and wind) we will be building a fragile system.
Germany discovered that it's tax incentive system didn't adequately take those effects into account. As a result it's actually shifting from nuke and natural gas to coal in a race to the bottom to have the cheapest form of neccessary backup power. It appears that they may stall out on further deployment until they can remedy the right balance.
the US has the advantage of a much larger mass and many time zones (not to mention more sun-- germany is compared to alaska). Thus we can buffer across this range if we build the grids. And smart metering can be more effective if we can use it across many regions as well. Smart metering offfers an approach to buying time and smoothing surge demands to allow other systems to spool up.
So the risk we face with something like a carbon tax or other flat incentives for solar and wind is that there's no inherent balancing of the funding across the breadbasket of sources, many of which might not be competitive in terms of KW/hr.
When you consider that each has about the same environmental impact, one is not really cheaper than the other. You're just playing a game of whack-a-mole with the pollution.
With coal, you're polluting at the generation site.
And how! like the whole landscape is removed. and also when you burn it. Even if you manage to scub some of it you still got a lot of heavy metals to deal with. And then of course there's the CO2 released. Don't forget shipping it takes fuel as well.
With solar, you're polluting at the manufacturing site. But, make no mistake, growing silicon consumes a ton of energy, a ton of water,
What's a ton of energy? Could we perhaps get this energy from say, the sun? And the water, it's still water when you got done right? didn't do the old E=MC^2 vanishing act. You just borrowed it like rented beer. So yeah maybe this month you could not water your crops. That is an impact.
I don't doubt there's a toxic load from solar cells. I'd believe much of it is hidden unaccountable in China. But I'm not persuaded by your grab-ass cost benefit analysis. I'm also inclined to believe solar cell manufacture can over time become cleaner but how do we make coal much cleaner.
My son's language arts teacher wanted the kids to draw a map of the town the story occurs in. They were allowed to also build it in minecraft. I thought that was a great way to build engagement for the kids between doing something that love as a way to visualize a story that when taught in english class isn't terribly fun.
I also had great success in introducing my kids to python using the Adventures in Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi. It's a really fun introduction. They had it so when steve walked near certain flowers it would hurl him across the land. It's too bad the API for it doesn't let you do everything you might want to do. But it's a cool way to get kids really interested quickly in the raspberry pi and python. Perhaps most significantly to get them to learn to read documentations and APIs. That is to say, learning to teach yourself what you need to know to reach an objective.
I also set up a server for them but felt that was a bust. They just used it to play but never got into the whole maintaining a Linux serve thing.
So minecraft is great for sugar coating a lot of things and turning it into play while doing real learning skills.
At the moment the apple watch is a cool toy but in the future it will be more. For now if I wanted to be more info stimulation I'd certainly strap on this Digital Ben Wa Ball. Each ping, boop, or glance triggering a dopamine release.
But in the future some time there's going to be a tonne of uses for this. If my house becomes an internet of things then I don't want to fish in my pocket for my phone or talk out loud like a street corner preacher to my google glass. I want a device that instantly accessible and no bigger than it needs to be. IoT devices that need frequent adjustment aren't going to need much of an interface (heat up/down Lights on/dim/off, garage door open). But to be useful high access is needed. Sometimes voice willl be the right mode but not all the time so you need something you can bring with in ear shot, not a stationary Amazon echo. When I'm walking to my garage I want to say "SIri, open the garage door". Or as I'm driving around the corner "Siri, did the garage door successfully close? is any appliance left on".
In five or so years ubiquitous medical monitoring data will start to become useful to understand what normal metabolic and heart activity is, and to detect long term trends. Right now were just getting started on the data collection part. We've never had a way to do this at population sclaes before, so it's terra incognita.
As more and more things become digitally secured, (doors, payments, cars, elevators) and we even start to lose human interfaces like waiters, newpaper stands, baristras having a fast access to our keys and authorizations will matter more. And a device that can have some biometric locking to the owner is going to become an increasingly useful (finger print scanner, voice print, heart beat, or quick doodle on the screen).
You are going to need one of these eventually. At the moment they are just a fashion statement and an amusing digeratti toy.
If you are old enough you will remember that home computers were for hobbiests when they started. They were not useful.
If VR can cure anything as ingrained as Sexsim then why settle for that. We need mandatory worldwide mind programming to instill world peace. Facebook can do this for us using a combination of their Oculus and their walled internet garden of eden, while turning a profit on subliminal advertisements.
