I've been using Kagi search for a while now and frankly it's fantastic. Google looks like AOL to me now.
These guys are doing great work and this news product is exactly what I want... Once a day hit. What is happening in the world? As far as pmf goes they hit the mark for an old fart like me.
Usually the observation that “a widely used thing is objectively bad” is strong market signal for entrepreneurial opportunity in a big tam.
I for one would welcome a set of deeply integrated ui improvements in a Mac that included a better file manager, better window management, better desktop search, a contact manager just that worked, a messaging client that just worked, audio and camera controls that just worked, a calculator that didn’t suck, etc.
BI was founded by convicted fraudster Henry Blodget and owned by the lowest of the low EU publishing houses Axel Springer. I give this publication zero merit.
This is a good point. Why would someone even notice people burning to death in cars let alone keep track how many people burn to death in their cars? Counting people that burn to death in their cars must be motivated by politics
However, you're doing the right thing. It's important to not let the great become the enemy of the good. Yes, there is work to be done to make batteries zero impact. But no matter what's happening in the world of batteries it is nothing compared to the extraordinary destructive force of coal, oil, and gas globally.
Yeah, I also find the NEM changes pretty hard to understand: if the goal is to shift as many people to solar as possible, why cut the incentives right when they’re starting to produce meaningful results.
> why cut the incentives right when they’re starting to produce meaningful results
Because it's unsustainable and every rooftop solar installation that has net metering causes electricity to be more expensive for everyone. The same time your rooftop system is producing its peak capacity is likely to be the same time the nearby grid-scale solar plants are producing at peak capacity, but the utility is forced to pay you retail price for the power you're producing when they'd rather get it at wholesale price from the larger facilities.
Your comment assumes that the utility needs to be using up lots of land to power customers. Rooftop solar is far more efficient and there is no extra transmission required. Utilities don't need to consume vast tracts of land just to provide power to customers.
> retail price
Utilities in California (by law) already deduct fees out of this, so it's not reimbursed at full retail rate anyway under old NEM rules. There's also an absolutely massive gap between retail and wholesale rates that could be explored.
If what you're proposing about rooftop solar being more efficient was true, why wouldn't the utilities just pay to roll that out to residential customers? E.g. the utility pays to install the panels on your roof and then you get a discount on your electricity to pay for the "roof lease"?
It is because utilities can externalize many costs with their current development practices. Every now and then the federal government jumps in with some more funding for them too (see: Diablo Canyon). Incentives aren't aligned between the utilities and their customers.
> It is because utilities can externalize many costs with their current development practices
I'm curious what you mean with that statement. Which costs are they able to externalize by building grid scale solar that they'd have to cover out-of-pocket for a grid-scale rooftop solar deployment?
> Incentives aren't aligned between the utilities and their customers.
I mean, as a first approximation the utilities incentives are:
- keep capex and opex costs as low as possible
- while selling electricity at the prevailing rate inside their RTO
"Shorting The Grid" by Meredith Angwin paints an absolutely atrocious picture of the governance structures inside many RTOs and there are definitely perverse incentives at play, but fundamentally the utilities want to sell electricity while maximizing their margins.
I'm not even sure what the "customer incentives" are beyond paying as little as possible to keep their lights on and houses heated and cooled.
> Which costs are they able to externalize by building grid scale solar
The biggest one is transmission. Most utilities have an arrangement where they can receive a certain return from customers with new capex. No large-scale transmission is required for rooftop installations.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll have to check it out.
> "customer incentives"
Correct. Customers are incentivized to use as little as possible and therefore save money. The utilities are incentivized to get customers to pay for new projects to earn a guaranteed return. And if a customer overgenerates their credits in a net metering scenario? Typically this is free energy to the utility. No payout.
I think the idea is that California has plenty of solar generation during the day (or is on track to have plenty); what it needs is storage for when the sun isn’t shining.
The new NEM (the Net Billing Tariff) shifts the incentives away from solar generation (which the utilities have a lot of) and towards energy storage. I am in the market for solar right now, and I’ve been running the numbers. Whereas I would have had the greatest ROI with a large solar panel array under the last NEM, I now get the largest ROI with a small solar array + a battery.
I can’t say that my ROI will be the same under NEM 3.0 as it was in the old NEM, but solar is not suddenly a bad investment, as some might claim. A small solar + battery setup will pay for itself in 5 years in my situation. A battery alone (no solar panels) pays for itself within a decade, since you can buy energy for “cheap” during super off peak and store it for use during peak hours, pinning your electricity costs to the lowest of the day.
This is all with existing rates. The upcoming shift to an Income Graduated Fixed Fee will likely come with reduced per-kilowatt-hour rates, which will reduce the ROI for home solar and batteries.
As the dead web continues to emerge, content looks less like apples on a tree and more like sand on the beach.
And the act of looking for a misshapen grain of sand becomes absurd.