cwal37

It is most of deployed storage atm, but the bulk of that wasn't deployed recently. I'm staring at a very informative figure I just made last week that I can't share since it's a draft for a report, but if you glance at EIA 860 data you'll see the breakdown for storage by nameplate capacity is:

Battery - 0.7%

Compressed Air - 0.5%

Concentrated Solar Power Storage - 1.3% (which doesn't always exactly count)

Flywheels - 0.2%

Pumped Storage - 97.4%

You can also see that the average operational year for pumped storage is 1974, not anytime recent. You could weight the years by capacity, but most plants are pretty big, and it shouldn't change it too much. Also, pumped storage capacity only totals 21.6GW.

As for where I've been, I've just been stupidly busy. I keep meaning to jump back in, but I never seem to have the time.

It stands out to me that pumped storage only gets a passing mention. We've had that as a proven energy storage technology for decades. People in the industry love to talk about it and file FERC applications for preliminary permits on the same sites over and over (I would know, I've had to read nearly all of them over the last year at work), but it's never deployed at the scale people expected.

It'll be interesting to see if if PSH ever really takes off, or if it really does get left in the dust by batteries and other things.

That actually sounds incredibly appealing, thanks for the heads up. I love finding my way with a map and a compass, but I've somehow never heard of orienteering specifically before.

I hike basically every weekend, but since most of that is in the Smokies I adhere to the trails. It would be nice to venture into some more self-guided routes. I have relatives up near the UP I visit once or twice a year, I'll definitely look into this the next time I'm near a more active orienteering community.

I live slightly south of Frozen Head, and have hiked there a number of times in the last year or so since I moved down here (dryish-winter hike[1], a snowy day up top[2]). It really is a beautiful park and TN state parks are free, so if you're in the area I recommend stopping by.

I've been trying to convince a few ultra-marathoner friends to apply for the Barkley since I got out here, but they're all extremely hesitant. From everything I've read and gathered this race is just totally unlike what they're used to out West in terms of its general terrain (including plants, stepping off the trails in the spring and summer you can quickly get into quite vicious thorns, and the race isn't really on trails anyways as far as I know), and overall idiosyncratic nature. The weather down here can also be all over the place this time of year. I hiked Frozen Head in the high 50s/low 60s back in late January or early February; this past Sunday I was 2 hours south, in the Smokies, hiking in 5-6 inches of snow.

It's certainly a personal pie-in-the-sky feat to dream about before I move away in a few years, but realistically I'll just settle for an AT through hike instead (which should be far, far more manageable).

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/sets/721576407426...

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/sets/721576422837...

It's a bit odd to be attempting to inform yourself of pros and cons you don't know, but also make a very strong opening statement about wind power. I work in the energy industry and I can honestly say I've never heard someone refer to wind turbines as "effectively unsustainable." Maybe, as a joke? But certainly not in any serious way.

If you want to learn more about wind in general you can cherry pick sections from the recently released Wind Vision[1]. It should be able to answer most anything you'd wonder about.

[1] http://www.energy.gov/windvision

What government agencies are out there mass-building wind? In terms of America at least, that's not how our generation system is set up.

Also, the recently-published Wind Vision[1] runs with an expected 20-year lifetime, and starts digging into system reliability specifics on page 70. Wind Vision was a lengthy collaborative process with industry, the labs, and DOE HQ. Good news is that there have been significant reliability gains in the gearboxes, generators, and electrical systems.

[1] http://www.energy.gov/windvision .pdfs are on the right.

It's probably just how I consider myself in the context of people I know. I love being well versed in something and offering suggestions to people, but I have always been more of a taker when it comes to music. Normally I'm ready with a book/movie/tv/game/whatever recommendation, but I've never been connected to the music world the same way.

It could also be a sibling thing, as 2 of my younger brothers are very much on the cutting edge of new acts (following tiny blogs, watching new soundcloud accounts, etc.), and I feel like I end up mostly relying on hearing new things through them. There's even a clear delineation in my musical tastes in the early 2000s when my siblings began finding music and I shifted away from relying on my parents' stuff to theirs. It's just something I think about when I'm strolling through spotify playlists most days.

I hear you on feeling like I suck at music discovery. I've always kind of coasted off of what friends and family find. Recently one of my brothers launched a sort of music discovery/contest site-thing[1], and while I'm not totally certain about everything they're doing, I have found a lot of interesting tracks looking through their Discover tab. You might find it worth checking out.

[1] http://nostrajamus.com/#/

EDIT: And I believe you can view playlists from archived contests if you register, so you can focus the discovery down more to your liking.

