admiralteal

Georgia has every reason to be a solar powerhouse. They have sunlight to spare and every reason to want to build it. Batteries are finally getting cheap enough to outcompete fossil generation, too.

And they ARE building it, so they even are achieving learning curves on it. There are even Republicans on the PSC (Tim Echols) that are highly, highly pro-solar.

Meanwhile Georgia Power is currently planning more fossil gas plants and extending the life of a handful of coal plants because they think they have a shortfall in energy forecasts for future demands. Because, among other things, so many huge tech datacenters are moving to the state (which of course many were doing on the promise of the quite green grid Georgia has to offer, which was the bait that is now being switched on them).

Why? Because they’re lazy, super conservative, and they get guaranteed profits off of capital investments. The Southern Company is one of the most powerful forces of great evil in the country and goes largely unnoticed. They are actively incentivized to fuck their own ratepayers in order to increase their profitability by the agreements and statutes that allow them to be the utility.

The reality is that Vogtle was built and we should be glad for it and use it. It’s spun up and producing gobs of power, and will continue to do so for a damn long time. Great. But in a state where fossil production is still being actively expanded, putting money towards ultra-expensive nuclear over incredibly cheap solar and storage, betraying your own potential “customers” in the process, is just idiotic.

Those blades are way, way, way bigger than you think they are. They are moving extremely fast even at normal speeds. That 15ish rpm converts to around 1.5 rads/s. Modern windmill blades are something like 70m long – so we’re talking speeds of 100m/s or north of 350 kph / 220 mph.

Pretty comparable speeds to the windspeeds of the tornadoes in question during routine operation. Of course, there’s a lot more intensity with a tornado, but windmills are actually designed to let most of the air pass them unimpeded because it makes them work more efficiently.

Of course, their energy production will be deliberately curtailed under high winds because the generators and infrastructure hooking them up can only handle so much – they’ll brake the blades, or rely on back-emf from the motors, or some combination of those factors to prevent them from over-generating.

Of course, unlike typical wind being harvested by the windmills, the tornado’s airflow is far from laminar, meaning that even with their highest intensity, they will be losing a lot of efficiency in driving those blades.

…the tornado, of course, will simply knock them down.

There’s lots of industrial uses for CO2 – this style of DAC plant can be viewed as a green producer. That said, it’s really easy to outpace industrial demands and we can expect any facility like this will need to be sequestering most of their “production”. It’s hard to overstate how much excess CO2 there is in the atmosphere compared to the sum total of all industrial carbon dioxide needs. Since CO2 is thermodynamicly very stable, splitting it up to get pure carbon would be quite inefficient.

It’s part of the business model of every single DAC project pretty much without exception. Any way you can make back a bit of money selling that CO2 rather than sequestering it is an opportunity to offset costs. And no matter what you think of market economics, they’re very effective at reducing costs.

One of the most interesting uses is with projects like e.g. CarbonCure, where they dope cement production with CO2 which has known effects to strengthen (or at least not weaken) concrete. They don’t produce their own CO2 for their plants and so need to align themselves with renewable CO2 production facilities (which they do Heirloom Carbon).

Big issue is they it’s hard to compete with fossil-based CO2 production. So the next step once tech like this is proven is to start regulating/banning fossil-based CO2 production.

Musk told workers that Tesla “will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction.”

Sounds to me like the plan is to finish what is already under contract and do no more. I sure am glad the US authorities committed to that north american charger standard… what’s even the status on getting a full specification for it including third-party development at this point anyway?

I can’t pull a quote for the new vehicle development team’s situation because Tesla basically just keeps making the Model 3 with barely even incremental improvements to it, and even that one has totally inconsistent build quality vehicle to vehicle. Unless someone thinks the Cybertruck is going to save them – hah.

And yet even still the overwhelming majority of that “small plastic” is just… tire dust. That’s still the bulk of the material.

That’s the vast scale of automobile pollution. Another piece of how horrific auto-centric society is for the entire planet.

I think you may be forgetting that weed is illegal, federally. The product you’re buying is for tobacco – officially – because if it weren’t it would be a federal crime to ship it across state borders.

This is for large plastics. Big pieces of trash.

Microplastics are almost entirely just tire dust.

