cupofpython
ideally, every green energy farm would have a gravity well storage system nearby (like pumped storage) for the purposes of keeping discharge steady. Energy would be transferred into and out of this system pretty quickly, and stored in a more cost/size efficient storage option that could act as the true "battery" on dark days / longer periods of energy production downtime
Can a raspberry pi handle the server functionality I wonder?
I got an echo (alexa) for free and use it for home assistant. It only works when I have an internet connection. So when my internet is out, I cannot turn my lights on/off with it. I understand why, but i too would REALLY like to just have all functionality dependencies for home automation to be local.
so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive!
Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is)
Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species
Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s
Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out
this is the catch. you are perpetually in a mental struggle because all it takes is one big bad bet to undo enough of your work that it wasnt worth it. So the options portfolio that you are up 300% on is probably less than 10% of your entire portfolio. Whether it is or isnt under 10% is not actually important, the point is that the stress involved should begin snowballing past that point
not to mention you probably have a decent amount of money liquidated at any given time. for most people it is way for efficient to put the entire portfolio into an index, preferably a tax beneficial account like 401k or roth IRA, and then use all that extra time and energy bettering their workable skillsets so that they can increase their raw income and reduce the odds of unemployment.
That said, when i was unemployed for a year - I did a lot of options/crypto trading because i just had so much time on my hands. Since I've been back at a full time job, it's just too draining for not enough benefit. I can work a few hours of OT and guarantee more money that week than trading would get me, and the OT is way less of a struggle
We seem to disagree on the storage numbers. Genuinely curious if my math is wrong on this. I did research a bit more about recent advancements in pumped storage since my first comment and found that my original numbers were almost an order of magnitude smaller than what would likely be built today since I had referenced older tech. So admittedly, pumped storage is much more feasible than my original attitude suggested - which is great because id love for it to be all we need. However, I'm still not sold on it's ability to act as sufficient storage, and I do not see in any way how it could possibly keep things running for multiple days, let alone years of energy as you suggest.
There is a reason we only talk about pumped storage in terms of its discharge rate rather than its storage. We dont really use it for storage. We use it to store the difference between peak and average energy demand, not the total actual demand. You keep the generators running near average all the time, fill the reservoir during the demand valleys and drain the reservoir during demand peaks. Discharge effects ability to actually reach the peak demand, while storage effects how long you can sustain the demand. My point is even if we could discharge as fast as we need to, the reservoirs would empty in less than a day if we needed to rely upon them while energy production was down.
There is a new project (snowy 2.0) in Australia that will have a notable storage capacity of 350,000 MWh .
Current energy usage in the US is over 10 TWh per day. 350,000 MWh = 350 GWh = .35 TWh. So we would need 28 of this brand new top-end pumped hydro stations to hold 1 days worth of US energy demand in reserve. It's ballpark feasible, but lets keep in mind that this plant is costing Australia ~$5-10 billion and is working with two dams that already exist. Very much still in short-term load balancing territory.
This would also lock up 500,000 liters of water per 10kWh. 1 days worth of storage for US: 10TWh / 10kWh = 1 x 10^9; then x 500,000 liters = 5 x 10^14 liters of water = 100 cubic kilometers* (26 trillion gallons). Storing 1 years worth of energy would be 100 km^3 * 365 = 36,500 km^3; which is 3 times the size of Lake Superior (12,000 km^3). I still dont see this as an energy storage solution. MAYBE if use seawater and find a cost-effective way to build facilities into the coastline?
*(1 x 10^12 liter = 1 km^3)
Also to keep in mind that all of this is assuming CURRENT demand, which excludes the incoming energy demand increase for electric vehicle adoption. that's about 2-4 kWh per gallon of gasoline. US uses about 369 million gallons of gasoline on vehicles per day. We can add almost another 1 TWh for that, and then still whatever is necessary for increased usage in general.