If anyone is interested in learning more about permafrost methane, and a bit about clathrates as well, this paper[1] is a pretty good primer. I worked with the lead author over a summer around when he was publishing this a few years back. It's possible I can answer your questions, although I won't guarantee it. Clathrates/hydrates are a personal favorite of mine, even wrote up a short research paper in grad school on the possibility for their economic extraction.

[1]http://www.climateemergencyinstitute.com/uploads/L_Livermore...

EDIT: The URL is a bit hyperbolic, but the paper is legit, it's just the first host for this paper I found.

Hey, I took a look at your profile, and saw your resume. Coincidentally enough, I'm actually a fellow UIUC grad, although not in CS or engineering. I've applied to a lot of different jobs and internships in the past few years as I went through grad school, and I definitely notice a few things about your resume that could use some fixing up. If you want to chat about that my email is my name at gmail.

One major trick to applying is to not preclude yourself from jobs, but let HR do that. Apply to anything that interests you, even if you don't exactly meet the criteria.

EDIT: I was a bit casual, but it's bothering me, so I'll be serious. I guarantee your resume is hurting you, and I'm willing to help.

Thanks for changing the title, I always just err on the side of leaving it, even if it is absolutely terrible (as this one originally was).

On the actual topic, it's always interesting to see things go differently than economists expected. I fill an economist-ish role at work and it's kind of amazing to see the union of hand wavey-ness and certainty that pervades so much of the field. We drill down hard on data and stick with open source tools like Python as much as possible, but I definitely look around and see supposition treated as fact.

Unrelated to this, but do you guys like board games or really almost anything else? I made the mistake of living in Oak Ridge and I've had a hell of a time meeting people ( I mean, clearly, I'm propositioning a random person in an unrelated HN thread). When my mentor isn't around I can go days without talking to people, and it's starting to drive me a bit mad. I keep buying board games and local multiplayer PC games, but they all languish unplayed.

Back onto the topic, I seriously feel Comcast is "trialing" their data caps her because the southeast is perceived as less tech-savvy, and they're probably aware they can get away with it more.

EDIT: Thanks y'all, I'll be sending out some emails when I get home.

Well, I'm only down here for a relatively short bit. Just starting the second year of a postmasters at Oak Ridge National Lab, and at the end either there's funding for me to stick around and be real staff for a while or I'm off to some bigger city.

I am now surrounded by Google Fiber to the east and west, and Chattanooga's public fiber to the south, out here in Knoxville, TN. I really wish we could manage something here. This area has the biggest national lab, and a host of tech industry around it, I was kind of surprised more options didn't exist when I moved down a year ago.

It makes sense to me that Google went after these southeastern markets, because we are the area where Comcast is already enforcing (I've had to pay a couple times) data caps[1]. It's called a "trial" on their site, but the charges are real.

[1] http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-u...

Not dumb! Deserts are beautiful and amazing. If you never have, take a peek at Namibia[1] (my favorite visited deserts to date).

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Namibia/@-23.1991868,17.22...

For me the real money-quote comes near the end:

"For thousands of years we carried bees by raft and barge, by wagon and train, across oceans and continents, so they could make us honey and wax. Now we’ll try to carry them through the Anthropocene so they can pollinate our crops. The old mutualism, where we make homes for bees so bees can make us honey, is turning into fraught co-dependence. We need bees on an industrial scale to fertilize our food, and the bees need us to keep them alive in an increasingly hostile industrial landscape."

Articles like this really hit home for me and speak to those somewhat behind-the-scenes large-scale transformations of the natural world that you don't always see until you're a part of.

I grew up in IL and attended undergrad at UIUC. I wasn't in CS or engineering, but this[1] program where perhaps my strongest focus was ecology. It is difficult to convey just how incredibly altered the ecology of the IA-IL-IN corn belt is. A giant swathe of land that was denuded, drained, tiled, and channelized. A few random things that stand out as a part of this from undergrad.

I worked with a professor briefly who practically begged farmers to let him install small riparian buffer strips to greatly reduce the hypoxia-inducing agricultural runoff. But no matter how small the width of the strips proposed, it's a hard bargain to just hand over a strip of your potentially producing land.

I saw a series of farms where channelization of streams on their property had led to large erosion problems, and were working to restore a kind of anchored natural meander. The idea being that you would be able to avoid the wholesale erosion, but also control the extent of the bend.

UIUC itself was an utter joke in terms of institutional ecological initiative. We have the Morrow plots, the oldest experimental agricultural field in the united states, but no restored prairie, nothing to hint at what we replaced. You can find some if you go off of campus though, in Urbana.

It's just kind of weird to think back to being in the middle of this giant living machine. Watching it flush its effluent down to the Gulf, and seeing everything else shrivel and die around it.

