There are multiple tiers to Starlink (residential, RV, boat, plane, …). I don’t think Ukraine gets the most basic plan with limited bandwidth and meant for stationary dishes.
If I understood correctly some are used as a backbone for their internet infrastructure and some on the field on moving vehicles. The $110 plan wouldn’t cover those use cases.
If you have a balance of $1, wouldn’t you be counted as an active user ?
It sounds to me that an active user is someone with funds or that interacted with the app/website while logged in. I’m not sure the second category made much sense to begin with (unless you wanted to inflate the numbers during a bull run)
This is a contrarian response. Funding $1 would require me to visit the website so I would have been a MAU without even funding. Conversely, funding without visiting the website requires real effort.
No metric is perfect nor stands alone. What does it mean in context to RH, FB, Apple? The value of a MAU is relative. The key is it's well defined, stable and trackable over time. Assigning value is up to diligence at that point.
You may have funded the account last year and did nothing with it. My understanding is you would still count as an MAU even if you didn’t interact with RH.
It starts out with "A user need _not_ satisfy". They're saying funding has nothing to do with MAU. The language is pretty clear - "while logged into their account, at any point during the relevant month".
If you don't like it, I get it, but you've offered nothing than "I say they're shady!"
Ground heat pumps provide free cooling in the summer for a very limited amount of electricity as the ground will be at 10-15C (depending on where you live) so you don't need to use the compressor and just make the liquid flow to cool down your house.
It also has the extra benefit of heating up your ground for the winter period.
While that is in principle true, in practice there are quite a few issues. Many heatpumps here are made to heat the water for floor heating but don't transfer heat to air indoors. So you would cool using your floor which isn't very comfortable usually. More importantly because of the above the heat pumps are build for only one directional transfer. If one builds their own system it might make sense to plan for it, but even then it's unlikely that Sweden will become so hot that opening windows will not cool off the house enough. If it comes so far we likely have more pressing problems.
The ground heat pumps are not used in the opposite direction, it doesn't cool down water to the floor but it flows water at 10-15C into your floor. According to the installers I've talked to here in Belgium, all the ground heat pumps devices are capable of doing that.
While this might not be needed in Sweden, it's more interesting further south. I live in Belgium and we had a long heatwave this summer and they predict more of those in the coming years. So cheap efficient cooling might turn out useful here (even if nobody had AC systems 20 years ago)
That car is probably very inefficient as it's not very aerodynamic. If you need that van, you probably need the 75kWh version.
If you don't have many kids, you should probably look at cars that are only electric and designed for it: Tesla, Polestar, VW ID.3/4, Skoda Enyaq, Volva XC40 Recharge, ... You'll get better regenerative break which means that you'll recharge your battery when going downhill and better efficiency.
Without any changes to your home, you can charge your car at 3.6kW and there might be public chargers at 11kW around where you live and shop. I've spent a few weeks with a Tesla Model 3 SR+ (50kW battery) in the mountains of the Val d'Anniviers (Valais) where I couldn't charge at the chalet and I didn't have any issue to drive around and find chargers.
I honestly fail to see the issue. Running diesel generators to handle peak demand may not be the greenest move but it was likely the best move before they could come up with a better solution. Should they have left users stranded because they couldn't charge ?
What did you expect from Tesla powerwall ? It's another use of the same battery tech they had in their cars allowing them to use the same supply to build two products. Most of the added value of the powerwall is in the software and the battery management, not in the form-factor of the batteries. I suppose most home batteries are just repackaging batteries used in other industries.
At that time, Tesla claimed to be running battery swap stations, and was receiving massive subsidies from California for it. The entire point of the story is that the battery swaps were not being used even in situations where they would make the most sense, and the alternative was expensive and based on fossile fuels.
The implication is that Tesla was committing fraud, taking the subsidies and not in providing the promised service in exchange.
Battery swap stations still have to charge the batteries being swapped. If diesel was needed for charging the cars, it would have been needed for those too.
The battery swap station was offered to a small subset of owners. From what they claim, the reviews weren't overly positive.
TBH, I prefer charging the battery while in the car over a system like that in general.
Change nothing until you create perfect conditions. No partial steps of experiments allowed.
Remember the first car with its 500 mile autonomy, air-conditioned and with Bluetooth for mobile phones invented centuries later. The golden age!
"In addition to defects in the fog light and the low beam, the Model S at the HU mainly has problems with the wishbones. " so not a lot of information in there either.
I haven't had the batteries long enough (just a couple months at this point - took more than a year to get them) to work that into our habits in all seasons. I expect for 6+ months of the year the batteries will enable us to run virtually off-grid, with minimal draw from the grid, perhaps with the exception of charging the cars. Power production in those months vastly exceeds our usage.
Conversely, this time of year (winter) the way our house is positioned with the sun (on a hill, surrounded by tall trees) we generate a pretty small amount of solar, and are running the heaters a lot, so very grid dependent. The batteries would power the house for maybe 12 hours in an outage.
Last summer I'd often charge a car during the day instead of at night because we were generating more than the draw of the EV charger. I have an internal debate about whether this is better, because the power company's time-of-use structure incentivizes me to not do this, but instead export the power to the grid. So I'm not actually sure whether maximizing my energy usage at the time of production is less carbon intensive than exporting it to offset the rest of the community's usage. I guess it all depends on what's generating that grid energy at night.
For the most part within the house though, the batteries let you not care too much about what energy you're using when.
Can you expand on the aggregate CO2 vs marginal CO2 part ?
I’m looking into installing a ground heat pump in a new house (coupled with solar panels) mostly for environmental reasons and all the critics I’ve read so far were about the costs.
If you turn on a light and use some extra electricity, some power station somewhere will need to increase power output to provide for you.
It's the CO2 production of that extra generation, known as marginal generation, you should care about, not the nationwide average.
Most of the time, in most of the world, that extra generation is combined cycle gas turbines at ~50% efficiency.
For most people, the only time a new use of electricity is eco-friendly is when all the energy in a country is already supplied by wind/solar/hydro, and therefore a newly switched on thing also gets supplied by wind/solar/hydro.
Obviously the decision to installation a heat pump depends on the marginal generation in 15 years when you are still using that heat pump. That's very hard to predict.
If I understood correctly some are used as a backbone for their internet infrastructure and some on the field on moving vehicles. The $110 plan wouldn’t cover those use cases.