shame only works if there are consequences. if you're not calling them out then you are complicit. you are accepting that, and you need to live with it.
if you want someone to respect your feelings then ultimately you will have to make them. for broke-ass hoodrats, for whom economic factors won't work, that means eventually going to Louis' ultima ratio -- e.g. calling this out may lead to a fistfight on a moving bus.
More to the point, we currently share a society with many people of a violent culture, which makes directly shaming them dangerous and unwise. This was not always the case. The death of shaming is largely related to the increased daily proximity to violent subcultures who do not fear consequences.
Those subcultures have their own notions of shame and honor, and have lines they are careful about crossing and willingness to turn to violence if their honor is overly injured.
Disapproving glances on the subway when their music is too loud does not rise to that level, however.
That I really don't get (and I experience it a lot using transit for my commute) . It seems more common now, but you'd think it would be less common. Headphones used to be bulky things, now Bluetooth earbuds are tiny things easily put in your pocket -- why not use them?
In some places it's shameful to show one's hair, or to eat while you walk in public. In some, people don't think about those things at all. In others, the ability to do those things can be an expression of personal freedom.
Negative externalities is culturally dependent. The Japanese consider the sight of a person eating while walking to be a negative externality. Are we going to start complaining here on HN about people doing it? No, we recognize that those taboos vary across time and space.
The difference is some taboos are just based on tradition, and others are based on actual damage. Nobody is hurt by seeing someone walking and eating -- they can just not look at them and the problem is solved. You can't not just hear the noise people inconsiderate not to use headphones make.
In cultures where the sight of certain things is taboo, telling a local person that they have to direct their gaze elsewhere feels as much of a rude imposition as someone's phone audio reaching your ears. Please try to step beyond your own cultural upbringing and realize how arbitrary and mutable all these things are.
Well, not quite. Not showing your hair or not eating in public may have meaning in somebody's culture/religion, but it doesn't hurt anyone else either way. Playing video/music without earphones does. And surely people must have experienced it from the other side when people nearby were playing music they didn't care for. I think it is reasonable for people to ask themselves "Would I like it if someone near me did <X>?", and if the answer is 'No' to not do it themselves. Maybe this is "shame" or maybe simple empathy.
Eating in public places not mean for eating subjects others to the smell of your food in the same way that listening to something on speaker subjects them to unwanted sound. Hijabs are more indirect but I would disagree that it doesn't affect others.
Have you traveled Latin America? Loud audio in public is so normal there that immigrants to Europe often can't see what all this fuss is about when people complain about loud phones on public transport. This is very much a mutable cultural thing.
But then people get angry if you don't want those "cultural differences" in your daily life. And when people question why you prefer private transportation.
More seriously, whenever I ask a young person on public transport to use headphones (and luckily I live in a region where I can safely do that and enjoy some authority as an older person), the response is usually that the youth doesn't have headphones on him for whatever reason (doesn't own any, left them at home, whatever). But with the breakdown of this taboo, people don't feel that not having headphones should stop them from sweet TikTok dopamine.
iPhones also have a horrible sound management system which is just finally getting better. People keep their phone on silent at all times for this reason.
If from the start they had simply had separate volume controls for alarms / phone calls / media / alerts then I think this would not have become a trend.
Or their shame of playing TikTok audio in public is less than their shame and anxiety of dealing with the modern world (including crowded mass transit)
FWIW I use public transport daily and it basically never happens (I honestly don't remember a single time, it's that rare). Maybe it's cultural thing, I mean country dependent? Loud teenagers of course happen, but they don't play music out loud.
In my experience it's dominantly teen-aged kids who are just figuring the world out, or in more unfortunate but very rare cases 30-somethings who never quite grew up.
I was that shameless annoyance once too. It doesn't mean shame is dead.
I think there’s a difference between knowing you’re doing something wrong and not caring, and not even knowing you’re doing anything wrong. What you’re describing is usually the latter.
They definitely get glares and annoyed looks from fellow passengers. And they must be oblivious if they’ve never noticed other people distractingly listening to music next to them or whatever.
I feel so triggered right now… /begin rant/ VendorPay doesn’t summarize the total payment is a bug? Nope, working as intended. Put a vendor “on hold” still permits all new invoices to go into the payment queue a bug? Nope, working as intended. Want to test/prove an integration with your new ERP? Nope, got to buy and sign contracts. I could go on and on about all the annoyances of small business SaaS in the accounting space. Don’t even get me started about not responding to the actual question of an email—like if you went into a restaurant and asked for a steak medium-rare and the server said, ok. One steak well-done /rant
I get the topic—-abusing customer service. I’m just not feeling SaaS right now. There are conflicting incentives that I just don’t understand. I feel some SaaS are taking plays from the enshitification experts.
