Batteries and electricity storage follow learning curves too
One of the downsides of renewable sources is their intermittent supply cycle. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Technologies like batteries that store electric power are key to balance the changing supply from renewables with the inflexible demand for electricity.
Fortunately electricity storage technologies are also among the few technologies that are following steeply declining learning curves.
We already have cheap "batteries" in our homes. Run the electric water heater when the power is cheap. Water in the tank stays hot for a couple days.
The only piece missing here is an internet-connected thermostat for the tank that inquires about the spot price for electricity and turns on when it's cheap.
You're exaggerating a bit. Water heater will stay hot for a day or so, but will rapidly cool when you start using it and cold water flows in. House will be uncomfortably cold after a few hours in the wintertime if the heat is not running, and it's not really practical to overheat it when electric rates are low/free because you can only go maybe 10 degrees before it's really too warm for comfort. You'd need a heat tank of some sort which complicates the system and as a practical matter homes don't have that and might not have space for.
Finally aside from all that I heat my water and my home with natural gas.
I've had power outages for a week more than once, and can vouch for it staying warm enough for a comfortable shower for a couple days.
For HVAC, you can heat/cool it at a minimum to the edge of the comfort range, which will make a big difference. You can take it much further by heating/cooling some thermal mass, and drawing on that mass when the electricity is cheaper.
That mass can simply be a pile of stones in a box with some ductwork added. It's hard to find a cheaper "battery" technology than a box of rocks.
Frankly, I think people are way too focused on batteries and are overlooking the rather obvious.
Water has really good thermal mass already. I think that adding huge water tanks in basements would be pretty beneficial: if the water in those tanks is operated in closed cycle, minerals from water wouldn't accumulate, and if we used rust proof materials, they tanks could last for the lifetime of the house. Then, we could use them to store heat in winter and cold in summer, when electricity is cheap.
There were concept houses in Germany, where they had a water tank of 6 cubic meters which was heated through the summer via thermal solar collectors and stored enough energy for the house heating in the winter (and even in the winter the collectors would collect heat on sunny days).
>a pile of stones in a box with some ductwork added
man, the beauty in our lives disappears. Imagine that heated by electricity (especially if during cheap period) instead of coal/wood, and how great it is to sleep on or right next to such a stove (my grandmother house had one :):
I don't know about you, but I live in a log cabin in the back woods of Canada and have only wood stoves lined with bricks to keep me warm in winter (and we have a real Winter here). The cook stove has a cistern (water tank) for greater thermal mass and the stoves have baffles for high efficiency. The fuel grows all around me do it's carbon neutral (except for the chainsaw gas, but that's a luxury I will not forego).
This is not a used-to-was thing. It's the norm outside of towns in my county.
A lot of these issues "house will be uncomfortable cold" are because the way houses have been built previously (and still are in a lot of places) is horribly inefficient. In my country (it's -5c outside now, so not exactly warm) the building standards dictate new houses must consume no more than 15W/m2/year of heat energy for heating.
To convert that to US units, that means a 3000sqft house somewhere were electricity is $0.15c/kWh would cost $600/year to heat from electric baseboard heaters. If you have a heat pump you could bring that down to $200/year - and that's before you even consider solar.
I live in a 5 year old apartment, and haven't even turned on the heating this season, but it's still a comfortable 20c/68F inside.
It's technically possible to store heat for several months, e.g. in a large water tank, and use that heat over the winter. Only really feasible for very thermally efficient houses, but it can be done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...
The obvious solution is not to let cold water flow into the water heater unless you have the electricity to heat it - and if needed make it a bit larger so there is more buffering capacity.
No need for internet connected anything. But there is a need for a "smart grid".
We, in France, have a very primitive system based peak / off-peak hours used in many houses, and I expect other countries to have the same kind of system since it is so simple.
Basically, you have an extra wire coming out of the meter. If there is voltage, it is peak hours, if there is no voltage, if is off-peak. To that wire, you connect a relay which sits in the breaker panel. That relay can turn a circuit on or off, often the water heater, so that it only runs off-peak. You can force it on if you know you are going to use more hot water than usual.