From Wikipedia: In 1994, engineers at Apple Computer code-named the mid-level Power Macintosh 7100 "Carl Sagan" after the popular astronomer in the hope that Apple would make "billions and billions" with the sale of the computer. Apple used the name only internally, but Sagan was concerned that it would become a product endorsement and sent Apple a cease-and-desist letter. Apple complied, but its engineers retaliated by changing the internal codename to "BHA" for "Butt-Head Astronomer". Sagan then sued Apple for libel in federal court. In November 1995, Apple and Sagan reached an out-of-court settlement and Apple's office of trademarks and patents released a conciliatory statement that "Apple has always had great respect for Dr. Sagan. It was never Apple's intention to cause Dr. Sagan or his family any embarrassment or concern". Apple's third and final code name for the project was "LaW", short for "Lawyers are Wimps".
I think they should call these blades Litigation Exit Sabers or LitESabers for short.
When Astronomer Carl Sagan objected to Apple using "sagan" as their internal code name for one of their projects, they changed the code name to Butthole Astronmer. Perhaps they should change the name of the catblades to C&D sabers. I wonder if Apple would lend them the name Sosumi.
this is just some companies propoganda. It's duck soup to recover DNA from any skins sluffing. You don't need any special product. Total astroturf to hitch their wagon to the CIA and sucker slashdot to put it on the front page.
I'll feel safer when they combine this with AI to create a pre-crime system then deploy Robocops to snuff it out pre-emptively using an automated form of Judge Dredd instant justice decision making.
I'm always amazed how it takes so many engineers. What the heck do they all do? How does one organize this many contributions? Isn't this sort of they highly automated with largely repetitive subunits.
I'm just waiting for the day when the Flash or chrome auto-install-updates feature gets redirected to a malicious server and 90% of the world gets rooted.
I love this flipping of the equation! I can't imagine it's a lot of money but I like it putting the control to default off but letting me decide if I want to opt in. then compensating me. the feeling would be more important than the cash. and if it works we could have a world where it's default-off without an arms race in ad-blocking software. Ad blocking software is broke as a model because the ad blockers themselves track me, and it makes browsing unstable when it doesn't work right. Worse ad blocking is all or nothing. Sure you can limit by web site but you can't limit it by avertiser type. I'm happy to have some advertisers I'm interested in funnel interesting ads regardless of what site I visit.
No that is price fixing. It doesn't matter if you use an agent or not. The mechainsm of collusion isn't important it's the outcome of a price not set by competition in a field of competitors. What would not be price fixing would be for uber to auction the job and take the low bidder. THey could do that automatically too.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought P2P meant something else.
The age old battle of Sun versus Cloud. Sometimes the Cloud blocks the sun, and sometimes the Sun burns off the clouds. The age old battle between thin clients and local iron ebbs and flows as the earth rotates.
Are not clouds powered by vapor? Embrace the vaporware.
Now most people in the country have not seen smart grids so maybe I'm being to hard on you. Or maybe I explained it poorly in my first post.
. Wind and Solar need buffering. That's what I said in the parent post. How much? well less that you probably think. There's two aspects of it. the first is predictable variation. July will suck for wind but be great for solar. The other is daily variation with clouds. Large grids pretty much buffer local variations out. See the article I linked to. But instant variation? well we actually have that right now and it's an issue for existing power supply now. But smart meters address this quite nicely. They mean you need LESS spooled up backup power not more as you think. Your water heater can pause for a while and pocket a rebate to boot. It's all fast auctions that you never see. Maybe you have some thermal storage units-- well charge them up when power is cheap at auction. The result is load shifting that buys time for alternative sources to spool up if there's a concerted change in demand or concerted loss in production. But it also means they may not have to spool up at all if the fluctuation is transient.
Smart grids are coming on line in selected communities. Often ones with a lot of renewables by the way such as in New Mexico. It is still a pilot effort. But it will spread.
I was just thinking what a shame it is that the Americas have a long north-south aspect ratio. If we could just rotate the planet axis so that the north-south axis of the Americas aligned with the east-west equator we could have rolling generation across dozens of time zones. I suppose other countries might object to this pole shift, though they might make nice ski resorts for us.
More seriously, it seems like europe and aisa do have more time zones all together. Do they share solar power across their borders? Making every country solve this problem independently withing its own bordered seems like a poor approach.
Cost of silicon is now 40 cents per Watt peak. The cost of the energy to grow the silicon is included in that.