> During this build all storage technologies where they make the most sense so that when that last 10% is needed, prices will have dropped
this is kind of the point of what I'm getting at. Without any investment, none of the storage technologies are going to make much progress. If not financial investment, then at least a time investment from research/science teams. then again, maybe opportunism/free market will take care of this and we can assume any progress that can be made will be made by people trying to make a name for themselves or be first to market. I'm still curious to size up what that progress might look like for discussion/entertainment purposes in any case
Good storage solutions would immediately pay dividends through arbitrage, which would keep electric prices stable, and then anywhere renewable energy generation is more than demand and storage is sufficient, that stable price point could come down below the cost of using coal/oil as well as any other continuous production method. We would be able to consolidate power generation over time, not just space, and realize gains from that. As in, use massive bursts of energy production to top off storage and use them to exactly meet demand. Maybe this opens the door for more alternative energy production methods as well (that are better suited for burst than steady)
Second paragraph is a bit too information dense, I had trouble following some of it. Renewable energy deficiencies will be localized, so i understand how wires help here. A larger connected area produces more stability, makes sense. Agreed with the carbon reduction priority to tackle coal and oil first. Surplus renewable power acting as a subsidy checks out, but that is skirting around the energy storage problem imo. Sounds like you are saying "instead of storing renewable energy, get more than you need and sell it back to the grid and then use those funds to buy the energy back later". This would certainly work for local consumers, but doesnt do too much to help the power grid itself manage what to do with the surplus energy. Sell it to neighboring power grids? Ties in to the first point about connecting a larger area - but what are the limits here? Can we physically connect the sunny side of earth to the dark side? (ignoring that it seems logistically/legally prohibitive)
the question really comes down to what should we be spending money on to get "better storage"? What are the best solutions for long-term local storage?
There was 1 design I saw where they have a large cylinder cut out of the ground but left in place (so it is loose). Pump water underneath it to raise the cylinder up, then flip the valve and the cylinder squeezes the water back out for power through gravity. I am not sure how the sealing works on that, probably similar to hydraulics
Pumped storage is great at what it does, no denying that. And what it does is allow energy production to remain near average while demand varies, and consequently allows energy production levels to be adjusted a bit slower. You aren't addressing the raw numbers though. It serves best as a compliment to a continuous energy production system. As an actual battery/storage solution, it is weak. So it will not be the solution used to store a massive amount of energy generated over a short period of time in order to be used over a longer period of time.
I agree they should be fully utilized, but I am trying to explain that if you fully utilize pumped storage you are still going to have an incomplete energy storage problem. Of course the water levels dont get near max or min capacity - it is designed to take out exactly what you put in as soon as possible or else there is too much risk. The raw storage capacity is small to medium sized - about 10 hours at max discharge (and max discharge might not be enough to keep up with demand entirely on its own).
Basically, the more energy you need to draw the faster you need to drain it and the more energy you want to store, the more massive your reservoir needs to be.
These things cannot be made 100 to 1000 times bigger, nor is there capacity to make 100 to 1000 times more of them. We are better off having them vs not having them but it isnt enough, and if we find a better solution it may become obsolete
For something like solar, where we will want to store over half our daily energy production at peak storage (ideally 2-3 days worth I think) - I don't think it holds up. Additionally, it doesnt seem like a good bet as a primary mechanism for either storage or on-demand generation if energy consumption continues to increase due to the rather large coefficients involved for scaling it up.
"The United States generated 4,116 terawatt hours of electricity in 2021"[1]
4,116 TWh/year = 11.2 TWh/day
The storage capacities for the largest items listed on the wiki is on the magnitude of GWh. The scale goes kilo-, Mega-, Giga-, then Terra. So we are talking about a need on the order of a thousand pumped storage facilities per country. The US would need over 50 of them per state (on average) in order to keep everything running without production for 24 hours. Doesnt matter how many solar panels we have, if we get 1 dark day then we would run out of power. If we tried to rely on solar entirely, we'd also still need very roughly half that amount of storage just to get through the night.
lithium batteries are obviously much better suited for overnight storage, but I have no idea what the numbers are on how much lithium is physically available to use as such storage.
If we want to get on the order of monthly to yearly storage to allow, for example, solar panels in alaska to provide enough energy for a resident to get through months of darkness - I have no idea what the leading storage options are, probably lithium still
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/188521/total-us-electric...
Moving 500,000 kg (over 1 million pounds) 7.5 meters (~25 feet aka the height of a house) will give you about 10 kWh of energy. This is equivalent to running a 425W device all day, like a small air conditioner. The relationship is linear. Double the weight or the distance to double the energy. All of the metal at a scrap yard I know of amounts to less than half that weight, for reference.
I'm also a fan because pumped storage is a really interesting storage method, but it is beyond niche. It is very tough to move that kind of weight around efficiently for what you get back. Pumping water to great heights is not easy either. (see also: moving rail-carts up a mountain)
Of course, matching people well is hard - so any model that isnt good at that will be better off trying to game their customers and brute force their marketing. (for example, if their entire model is based on superficial values like how well they can take a photo of themselves - it may not be good at actually matching people)
Also possibly concerning, is the financial incentive to push conversations into areas where the ads are discussed. People dont always talk about consumer goods, but with the ad model you might have the situation where AI keeps bringing them up anytime it is remotely relevant. turning conversations into commercials, and missing opportunities for learning generic words by replacing them with named brands.