Out-of-date iFixit Article

Follow up where Sony made the good ones worse

But Fairphone does always give us hope

That was the point that hit my limit, now that you mention it – getting it to show up on a duckdns address on the https public internet. Not being able to make that work after fiddling with all kinds of contradictory guides nor with 2 or 3 completely different reverse proxy tools just left me mad. Especially since a regular ngix reverse proxy manager container works fine on the same computer, but for some reason was just refusing to connect to HA (SSL issues, I think).

Having HA just working locally didn’t really make it a replacement for the big tech solutions that already work fairly smoothly. I’m sure I’ll go back to get it the way I want one day, but the learning curve on any selfhosting is still pretty rough.

I had it briefly up and running and can only say… it’s a bear, at least if you are trying to use it as a drop-in replacement with existing hardware. I’m sure I’ll go back and sort it out at some point, but it left me just feeling tired and frustrated even when I had it doing most of what I wanted.

If you were thoughtful about hardware from the ground up, maybe it would be more straightforward, but I tried getting it running on just an old workstation with ubuntu installed on it that I use for very basic stuff like syncthing and it was just painful. Mix of Kasa/Wyze/Philips devices that are just what I’ve somehow collected over time.

It would be nice to see better first-class add-on support. I found myself needing to SSH into a VM to get stuff into it, and even then it was twitchy in all the wrong ways. Would also be nice to see better support for the containerized version, because that’s so much easier to distribute and execute compared to a VM. Next time I’ll probably just try to do it all with docker and see if it hurts less, since I don’t think any addons I was using were critical to begin with.

That said, if you’re doing HA, get a dedicated piece of hardware for it. I suspect it vastly simplifies things.

They literally are claiming they found a new fundamental force.

It’s bullshit. He’s a liar and “the debrief” should be goddamned ashamed of publishing this tripe.

This can’t be ion propulsion because ion propulsion involves a propellant – the ions.

Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.

You won’t immediately be sent to the stocks for saying “I don’t want to answer”, the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don’t want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney asking the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.

Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren’t prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.

They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don’t want to answer and say so, it’s unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.

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Then you’re arguing against the wrong person.

I’ve never once said regenerative beef farming is good for the environment. I’ve only said, consistently, that it is better than more typical industrial practices. And that those arguing that it makes no difference whether it’s industrial or regenerative are full of shit.

Read my top-level comment and tell me what in it contradicts this.

The core point of regenerative ag is to not have to import outside fertilizers/feed. That you replace that with land management – crop rotation, essentially, giving the land time to regrow on its own.

There’s no free energy coming from the cows. It comes from the goddamn sun. If you don’t load your pastures with monoculture grass stock and chew it to the dirt every season, you don’t have to constantly plow and fertilize it to keep it grazeable.

Don’t accuse me of being an industry shill, by the way. I am not from the rurals. I actually read up on this because soil health and soil science is fascinating and this is from where a lot of the research is coming.

And the transportation costs I referred to are costs transporting and producing those fertilizers – and the supplemental feeds you need when you overextend the land and thus have to stop grazing on them during long stretches.

I’m not sure if this point is lost on you or if you’re being obtuse, but you have dodged it again here even though I think I mentioned it pretty directly here.

There’s little more damaging to a cow’s health than living on concrete or in close indoor quarters. Than standing around in shit all day, breaking open their hooves on curbs, and all that crap.

Your argument here is that it may not work everywhere and is therefore bad… that’s a bad argument.

Please try not to engage in the straw man of the carbon free shit. We agree it’s bullshit. There’s no such thing as emission free ag at any level and particularly for beef.

You’ve got to acknowledge that transportation and production of and feed/fertilizer are major sources of emissions that are reduced, and potentially eliminated, by these practices. There’s no point having a serious discussion if you refuse to do that.

I’m also really having eyebrows raised by your apparent claims that its not healthier for the animals to be pasture raised. I think you are in a serious minority in believing that.

This is basically correct. FERC policies / interconnection queues are currently the biggest thing holding back additional renewable growth. Last I was looking there was something like a terawatt of solar projects waiting for interconnection nationwide. I’m not sure how much this effects California specifically but I believe it does.