Thanks for that very informative number. Help me understand what that means as it strikes me as too low.
Suppose electricity from a wall plug is 10 cents/KWHr and I could replace that with rooftop at 40cents/Watt (peak) how long would it take me to ammortize that fixed cost?
40cents/W = $400/KW
so it seems like in 4000 hours I wold have paid for my panel. Now that's 4000 peak hours. Lets say we get about 4 peak hours per day. That would be then 1000 days or a little under 3 years to pay for it. And that ignores all the energy I would get outside those 4 hours, which presumably is probably about an equivalent amount all total.
This seems to be way faster payback than I would expect it to be.
Perhaps however some of my figures are wrong. Obviously I'm assuming I can sell back my power because I probably can't actually use it during the day. But to a certain extent power follws people around. If I'm not home, I'm at work using power. So I'm guessing power demand will be available to sell into.
NREL forecasts that if we build a modern grid and implement smart metering then we can potentially beat the problems of regional and daily variability in Solar and wind. But short of that these will cap the amount of this that can be deployed in the intial stages.
If you don't do that then you can run into a problem where you need to have energy sources spooled up but not producing to cover short falls, expected and unplanned.
Thus what we need is a breadbasket of many different renewable energies including geothermal, ocean, hydro. We may need things like the thermal-solar plants not just for their own power production but as batteries to store energy from PV solar and wind.
If we just keep pushing the thread on the cheapest possible renewables (PV solar and wind) we will be building a fragile system.
Germany discovered that it's tax incentive system didn't adequately take those effects into account. As a result it's actually shifting from nuke and natural gas to coal in a race to the bottom to have the cheapest form of neccessary backup power. It appears that they may stall out on further deployment until they can remedy the right balance.
the US has the advantage of a much larger mass and many time zones (not to mention more sun-- germany is compared to alaska). Thus we can buffer across this range if we build the grids. And smart metering can be more effective if we can use it across many regions as well. Smart metering offfers an approach to buying time and smoothing surge demands to allow other systems to spool up.
So the risk we face with something like a carbon tax or other flat incentives for solar and wind is that there's no inherent balancing of the funding across the breadbasket of sources, many of which might not be competitive in terms of KW/hr.
When you consider that each has about the same environmental impact, one is not really cheaper than the other. You're just playing a game of whack-a-mole with the pollution.
With coal, you're polluting at the generation site.
And how! like the whole landscape is removed. and also when you burn it. Even if you manage to scub some of it you still got a lot of heavy metals to deal with. And then of course there's the CO2 released. Don't forget shipping it takes fuel as well.
With solar, you're polluting at the manufacturing site. But, make no mistake, growing silicon consumes a ton of energy, a ton of water,
What's a ton of energy? Could we perhaps get this energy from say, the sun? And the water, it's still water when you got done right? didn't do the old E=MC^2 vanishing act. You just borrowed it like rented beer. So yeah maybe this month you could not water your crops. That is an impact.
I don't doubt there's a toxic load from solar cells. I'd believe much of it is hidden unaccountable in China. But I'm not persuaded by your grab-ass cost benefit analysis. I'm also inclined to believe solar cell manufacture can over time become cleaner but how do we make coal much cleaner.
No I just made that up. But San Francisco voters did try to name a sewage treatment plant after GWB.
What gene would you name after trump?
Automobiles stay in the collective fleet for 15 to 20 years. You are not phasing out fossil fuels till the current cars run on something else.
I wanted my Iphone laid to rest as I knew it in life.
It's just a viral media build up for the next Sharkanado.
My son's language arts teacher wanted the kids to draw a map of the town the story occurs in. They were allowed to also build it in minecraft. I thought that was a great way to build engagement for the kids between doing something that love as a way to visualize a story that when taught in english class isn't terribly fun.
I also had great success in introducing my kids to python using the Adventures in Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi. It's a really fun introduction. They had it so when steve walked near certain flowers it would hurl him across the land. It's too bad the API for it doesn't let you do everything you might want to do. But it's a cool way to get kids really interested quickly in the raspberry pi and python. Perhaps most significantly to get them to learn to read documentations and APIs. That is to say, learning to teach yourself what you need to know to reach an objective.
I also set up a server for them but felt that was a bust. They just used it to play but never got into the whole maintaining a Linux serve thing.
So minecraft is great for sugar coating a lot of things and turning it into play while doing real learning skills.
