zizee

> For one common naive case: Storing the energy in Li-Ion batteries in e.g. a Tesla Powerwall: $437/kWh.

How did you come up with that number? Total cost of the battery divided by its capacity?

Since you do not dispose of the battery upon first discharge, the true cost should be amortized across the thousands of cycles it would go through during its lifetime.

Batteries are still far from economical in many situations, but there are many situations where they now make sense. They are also getting cheaper all the time, and as they do, so will the range of applications increase.

American houses tend to be bigger than those in other countries, and built with poor insulation than say those of europe.

I agree entirely. I chose the 1 hour of storage as a number because I had to say something, and I didn't want to go to low as it would undoubtedly knee jerk responses of "that's not enough, you need X hours".

The main point I was going for is that we shouldn't think of a national network in the same way as we think of a off grid house with solar, where you have to deal with many hours without sunlight, and have storage capacity for several days of rain.

In a similar vein, the intermittency of solar and wind look bad when you look at isolated generation instances, but when you have a continent spanning network, the intermittency is reduced as the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun is shining for many more hours than when you look at any single point on map.

Again, I would love to see the numbers if you were plan out a realistic build out of this ideal network. It would probably be a pretty big number, but how would it compare to building out with nuclear, or even just lots of coal power plants from scratch.

> Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska.

I don't think this was your intention, but this reminded me of something I see in so many of these conversations.

In discussions about solar (and electric cars) there are always people who say "well this won't work in situation X", with an unsaid implication of "this is not the solution".

It is unlikely that we will find a single solution that will be a good fit for all situations. Instead we will have many tools in our belt and apply accordingly.

I know that you used alaska as an extreme, perhaps they will never get off fossil fuels. But alaska is a tiny population overall. Its the main population centers that we need to worry about, not the extremes that are hand picked to be difficult.

I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable.

I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, and appropriately provisioned and placed solar and wind, taking the duck curve into consideration.

> The average household consumes 28.9kwh in a day

Maybe in the USA.

> which is way more than rooftop solar can provide.

Maybe in your part of the world this is true, but it is not unrealistic in many places.

Also, why are you limiting your thinking to rooftop solar?

A lot of applications are read heavy on their database. When this is the case, you can make reads to a read only slave closer to the edge. There are other options, but depending on your applications architecture this might be a relatively easy way to reduce latency on a large portion of your traffic.

> Not tilling the soil? What does that even mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming

There are probably millions of feral cats roaming australia.

Indeed. What would happen to FB if for some reason both Apple and Google simultaneously removed their apps from their respective apps stores? I'm not sure it would destroy FB, but it would be a huge blow.

Or arrest people that are using easily detectable satellite dishes.

Interestingly, the disease carrying mosquito is an introduced/invasive species, so eradication in many parts of the world would be repairing the damage that humans caused.

> Whatever, do your own research.

Is it not ok to ask people making bold statements to backup their claims?

The wikipedia article (which I admittedly only quickly scanned) doesn't appear to mention corruption, murdoch, or newscorp. The other is a hyperbolic opinion piece that doesn't provide any references whatsoever.

Regardless of all this, you completely missed my point. The grandparent was complaining about lack of competition whilst being in a semi-rural (read low population density) and there being only one real option, with multiple resellers. Corruption isn't stopping rollout of companies from rolling out multiple competitive networks to rural australia. There is not going to be any return on investment.

For a country like australia we need internet as publicly owned infrastructure, with "zero competition...just resellers of the same system".

The coalition really ballsed-up what should have been a great resource for the so called "clever country". However, if starlink lives up to the marketing promises "our tech-illiterate decrepit government"s opinion that it would be a waste to provide fibre coverage to 93%* of our population, and their decision to instead to wait for technological advances to provide solutions better suited to australia is suddenly not a bone headed as people make out.

* Australian urban population is 86.2% https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/ Australi

> Due to blatant corruption there’s zero competition for broadband here, just resellers of the same system.

Can you tell us more about this blatent corruption? Are you saying corruption has stopped multiple players entering into the highly profitable internet market of the sparsely populated rural Australia?

That could absolutely happen. But this scenario is no more the fault of the original author than everyone else that had a choice in using that software, but also refusing to maintain it themselves.

I see no problem with someone developing something for fame and glory and not really want to put lots of effort into maintainance.

It if it gets popular, the community (aka users) can maintain it. If the community also does not want to put in the effort to maintain it, they cannot really complain about the original author also wanting the same.

The only problem is when the original author doesn't want to maintain things, and also rejects help with maintenance. If that occurs, a motivated community can fork things and continue.

There is definitely good wine and not so good wine, if you define "good" as something you like.

I could believe that there is a tenuous link between price and quality, but that's not the same as saying there is no good wine.

Cheaper fuel. Refill at home. Cleaner air. Cheaper to maintain (no oil changes, air filters, sparkplugs, less wear on breakpads). Quieter.

Clearly you don't think it will ever be practical for you, or people in your situation. However, I encourage you to open your mind that you might not be representative of the entire auto buying market.

The first electric cars were very niche. The next were a bit more capable, and the number of people that they were suitable for increased. Each iteration they get better and better. Perhaps this iteration doesn't suit you needs. Maybe the next will not either. But one by one the objections will fall. Charging infrastructure will improve. New battery chemistries will be invented. You'll come around.

Thanks for the clarification, that makes more sense.

Personally, I would think microsoft would be easier to "motivate" to share given they probably have more investments in china which could be used as leverage.

Honest question: what percentage of the worlds population live in areas with such conditions?

Excellent points. Also people seem to be forgetting a large percentage of people will be charging at home overnight, and will largely never need to charge their cars at places other than home.

Honest question: are you suggesting that microsoft buying github makes it harder for the Chinese government to access the servers?

That's not really the type of "skipping" that is the issue.

Software tends to ask the system the current time (via a library), and the system responds with a "here is a number, it is the number of [units] since [epoch]". The library then converts that number using a formula to work out a date/time. If it is decided a leap second is added or subtracted, and the library's formula doesn't account for it, then the time will be calculated incorrectly.

For most software it is unlikely to matter too much, but this sort of thing can lead to unpredictable emergent behavior in complex networked systems.

Apparently this is against Facebook's ToS and it risks account suspension at any time (removing access to anything you bought in the Oculus store).

I am thankful that I made the decision early on to use steam for purchases early on.

Medical doctors have a professional organization enforcing strict standards. People cannot practice medicine without passing a series of standardized exams that only recognized universities can administrator, they have and a lengthy internship process, review board etc. If they break the rules they can have their licence suspended.

I think it would be a shame to bring this sort of thing to software development, but it would allow us to get rid of some of the hoops people have to jump through to ensure they can actually do the job being hired for.

Electric cars will probably save the grid nearterm, with people wanting the convenience of charging overnight at home. Eventually all carparks will be equipped with solar powered charging, which will allow people to use their cars as backup power packs.

Long term, solar/battery economics will eventually make the cost of maintaining the grid too expensive. Governments will try and mandate against it, but that will only last so long.

This is because it is not correct. Australians on average do drive bigger cars than in europe, but the average petrol consumption of passenger vehicles is 10.8 l/100km.

https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/avera...

“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Keep iterating on this concept and eventually we'll have liquid metal T-1000 like robots.

Makes me wonder if Arnie could have defeated him/it by throwing lots of strong magnets into the mix.