I went Monarch tagging a few months ago[2], and that is a sad endeavor (but also incredibly fun, everyone should run through a meadow catching butterflies at some point in their life). Everyone involved knows their habitat has decreased dramatically.

EDIT: And just one more thing. This might sound kind of cheesy, but I have always loved bumblebees, our rotund, fuzzy, endemic workers. They remind me strongly of hot, lazy, Midwestern summers from my childhood. I sort of vaguely knew that they weren't doing well[3], but this article reminded me of that, and I'll be sad to see them go.

[1] https://www.earth.illinois.edu/ [2] https://vimeo.com/108187852 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee#Endangered_status

Naw, you're still oversimplifying it and being way too pessimistic. Renewables aren't 100% the answer yet, but their LCOE in practice isn't that bad right now at all[1]. I realize this is at relatively low levels of penetration, but their uptake has been extremely rapid and tech progression has been quick. Solar is still expensive as fuck, but everyone knows that. Look at those variable O&M costs though, those are some sexy zeroes if you can lock in your other costs adequately.

Pages 10 and 11 here [2](warning, pdf), discuss wind curtailment in MISO, where they've tackled the curtailment problem head-on with great success. They also estimate that they can keep manual curtailment incredibly low until wind doubles in capacity from the time of the report. The intermittentency is not overwhelming until you have much more wind in the system than we currently do. Additionally, there are exiting traditional storage techniques that don't get much traction for a variety of reasons (like pumped storage), which we could build out hard if we actually needed to.

A healthy mix of renewables, storage technology, grid upgrades, and more efficient traditional generation technologies would leave us in a fine position.

[1]http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

[2]http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...

Hmm, never been downvoted before for providing a sourced comment with relevant information. Guess people aren't down for discussion today.

Totally. Their in-the-ground infrastructure was built to serve a completely different kind of population. I'm just thinking even longer term.

This Planet Money episode[1] does a great job painting a picture of the back and forth between residents having their water shut off and finding ways to turn it back on.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/08/08/338068996/episode-...

Detroit seems to be turning the corner at the bottom of a decades-long economic slide, but there are also some interesting long-term environmental trends that I think bode well for it and many smaller rust belt towns. Most pressingly, a lot of those towns are directly on arterial waterways and receive copious amounts of rain. So you get extremely cheap transportation of goods, and you also just have a water supply in general.

There may have been a great migration to the Southwest over the last 40-50 years, but it's hard to picture a scenario where that area's ecological budgetary chickens don't come home to roost at some point. Then, Detroit and other communities like it become significantly more attractive.

>I'm not aware of any large ISP that has throttles or bandwidth caps (comcast has a supposed 300GB cap but has never to this day enforced it).

Then you haven't been paying attention[1]. I live in one of these areas, and have already been getting 1-2 robocalls a day this month about my data usage. They're calling it a "trial", but the costs are very real, and it's all in place to go national when people here don't complain enough. If I go over in the next two months, I will start getting hit with that charge.

[1] https://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-...

You might be interested to learn that so far since the major deregulation wave in electric utilities over the past 20 years or so, no one has been able to show any real pricing benefits for the end consumer.

Certain industries are inherently slanted towards a monopoly, and a regulated monopoly is often preferable to an attempt at forcing market conditions. The two industries aren't the same, and I think electric/gas utilities are significantly more inclined towards a natural monopoly, but it is important to realize what situation we currently have, rather than applying an idealized narrative.

Probably because it's way over the top.

That comparison proposes that people who can't program have a huge mental deficit compared to those who can. There are plenty of programmers out there who are not particularly proficient at thinking, and plenty of extremely intelligent people who aren't programmers. It's a needlessly breathless and self-congratulatory comparison, with limited perspective on the outside world.

I spent some time at Livermore, and I work at Oak Ridge now. It's been interesting to see the difference in how the HPC assets are referred to, or not, and I think it reflects the culture and layouts of the labs.

At LLNL it was constant, and everyone I interacted with had something to say about being at or near the #1 spot in the top 500 list (with Sequoia at the time), and advice on projects to try and get time. I went on a tour of the facility too, and it was really neat to get some perspective on the physical aspects of it all.

I've been at ORNL since February, and haven't heard Titan mentioned once. Partially I think this is due to the more cohesive overall mission of LLNL vs. ORNL, but I think geography plays a role as well.

The labs have fairly similar numbers of employees, but with one major difference; ORNL is spread out over a pretty large area and LLNL is a single square mile. Perhaps as a result of that, groups at ORNL feel a bit more insular. Heck, I've been to the "main" cafeteria once here, because I work on an edge of the campus, but at LLNL I went every day because it was easy to get to.