At the moment the apple watch is a cool toy but in the future it will be more. For now if I wanted to be more info stimulation I'd certainly strap on this Digital Ben Wa Ball. Each ping, boop, or glance triggering a dopamine release.
But in the future some time there's going to be a tonne of uses for this. If my house becomes an internet of things then I don't want to fish in my pocket for my phone or talk out loud like a street corner preacher to my google glass. I want a device that instantly accessible and no bigger than it needs to be. IoT devices that need frequent adjustment aren't going to need much of an interface (heat up/down Lights on/dim/off, garage door open). But to be useful high access is needed. Sometimes voice willl be the right mode but not all the time so you need something you can bring with in ear shot, not a stationary Amazon echo. When I'm walking to my garage I want to say "SIri, open the garage door". Or as I'm driving around the corner "Siri, did the garage door successfully close? is any appliance left on".
In five or so years ubiquitous medical monitoring data will start to become useful to understand what normal metabolic and heart activity is, and to detect long term trends. Right now were just getting started on the data collection part. We've never had a way to do this at population sclaes before, so it's terra incognita.
As more and more things become digitally secured, (doors, payments, cars, elevators) and we even start to lose human interfaces like waiters, newpaper stands, baristras having a fast access to our keys and authorizations will matter more. And a device that can have some biometric locking to the owner is going to become an increasingly useful (finger print scanner, voice print, heart beat, or quick doodle on the screen).
You are going to need one of these eventually. At the moment they are just a fashion statement and an amusing digeratti toy.
If you are old enough you will remember that home computers were for hobbiests when they started. They were not useful.
If VR can cure anything as ingrained as Sexsim then why settle for that. We need mandatory worldwide mind programming to instill world peace. Facebook can do this for us using a combination of their Oculus and their walled internet garden of eden, while turning a profit on subliminal advertisements.
it is an invention
From Wikipedia: In 1994, engineers at Apple Computer code-named the mid-level Power Macintosh 7100 "Carl Sagan" after the popular astronomer in the hope that Apple would make "billions and billions" with the sale of the computer. Apple used the name only internally, but Sagan was concerned that it would become a product endorsement and sent Apple a cease-and-desist letter. Apple complied, but its engineers retaliated by changing the internal codename to "BHA" for "Butt-Head Astronomer". Sagan then sued Apple for libel in federal court. In November 1995, Apple and Sagan reached an out-of-court settlement and Apple's office of trademarks and patents released a conciliatory statement that "Apple has always had great respect for Dr. Sagan. It was never Apple's intention to cause Dr. Sagan or his family any embarrassment or concern". Apple's third and final code name for the project was "LaW", short for "Lawyers are Wimps".
I think they should call these blades Litigation Exit Sabers or LitESabers for short.
When Astronomer Carl Sagan objected to Apple using "sagan" as their internal code name for one of their projects, they changed the code name to Butthole Astronmer. Perhaps they should change the name of the catblades to C&D sabers. I wonder if Apple would lend them the name Sosumi.
You must use this fear. It is your strength. together we will rule the galaxy.
this is just some companies propoganda. It's duck soup to recover DNA from any skins sluffing. You don't need any special product. Total astroturf to hitch their wagon to the CIA and sucker slashdot to put it on the front page.
I'll feel safer when they combine this with AI to create a pre-crime system then deploy Robocops to snuff it out pre-emptively using an automated form of Judge Dredd instant justice decision making.
I'm always amazed how it takes so many engineers. What the heck do they all do? How does one organize this many contributions? Isn't this sort of they highly automated with largely repetitive subunits.
I'm just waiting for the day when the Flash or chrome auto-install-updates feature gets redirected to a malicious server and 90% of the world gets rooted.
I love this flipping of the equation! I can't imagine it's a lot of money but I like it putting the control to default off but letting me decide if I want to opt in. then compensating me. the feeling would be more important than the cash. and if it works we could have a world where it's default-off without an arms race in ad-blocking software. Ad blocking software is broke as a model because the ad blockers themselves track me, and it makes browsing unstable when it doesn't work right. Worse ad blocking is all or nothing. Sure you can limit by web site but you can't limit it by avertiser type. I'm happy to have some advertisers I'm interested in funnel interesting ads regardless of what site I visit.
No that is price fixing. It doesn't matter if you use an agent or not. The mechainsm of collusion isn't important it's the outcome of a price not set by competition in a field of competitors. What would not be price fixing would be for uber to auction the job and take the low bidder. THey could do that automatically too.