The essential issue is that most utilities have a policy that’s sort of first pass the post. The first major infrastructure project, including generation, which would render the grid over capacity needs to pay for those grid capacity upgrades in order to get their project permitted. Which a lot of these projects can’t afford, so the queues just become really chaotic whenever someone loses that lottery draw. And the queues* can be absurdly long. Years not months. Many projects might not be able to afford those kind of delays.

Particularly painful for tribal entities. I know there were several major wind projects in the middle of the country that got fully funded and planned out and then killed by those queues.

The dumbest part is that a lot of these grids actually do have adequate capacity but the lack of proper monitoring equipment - which isn’t even very expensive to install - that could trigger curtailment for those extremely rare over capacity events prevents using the grid at its real capacity.

There are some pretty deep issues with most utilities for why this happens. The short of it is that are huge misalignments of incentives in the public-private partnership contracts.

Solar in particular is so cheap that if the free market were truly allowed to build as much of it as it could bear it would probably wipe out most fossil generation. It’s probably for the best that we don’t allow that kind of crazy free for all for a lot of reasons, but it’s notable that fossil electric generation is basically guaranteed to decline even if just for purely economic reasons going forward.

If you want to advocate for this policy look for if you have something like a Public Service Commission. This is one of those things like City Council or an MPC - if you have an elected PSC they probably don’t actually hear a lot of constituent voices meaning if you reach out to them you will have an outsized voice.

Smart transmission technology and reconductoring are two examples of fairly cheap grid upgrades we aren’t really making that could vastly increase short-term capacity. But the main thing we need immediately is permitting and other bureaucratic reform.

Sounds like a compelling argument for why we need better safety standards for cars and traffic engineering.

In the US? The IRA is a very good model. Hard to overstate what a good piece of legislation it is. Doesn’t go far enough, but it makes some serious strides.

Promote electrification. Renewable energy generation is already cheaper than fossil fuel, so with minimal additional incentives the market is going to wipe out grid fossil energy production over time. Calibrate your incentives and penalties to make it happen as fast as possible – we aren’t there yet, but we’ve taken major strides.

You’ll need to do a LOT of grid enhancement in the process. As more electrification occurs, you’ll need better transmission of that electricity. A lot of the utilities have vastly miscalibrated incentive structures right now, which favor building major capital projects over doing repair and maintenance. Better regulation can fix this, though some of them are so incompetent and corrupt that they long-term probably just need to be nationalized (looking at you Central Maine Power/Versant). Re-conductoring is a good place to start for this because it’s cheap and can increase current grid capacity by something like 2-3x. Large grids with a good mix of wind/solar and dynamic pricing should be largely resistant to any intermittency issues of renewables, by some energy storage sugar on top will take care of that.

Side note: the main thing pumping the breaks on more renewable energy generation facilities is not actually a lack of demand, it’s interconnection queues.

Another prong is urbanization. You massively reduce emissions by reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Good urbanism reduces VMT, creates more financially sustainable towns, and also more pleasant, safe, and healthy environments for the average person to live in. Strong Towns has a lot to say about how you can start pushing for better urbanism right now. There’s little more you can do for total emissions as an individual than helping your city avoid expensive and dehumanizing sprawl; show up to your MPC/city council meetings and advocate for good urban policy.

We can further cut back on emissions by reducing the reliance on interstate trucking for freight. Trains can (and should) be electrically-powered and are FAR cheaper for a society. Delivery “last miles” can be done by various EVs pretty easily. For the US, this pretty much requires nationalization of the right of way/track (and then, ideally, deregulation of the freight operators). That is, make the train network function a lot more like the current highway network. Bonus points: ~80% of microplastics in our water are just tire dust. Let’s do less of that.

Industrial heat is another major pillar. Places like steel and concrete plants need to switch to heat batteries powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels. This tech is ancient and reliable, but still not at scale, but at least some promising pilots are already happening. And the minute any of them work at all, they’ll take over fast. Because renewables + heat batteries ought to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than furnaces + fossil fuels once operating at scale. And the facilities will also be able to make use of aforementioned renewable intermittency to save even more money (e.g., charging their heat battles at nadir hours where energy prices go to near 0 or even negative).

We’ll also need to do some stuff that is politically sketchier. Reducing certain kinds of consumption (industrial beef, fast fashion, tariff-loophole import goods, etc). But those are higher-hanging fruit and it’s ok to procrastinate on them a bit if they’re too politically difficult right now.