Batteries, hydro, and natural gas (peaker plants) all help directly. Wind isn't really "dispatchable" in the sense that the grid operator can't ask for more wind.
I don't believe nuclear power ramps up very easily, and in any case it has to run as much as possible to pay for high capital costs. Power that's going to be on standby much of the time needs to be cheap to build.
Anything that usually generates power in the evening will help some, though.
Also, the grid operator being able to schedule demand helps too. Things like water heaters and air conditioning can be run in advance and turned off at peak times.
The point is that ramping up isn't really a thing because it will have already been producing at 100%. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful to address this, because it's still a generation method that generates power during the hours that solar doesn't. You would also then have even more generation during daylight hours, which isn't as valuable, but it still has economic value and can be sold for some smaller but still non-zero price per kWh.
In California the price actually is hitting zero sometimes during the day [1], which means that at that time, it's not economically valuable at all - nobody wants it. Rather, cutting back is valuable. Other kinds of electricity generation are easier to shut down, though, so they go first. This is graphed as "curtailment" [2].
Surplus electricity could hypothetically be put to use, but something would need to built to take advantage. (Perhaps batteries or some other load.)
> In California the price actually is hitting zero sometimes during the day
Sure, sure, but these are unusual times and not the common case. And if it was the common case that the price was zero during most daylight hours, it would be solar that goes bankrupt, since that's the only time it's generating. The other generation methods would still have the revenue from generating at night, which was the bulk of their revenue to begin with because of the expected price differential.
> Surplus electricity could hypothetically be put to use, but something would need to built to take advantage. (Perhaps batteries or some other load.)
Charging electric vehicles is an obvious one which will increase with their adoption. It's also likely that the grid will need some kind of storage because even if you have baseload plants to carry most of the nighttime load, the peak load of the day is just after sunset, and picking that up is going to require some kind of storage or peaker plants but the existing peaker plants are fossil fuels.
What baseload plants give you is to only need enough storage to make up the difference between what the baseload plants generate and that peak, and only for that couple of hours instead of the entire night.
Changing evs will become more popular, but is in time conflict with demand. The discharge time is at night, and people don't want to start the day on low, even if you do all your charging at worksites, which is the other challenge.
Solar panel recycling is a hot topic, that already works for some parts and even if we don't progress at all it will not cost hundreds of billions per country like it does now for nuclear already. Per country is vague but mostly large countries have nuclear now anyway and dozens if not hundreds of reactors. Yeah, "same".
Comparison should be made per kw generated. How much money for reprocessing 1kg of nuclear that produced x amount of energy vs how much money for solar panels that should be recycled and produced the same x amount.
There are other options too like building breeding reactors to reduce the costs over time but that's another topic
Let's take Germany as an example. The German nuclear plant operators made a deal with the state in 2017 for it to take responsibility of the waste. They paid 23 billion to wash their hands of their own product, and the estimate is that it will cost over 100 billion. But again, it's the tax payers' problem now. [1]
Let's take Britain as an example. It has a nuclear waste storage facility in Sellafield that costs billions every year to run and the price for the final solution is anyone's guess, again we are talking about hundreds of billions - 263 billion pounds is the latest estimate to be exact. [2]
Let's take Finland as an example, which is a smaller country. It plans to dispose of the waste in a specially built nuclear facility that cost billions. They will then depose 300 caskets there made of thousands of tons of iron and copper, again costing billions.[3]
Now whatever the cost of solar panel disposal will be, I am pretty sure the number will not be 100 billion and it will not be 23 billion either. And it will not be a really big issue what to do with it, and the vast majority of it will likely be recycled.
Dynamic pricing! Get a little smartness in front of large consumption appliances and charge much less when there's too much power. The answer will create itself without any need for breakthrough technologies. (I hope)
It seemed like we were inching towards this with smarthome tech, but now we’re losing ground. Nest was pretty revolutionary at the time with their “learning” thermostat, but aiui most smart thermostats don’t bother with real smartness.
Google/nest just spun off their energy team, Ecobee was bought out by a home energy company, so hopefully we’re seeing a new generation of smart energy companies coming.
Exactly, or at least have more tiers of pricing based on the time of day. I visited another state and was pleasantly surprised to see four time windows that shift based on season. In Southern California, there are only 2, and I doubt most customers have even been transitioned to a TOU plan. So dumb.
Can't rely on hydro power in California. In 2021, for example, a serious drought caused water levels to drop so low behind reservoirs they could no longer be used for pumped storage. Batteries are the best solution, quick to charge, high efficiency and can be brought online instantly.
I think he's pretty well analyzed it. Personally, I've had to drive a car full of toddlers with no heat in winter because my touch screen gave out and it was unsafe both to pull over and to try and troubleshoot while driving. This happened in a 2023 model year high end minivan. My 2009 mazda POS with physical knobs has never had a single problem in over an order of magnitude more time.
There is a scifi novel from the 80s or 90s employing a ~somewhat~ similar plot device for a human, although the name now escapes me. Ring a bell with anyone?
Women do not need a bachelor’s degree to learn how to not get pregnant.
The whole society needs to accept that women should have rights to birth control, and should have control of when and who they have sex with. And, of course, educated women become able to sell services/goods that allow them to be financially independent, so as to not be coercible.
This happens to correlate with a society where women are more educated, but due to differences in physical power, “educated” men have to be part of the equation.
I do not see a reason to rank the causal factors, but I can point to a few societies where the women and men are “educated”, but the women lack the rights they have elsewhere (either legally or practically).
Probably not, but there are countries where women are allowed an education and still do not have the rights they should have. Which is alluded to by the fact that they are “allowed” an education in the first place.
Ex-husband narrowly survives a sudden and serious GI illness after weeks of intensive care. A year later, his parents and another couple die or nearly die after dinner with his wife, becoming suddenly and violently ill while she and her children are unharmed.
I definitely think it is curious, and it obviously deserves to be thoroughly investigated (and by all accounts it is), but I just don't understand this need to immediately jump to conclusions in cases like this. The top comments on this article on the WaPo site are basically "It's not rocket science to know she did it."
Why is it so hard to just wait for more information? Yes, it definitely looks very suspicious, but there was no talk of motive in the article, and if someone wanted to murder people, inviting them all over for dinner and then poisoning everyone except you and your family seems like the dumbest way to do it (and I'm not saying that's exculpatory - plenty of murderers are very dumb).
I just wish more of us would say "We just don't know yet, and that's fine. Just give it a teeny bit of time to know more."
It's fine for people to suspect things before they're prove. She isn't being denied a trial. In fact, suspecting something before it's proven is a prerequisite for that person being brought to trial.
I make my own mostly because I enjoy making my own food. But it's also a lot cheaper and a bit easier on the environment. A 32 oz glass jar of White Mountain yogurt is almost $10 whereas a gallon of Whole Foods milk is $7.00. So $7 vs $40, and four fewer glass jars each batch.
Since I start by cloning White Mountain, my yogurt is basically identical and the taste is the same.
