blake1

He’s basically that the partisan makeup of the Senate as of the most recent election should be the controlling factor.

It has the veneer of a neutral rule, and that’s all they need.

Proof: x = (s2 + s3) / 2.

This is easily extended to show that there is an arbitrary number of such x.

Scapegoating allows politicians to avoid angering their own constituents, and it also makes it rhetorically easier for politicians to avoid taking the demands seriously.

And a significant fraction (1/6 to 1/3) of arrests have been from out of state. So, the original claims had an element of truth.

But I disagree with you that it’s just “BS”, which would imply a level of cynicism which may exists, but for which you provided no evidence.

Also, while storage would be helpful, it is not the only way to enable a renewable transition. Additional transmission is enormously helpful: as the sun goes down on California, the wind is picking up in the Midwest. And don’t forget demand response: if smart thermostats received price signals (maybe we should precool this house...) that would alleviate the evening ramp-up issue.

So I claim we’ll need less storage than “a whole day’s usage”. But the learning curve applies to batteries as well! This storage won’t cost as much anyway.

The whole issue of intermittency is overrated. While a single solar panel might generate intermittently, the solar fleet across a whole state generates more predictably.

I am predicting that grid emissions will come down a lot over the coming decades. Partially I’m predicting the past: they’ve already come down, a lot!

The slow ramp rate, and lower reliability means the power they output is less economically attractive, and the other factors makes the price higher. Combined, they mean that nuclear plans sit around idle a decent amount of the time, so much so that some locations just flat-out subsidize them (like Illinois).

I used to work in power markets.

Hold a bunch of special rocks close together. They get hot and make water hot. And turns into hot, wet air, which turns a big fan. Hook a magnet to that fan, and spin it in some hoops and you get electricity. Oh, and always, always, always keep the rocks from getting too hot.

Compare that to solar cells, which are semiconductors doped with cleverly designed impurities, and layered to exploit quantum effects to deliver electrical power simply by pointing it at the sun. You can make it more useful by hooking it to a rechargeable battery, which also exploits clever quantum chemical effects to store that electricity. And the combo of these two wonderful quantum-technological devices is cheaper than the reactor.

Both technologies require understanding of modern physics, but it's pretty telling that you can do enough math to make a fission reactor with a hand calculator, and not a high-powered computer.

Consider California. Currently, this mismatch is taken up by fossil fuel plants and imports, but the solar demand drops off so fast that they have real difficulty in ramping up as needed. Batteries are a major part of the solution, but another part is improved transmission of wind from states to the east. This will cost less than you might think.

California might use 800GWh daily; and yes, installing 800GWh of battery capacity would be prohibitively expensive. However, the wind picks up in the evening just a few hours after the sun goes down, so the batteries really just need to shift some excess power from midday to the evening. When I last calculated this, the additional transmission + batteries would cost around $40 billion.

Interestingly, smart thermostats can make this worse: devices with a home/away mode allow the house to warm up when no one is inside because the owner doesn't want to pay for cooling that they won't enjoy. However, as all of these owners return home after work and school, this creates a demand spike; also, the AC units on these houses, which have been allowed to warm up, now need to run far longer into the evening. Really, the home/away feature is a little bit of a hack: the real goal is to minimize cost with some constraints on the temperature, and the utility ought to pay owners to shift their demand forward from evening to midday. This is like getting paid to store energy temporarily.

So some combination of demand shifting---either with smart-er thermostats or batteries---adding other generation sources like wind, and some additional transmission, mean that California really can get to 100%. It will not be free, but it seems like the cost is less than $100 billion.

Now in Texas, the situation is somewhat reversed. There is too much wind generation, and not enough solar, but the upshot is similar.

Under normal conditions, they have an extremely strong influence on medium term interest rates as well by convincing the market that they will keep short rates high(low) in the future, while will then raise(lower) medium terms rates.

If that proves inadequate, like it did after the crisis, the Fed can buy and sell bonds directly to move medium to long-term interest rates.

The Fed may have a historical preference for relying on the first mechanism alone, but through some combination of these techniques, they can set any interest rate to any reasonable value almost at will.

This is a real risk for current reactor designs. Loss of backup power means a loss of any safe shutdown option.

Now, I hope we can electrify the transportation sector, but our current generation and transmissions systems are inadequate. I am did he calculations for the state of California, and found that they would need to be roughly doubled in size. An immense undertaking, but a doable one.

However, I do not see us increasing the electricity generation and transmission systems by a factor of 25, which would be required for this technology.

With a bank, you are lending cash to them when you make a deposit. You are taking a risk that the bank’s credit won’t be good, and you will lose your money, so you should require interest to compensate for that. Deposit insurance changes this only a little. But it’s not like there are zero assets backing the accounts: there are still enough to cover expected liquidity needs. The credit risk mentioned early is that his expectation will fall short of reality.

But owning tether wasn’t supposed to invoke any credit risk at all. It was a secured loan: if you bought a tether, you had sole claim on a dollar in a bank account.

By the way, banks buy and sell secured loans all the time. Mortgages are a particularly common example in retail banking. Although usually, secured lending is used to convert a low liquidity asset, like a house, into a liquid one, like cash. Tether makes no sense economically because it converts one liquid asset into another.

And I honestly am surprised how pedestrian the fraud was. It sounds like they had the cash to back tether and just flat out stole it to cover for a trading loss. This has happened countless times before.

And yes, he was not convicted of the solicitation for murder, but in the US justice system considering this secondary behavior is perfectly legal. I don’t even think it’s all that uncommon or unethical. It’s just the more converse of giving someone a lighter sentence for an otherwise unblemished life.

An ICE is ~20% efficient.

A combined cycle gas turbine is ~60% efficient, transmission systems ~98%, LiIon ~99%, motors around 85-90%. The first is thermal, the rest are electrical. Well-to-wheel this is about 50%.

My point was just that you really do get a large efficiency improvement (50 - 20 = 30) by electrifying cars. Climate argument aside, energy is simply being wasted.

And the HN ideal should be to rigorously investigate even a logical inference like that. Yet when a post does just that, it’s met with a racist suggestion that middle eastern migrants are causing the uptick. No citations.

Very disappointing reaction.

First way is called demand response, and entails the operator asking some users “how much is the next MW worth to you?” If no one can supply that MW at that price or less, the customer can agree to not consume that MW. It is significant for some operators, but by design of the market, is only an option for industrial customers, really.

Some utilities also offer a limited form of this, where you can allow them to shut off your AC, receiving a discount on your bill, generally.

Both work, in their way. Would have a much larger effect if they were more universal, and of the price signal were felt more strongly by consumers. Which I think was your point.