beaviskhan
Our local utility in NC has a program where they'll pay you ~$50/battery/month to enroll in their virtual power plant program. In exchange, they can take control of your battery up to 36 times per year for a period of a couple hours. Summer events are typically early evening during peak air conditioning times. Winter events are typically early morning during peak heating times.
In practice this means one of two things:
* They make your battery charge to full capacity in advance of the event, and then you run your home off the battery and don't take any power from the grid during that time * Sometimes you'll also return power to the grid beyond that used by your house - they pay you the contracted rate for the power you deliver
We've paired our batteries with solar panels, so generally we have a full charge going into the summer VPP events. We have gas heat, but I expect we'll pay for at least some grid energy to charge batteries during the winter events. Regardless, it's been a good program for us - even without solar, we would not pay for any more power than we used, and the monthly rebate from the utility makes the economics of the system a lot more favorable, especially here in the land of relatively cheap coal power.
Making flight connections is never fun, but this sounds absolutely brutal.
$35k - $26k = $9k
$9k / $0.12/mile savings ~= 75,000 miles breakeven
This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.
No idea if they're compatible with Jaguars or whatever Waymo is rolling these days, but my guess is that Waymo could make the economics work.
Yeah, but then you have a PowerEdge with all the noise and heat that goes along with it. I have an old Synology 918 sitting on my desk that is so quiet I didn't notice when the AC adapter failed. I noticed only because my (docker-app-based) cloud backups failed and alerted me.
Unless Synology walks back this nonsense, I'll likely not buy another one, but I do think there is a place for this type of box in the world.
I have no reason to doubt any of what you said, and in all seriousness, I am happy that you have come from a poor background and made a good life for yourself without the so-called required college degree. My point is that if all those things were true about you and you were also black for example, you'd probably have been at a relative disadvantage to your white self in this country.
That in no way takes away from your success in life, or implies you didn't work hard to get there. I grew up in a family without much money, but one that valued education and hard work. I have worked, and worked hard my entire life, and things have by and large worked out very well for me. In my younger days I did plenty of stupid things that might very well have gotten me shot were my skin tone darker. I have black family members who have been handcuffed and thrown down on the driveway of their house that they own because it was late at night they "looked suspicious". Would I have gotten to where I am today if I were black? Maybe yes, maybe no, but the macro-level odds are I'd be worse off if I weren't white.
My view is that if we want to change things for the better - whether in politics or business or personal life - it's better to be honest about the nature and degree of the problems than to try and pretend they don't exist. My great-grandparents owned businesses and my black friend's great-grandparents were owned by other people. My parents could do whatever they wanted and my black friend's parents had to go to separate schools and use separate drinking fountains. None of this is your fault nor mine, and I'm not going to feel bad about myself because of what my ancestors did. But I am willing to consider that actual history should inform our approach to improving things going forward. Maybe consider it a blameless postmortem for society https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/
If you want to reduce that to "identity politics" and write it off in a with-us-or-against-us calculation, that's certainly your right. It is still a free country after all. For the record, I've been an unaffiliated voter my entire life, and I believe the surest sign that the democratic party is terrible at what they do is that Donald Trump has been considered a serious presidential candidate three times now. The two party system has done an amazing job of splitting people who may otherwise agree on 95% of issues over relatively trivial issues. But truly, you really are with us or against us, and there is no other way unless we can get rid of the two party system. So for me I am against the sycophancy and nepotism and kleptocracy and hypocrisy of Donald Trump and the republican party, and if that means I have to deal with some ill-advised identity politics from the democrats, then the reality at a national level is that I have to hold my nose and deal. What I'm not going to do is vote against the interests of myself and my family (and, I believe, my country) because someone is trying to make me feel bad about my ancestors.
"military veteran from a poor family with no college degree"
okaaaay.
This is a completely separate matter from being ashamed of said privilege (I don't think this is reasonable or productive), or being held responsible for racism in general (obviously ridiculous unless you are right now a bona fide racist). But that level of nuance doesn't fit neatly in a 30 second inflammatory commercial.