Such a simple thing, but updated in real time can already go a long way. In a more advanced system, the meter could tell you the price of electricity via PLC and you could have a relay in your breaker box that turns on a circuit depending on price.
Even smarter devices could receive the signal from the meter directly and do more things, for example, many appliances have a "delayed start" function. A "start when electricity is cheap" function would be a great addition.
The problem is that would require standardization. A standard protocol shared by utilities and electric device manufacturers. As for communication, PLC sounds ideal, it doesn't have to be fast, and it could also be the same signal used by the utility to remotely check the meter for billing (something that is being deployed in France, BTW).
I'm in favor of the Black Mirror approach for politicians; Give the people full transparency into politicians' activities. This shouldn't be so controversial, given that they work for us, but of course, that is when you would see some real concern for privacy!
Sure, if you compare it to scenarios that aren't remotely the same. I think we were supposed to take it as an obvious given that this applies to scenarios where the side giving away the power is watching the side that was given the power.
Also worth noting is the October Surprise, where Reagan foiled negotiations with Iran to bring US hostages back, in order to help his election chances.
Fully agree. The bookstore/library browsing experience is intimately tied to adjacency/serendipity. I love browsing up and down the stacks and looking for whatever catches my eye. Typical genre or sorting lists don't even come close to the richness and density of the stack experience.
I absolutely agree. It does constantly get used around here just to silence the narrative of something the downvoter doesn't like. I'd posture it mostly gets used for that, and a small fraction of the time is it used correctly or does it serve a "good faith" action.
Great attention grabbing headline, but it ignores the typical user scenarios where PDFs are created. So how is your typical Office worker who is probably using Word going to create this awesome web page? It's simply not realistic to expect that office workers are going to use HTML, and it's been tried for years and years. Nielsen may as well go after Powerpoint next. Same criticisms and human limitations apply. Yes, better formats exist in the ideal, but ignoring the user's real context and limitations goes against the principles of User Centered Design.
One of my covid projects is improving my nearsightedness, I'm 20/200+. I've been spending 20 minutes a day doing techniques called Eqyptian Black Dot and Egyptian Letter Gazing plus other techniques I got from a book called The Art of Cosmic Vision by Mantak Chia, a well known Taiji master. I've been doing it now for 7 weeks and have noticed significant improvement in my vision. I'm not going to be driving without glasses any time soon, however, I am increasingly able to function without glasses, which was my main goal.
Your point about the outdoors is also made in the book. We are spending our time in near focus on screens and not using our far vision, as in nature. I now make sure to take time during the day to get outside and do distance gazing and expose my eyes to sunlight.
I printed out an eye chart and have consistent lighting in a room where I use it. My eyes have not improved in the past 5 years of doing exercises on and off.
I recommend printing an eye chart and testing yourself w/ the same lighting and distance from the chart.
Also, keep me updated please (if you remember to, post here or something), genuinely interested.
I am tempted to buy a huge screen and place it across the room from me to have the focus point further away.
I think part of the problem might be that it's focused on one place, rather than close focus. But I guess it's better to be focused further away.
I printed out an eye chart this week to do just that. I also purchased a device for testing and tracking my vision that I just started with: https://www.eyeque.com/visioncheck/
You can email me (davidwitt415 at gmail) if you want me to keep you updated on my progress.
I agree, and don't believe your explanation is all that different from mine. Market driven medicine implicitly favors people who for whatever reason find themselves in the position to pay for care, and slowly but surely culls those who aren't.
People with the power to regulate health care "markets", to shape the incentive structures and make them less overtly biased in favor of wealthy people, sometimes they do this and sometimes they don't. Currently, at least in the US, in the midst of this unfolding crisis, the power balance seems skewed toward the "let's take a violent trek toward 'herd immunity' as soon as possible" decision makers, many of whom are more or less blatantly eugenic.
Batteries and electricity storage follow learning curves too One of the downsides of renewable sources is their intermittent supply cycle. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Technologies like batteries that store electric power are key to balance the changing supply from renewables with the inflexible demand for electricity.
Fortunately electricity storage technologies are also among the few technologies that are following steeply declining learning curves.