I wonder if a more compressed area results in a more useful utilization of huge assets like HPC because there are a lot more connections to be made between different departments. Then again, I also got the feeling that at LLNL it was a carrot they could try and dangle to draw people out of the valley. ORNL doesn't really have that same local competition for talent.

EDIT: And the article even specifically mentions the difference in lab missions by noting the new computers' uses: security vs. open science.

Opportunities like this provoke an incredibly intense response in me. I would drop almost everything to go work and live in Antarctica for 6-12 months, and searched fruitlessly for available jobs when I finished my undergraduate degree a few years ago. I'm not qualified for the position they talk about in this article, and I have a pretty good career path and professional responsibilities I can't just abandon now, but the pull remains strong.

Something about unique circumstance and desolation in particular just hits me in a particular part of my brain.

One of the most surreal and powerful moments in my life was pulling over in the middle of complete desolation in northwestern Namibia to wander the desert in the middle of the night. It was lit by a full moon, and the entire world was this shade of soft, ethereal purple I hadn't seen before and probably never will again. It was illuminating this tremendous expanse of landscape sparsely populated by utterly alien flora. In some ways it just felt right to be as utterly alone as I could be, in an alien situation I couldn't have imagined even 6 months prior.

Community college isn't equivalent to the schools being discussed here though. The point of the article is big, 4-year institutions, and the comment I was replying to specifically mentioned the state schools as being better than international universities.

That's simply not true. I'm the oldest of 6 kids. Plenty of state school attendance between myself and my siblings, and neither us nor our parents were ever able to just pay for school each year.

We've all gotten the best local scholarship from our high school so far (4/4), most of us got additional scholarships, and also some aid from the school.

All of us have had to take out loans.

EDIT: Going a bit further, I went to school in-state, and the semester I spent abroad in a world class city was cheaper than a semester staying in central Illinois.

I assume this is the real, official end of the dream that I will ever get the case they initially showed off for my Nexus 10.

I enjoy the Nexus 10, but I really feel like I've kind of just been left in the cold. Android updates haven't been kind to the device in my experience.

So putting together: Quality Video + Small Size + Aerial Mobility + Flexibility + Weatherproofing(presumably, even just sweat on a wrist or fog could be a problem) seems incredibly ambitious (and of course, super neat).

However, I can't picture something comfortably wrapping around my wrist that also has enough battery power to have any significant flying time and deal with basic weather conditions, like a breeze. Just in trying to remember tiny copters and things I've had in the past, it would be kind of amazing to me if the power supply and utilization has advanced that much.

Any new action-cam is going to be referenced against the ubiquitous GoPro, so I feel ok making a comparison. I have a GoPro Hero 3+, and filming at 1080 the battery only lasts a couple hours. Turn on the wifi, and that time takes a significant hit. As far as I can tell from the renders in the video, this would have a smaller battery than those in a GoPro, but would need to provide more power, since the thing is flying. Maybe I'm wrong about this, again, just eyeballing form the renders.

It's a neat concept, and when I first got a GoPro I was surprised by how damn small the thing was, so I imagine camera boards will only get more intriguingly small and effective. I do wonder about the lens though, as it appears to be tiny. Perhaps more is explained in the video which I watched on silent. Would be nice if there was some text to parse somewhere for people without sound.

Giant data set, big collaborative effort, spreadsheets and calculations are available online, and enjoyably written. Most economics texts I've found to be extremely dry, mostly theoretical (minimal or short-term real world data), and/or have their calculations hidden in some excel-based black box that will never be seen by anyone else.

Currently engaged in:

-The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell. Just a fun read. Fiction sucks me in pretty easily, and I enjoy the time-hopping.

-Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia's Water Crisis - Cheryl Colopy. Not enjoying this as much as I thought I would so far, possibly because I have too much academic experience in the topic area and the writer is a reporter. I'm a bit more pragmatic about large energy projects, not exactly bleeding heart, but I try to focus on the bigger picture. It was a free book on a table at work though from someone cleaning out their office, so not a big deal.

-Operations Research - Hillier and Lieberman. Also a free book from work. Something I need a stronger foundation in for upcoming projects.

Perpetual Backburner

-Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace. I've gotten a couple hundred pages in a few times. If I get distracted at all it's so hard to go back to.

-Capital in the 21st Century - Piketty. I blazed through the first couple hundred pages around when it came out, then I went on a long vacation. Now I sort of nibble at it when I'm in the mood. One of the most compelling economics books I've ever read.

Recently finished

-The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons. Fun to read about the history of the NBA from a true fanatic. Eyes glazed over in some sections on the Celtics though.