You: "Hi how are you?"
AI: "Thanks to my Frosted Flakes and cup of Folgers that I bought from ShopRite this morning, I am feeling great! Have you tried Frosted Flakes?"
Reality: "I'm good, you?"
that said, there could be some value in seeing brands you recognize around the words they represent (like saying "frosted flakes cereal" above instead of just "frosted flakes") since the context will help you remember what the generic words mean.
Also dont underestimate the issues you might have getting Brands on board with this. you are asking them to give you permission to use their brand name in conversations that they cannot approve of in advance. that's very tricky too
Jane sends unknown message to John
John fits the target profile of topic C
John gets shown ad for topic C
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coincidentally, Janes unknown message was about topic C. Likely because she too believed it to be applicable to John.
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Going further...
Maybe topic A was trending in Janes area. Jane's friend Sally got ads for topic A. sally talked to Jane about topic A. Jane searches topic A
A trend emerged where people who searched topic A, very soon afterwards searched topic E.
Jane is very late to hear the news about topic A. She gets shown ads for topic E. Jane thinks advertisers are reading her mind because she was thinking about topic E but didnt talk to anyone about it.
Yes they are ultimately responsible for all the same border crossing paperwork and such, but that is a lot easier when everyone you work with is giving you information in convenient formats and returning your calls quickly. Not to mention the ability to leverage work from past shipments as reference.
a small player in this space has a significantly harder time since they have less reference, and vendors are more likely to treat their business as a nice-to-have instead of a want or must-have.
Additionally, the public is relatively unaware of how nuclear plants fail. If people at nuclear reactor research labs suddenly stop showing up to work - what happens? People kind of assume it will explode, or become a radiation hot-zone rendering the local area unusable for a hundred+ years.
And considering the experimental reactors being discussed need parts replacement due to corrosion, what happens if those replacements dont happen?
The dangers of human inaction seem much higher for nuclear than other things. With standard fuel sources, if people stop showing up to work then power simply stops being made - that's pretty much it. And while they are at work, the process is pretty simple and robust (compared to nuclear) with a lot of room for error.
I know I've been surprised (in a good way) to learn about some of the safety mechanisms existing within nuclear reactors, but I still only sort of understand what anything means that I read - and the safety mechanisms that gave me some sense of relief is based on a lot of assumptions I had to make about the way nuclear works as a lay person.
how about nuclear scientist stop saying "trust me bro" and more aggressively educate people on nuclear fail-safes? People have trouble voting for things they do not understand. And educating the public on something they are either uninterested in or incapable of understanding is an unfair burden to put on nuclear scientists, but they are the only ones qualified to do so.
the ball will move a lot faster once lay people can exchange stories about nuclear safety that go beyond "we barely use nuclear, and no one has died yet, it's actually really safe because ... reasons? scientists said so?"
there are some verification focused services - like they take a list of emails and check if they are valid email addresses. Some use fine print to say they are only validating whether or not it is of valid email address FORMATTING, and make no claim about whether or not the email will bounce. verifying if the email address actually belongs to the person it claims to is not part of the deal.
it's nearly an impossible task, because you have no actual source of truth to verify it against. So data vendor A and B give you different results for the same search - now what? you have to manually research and see whos "right" or "more recent".
even if it looks like good data, it might be stale. For example, company size, revenue, C level email addresses, etc all change over time.
so if a customer wants cleaner data - you basically charge them to pump the dataset through Mechanical Turks or upwork or something to have people try to verify things manually. Datasets can be large though and this gets expensive, so it tends to be better to just buy the crap data for cheaper and figure it out yourself
I have a conspiracy theory that these verification services are behind a lot of the phone spam today. they are just checking if your phone number is valid, they dont actually care if you answer.
Data right now is typically bought and sold with an expectation that most of it is crap. it's faster to buy and process 5000 dirty items that probably has a few good leads buried within it than to find leads manually / naturally or broadcast random advertising. (I left the industry in 2020 and my NDA expired in 2021)
Data quality is typically assessed at the "Does this data field have a value for this line item" level. That means data vendors are financially incentivized to make shit up about you as much as they can get away with. think about it for a second, these companies are selling themselves as the source of truth. the actual accuracy does not matter, and the better you are then the less data your customers buy. the data goes stale faster than the accuracy of the data becomes relevant
Did you like a post about a fresh baked baguette that had #french as one of the 100 tags associated with it? congrats, you're french now. it's not exactly this ridiculous, but you get my point