The program has so far spent $2.5bn, and installed 11GWh. That's just the cost of the subsidy (~30% discount), not the cost of what home owners tipped in.
Utility scale batteries are now at ~$66m/GWh, or about ~$726m equivalent.
It does not make sense for everyone to be doing a bespoke installation inside their own home. It is ridiculously inefficient.
We are a society. We don't build our own roads, water, grid, schools, hospitals. Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? (A: failure of governance)
Fair points, but you are glossing over important issues:
1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping.
2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries.
3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid.
4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.
1. The subsidy was fixed per kWh at a level that has always been vastly above utility scale BESS.
2. Power usage is flatlining. There is no reason to need transmission upgrades for BESS. Successful projects are colocated at retiring generators, or at existing major grid terminus.
3. Are those benefits worth 4x the price? Noting again, that's 4x the subsidy, not even the actual installed cost which is closer to 8-12x.
4. It would have been cheaper even at just the subsidy rate.
Where are you getting that? The 2026 AEMO plan says:
"Electricity consumption is expected to almost double over the coming decades, driven by population and economic growth, electrification across homes, businesses and industry and the emergence of new large loads such as data centres."
Are you really holding up Snowy 2 as a success story? We're past 20bn on Snowy 2 now. Run those numbers against grid scale BESS, on both capacity and peak generation and get back to me - 10 years ago it looked good, now it's not favourable.
lots of people confuse a $75-$120 / kWh cell price for grid scale battery installed price, which these days is about $300 / kWh.
1 gigawatt hour of installed BESS therefore at current prices is roughly $300 million.
Snowy 2 is 350 gigawatt hours, which would cost $105 billion in equivalent batteries which is about $150 billion in Australian dollars, or ~7x cheaper per gwh.
If you price it on throughput and not storage size, because Snowy 2 is very constrained on when it can charge and discharge then the realistic 8Twh per year you can get out of Snowy2 loses to batteries by a factor of 3 based on your costs.
But that's assuming the batteries can charge and discharge in full every day.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle where Snowy can act as seasonal storage with a big capacity that isn't used every day.
I think it would then also lose on price if compared with a portfolio of batteries alongside solar and wind to directly supply electricity and continually recharge the batteries over seasonal scales but that is a more complex comparison.
In general I think even good hydro schemes (and Snowy 2 is not a good one) rely on non-electrical factors to be worthwhile now batteries have plummeted in price, e.g. managing seasonal water flows for agriculture, and the electricity can be seen as an additional benefit.
sigh This reminds me of all of the tedious arguments by people reminding us that solar panels don't work at night, implying that they are therefore useless.
Or the ones that remind you that batteries are useless for seasonal storage.
Or that the wind doesnt always blow.
Yes, individually all of them have crippling flaws and all of them work best when combined with technology that has complementary crippling flaws.
Snowy 2 won't be used instead of batteries it'll be used alongside batteries.
Right now nothing comes close to beating its price / gwh no matter how much the cost overruns or how many people dump on it for being 7x cheaper per gwh than batteries instead of 10x.
More countries should be building one as well as building out grid level batteries. They complement each other.
I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies I've ever seen in this country. The numbers are much worse than you make out. The program has spent more than 2.5bn (the projected figure) and we don't know yet how much. The subsidy was closer to 70% for a typical large battery install. The government's own gen cost report would have put grid storage 1.5x ahead on ROI.
Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.
I've tried to be as charitable on both sides. As you note the real subsidy is higher, but the owner contributions are still high, and the projected cost of the program is now closer to 7.5Bn.
For 2N government dollars, the program gets 3N home battery. Grid is 2x more efficient by their own accounting. Therefore, we could have gotten 4N grid storage. This is not comparable to the home solar programs - which I understand to 'enticed' more private investment. Simply buying votes and lying to the public. I feel for the renters who paid their taxes and never saw a cent.
>I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies
Don't forget about the EV subsidies! No fringe benefits tax, no road user charges, discounted registration.
Set aside the broader incentives (noble though they may be) and just look at the equity in the distribution of the welfare.
I was surprised there were no companies offering finance deals, such as loans to cover the out of pocket costs. An energy retailer could lock in a customer for 10 years to reasonable rates, make more money, and customer pays less. I suspect it was because the limiting factor was not cash, but the installer capacity. Solar installers have been working flatout, and even more customers would just push their prices up further.
Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal.
I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.
We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.
> Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale.
A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.
No, we do not in fact have the "power pipes". Those "pipes" have capacity limits. Those "pipes" and getting them approved and built in the US is a key limiting factor that throttles... pretty much everything. Yes, it holds up data centers, but also I've heard 'green' energy advocates complaining for decades about how difficult it is to get the permits and approvals to get wind and solar facilities hooked up, they're holding up nuclear plants, they're holding all kinds of things up.
There's also something to be said for distributed production and storage. We don't all live in ultra-compact cities. I agree apartment buildings don't need to be playing this game. But Australia (and the US) are extremely dispersed relative to Europe, for example. There should, in theory, be resilience in distributed production and storage that grid managers could call upon to help manage point failures.
Those are transmission lines. Utilities do need to upgrade distribution lines and transformers for areas with large-scale adoption of EVs, heat pumps or other increases in electrical load. Localized battery and solar installations can help defer these infrastructure upgrades, if done by planning and consultation with the utility.
Base Power is, at present, installing nearly 100 40kWh batteries on homes per day throughout Texas and the Chicago area. It is doubling total deployed capacity approximately every six months (currently at a bit over 0.6GWh total, to hit 1GWh by EoY). Read: at scale.
There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power.
Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
“ A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted
Photovoltaics proved so successful in Hawaii that the local utility, HECO, has instituted policies to block further expansion”
I don't live in Hawaii anymore, but when I last did and HELCO was still allowing homeowners to participate their home solar with a grid tie they had the following limitations: no matter what your balance of power production to consumption differential was, there was no discount for a base 'connection fee' - essentially the lease of the meter.
They would sell each household kWh at full price, and 'purchases' daytime production at a wholesale rate derived from a mainland commercial grid interconnect rate, the difference was about one order of magnitude, and their meter had the ability to cap output from the panels, such that no matter what the purchase price of excess power would never exceed the consumed power price, and every month there was at least $80ish in connection fee.
This kept most of my neighbors from either, a) considering solar for the household, or b) deciding to stay disconnected from the grid when the house finished installation.
My friends with new houses being built mauka (up-country) also faced a Many-KiloUSD per pole cost to run lines along the road to new housing areas, and if even you could get everyone on a road to pitch in for a new run it often was more economical for everyone to just DIY their own selection of solar, wind, generator, batteries and it still was less expensive than just running the lines, even before accounting for kWh costs.
Even in towns down closer to the coast, it still made more economic sense to use wind+solar and a batteries with a backup generator than to pay for HELCO's power... which also came in with such erratic voltage and irregular wave profiles that it routinely toasted anything sensitive, from refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, you name it... which careful reading of the manufacturer warranties shows that for most main brands they specifically exclude Hawaii from any guarantee of service or replacement.
Now, HECO services a different island than where I lived, and the situation is widely variable in each of the islands, with completely different rules and operating practices. So that's not to say my observations have any validity outside of Big Island, and some limited observation from friends' ohana in Maui.
When we lived in town, it was necessary to put UPS inline for everything more complicated than a toaster oven, and when we moved way up mauka to our little goat farm, the answer was solar and at first golf cart batteries, then a whole stack of recycled/reconditioned submarine iron core 1.2v cells and some very heavy duty cycle inverters; combined with extremely conservative electricity consumption: about 10~15 kWh per week.
One of the benefits of using all LED red lighting at night, and living at elevation to never need A/C, plus methane digester powered by goat waste for refrigeration and mostly using a rocket stove for cooking with guava wood. and no TV, no tower PC, hand crank wringer for laundry like most mainland peoples great-grandparents and line dry on the patio where the rain cant soak them and the wind might get them dry before too long. Its not an easy or soft way to live, but in many ways my wife and I wish we sere still there.
> the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper".
Now if I've paid $5000 for a product which makes me electricity for free and then later you offer me the same amount of electricity for just $4000 you could say yours is cheaper, but, er, I already bought that $5000 product, I'm already out $5000 and my electricity is free, yours is not actually cheaper now. What we're seeing here is just "Did you know solar panels have become cheaper over time?"
If you have to pay a connection fee for having the solar panel hooked up to your houses grid, I could see it ending up cheaper to disconnect the panels and sell them back tbh
I don't understand. If you owned a solar calculator you'd have to pay somebody because you made power ? Huh ? We've discussed before on HN the fact that the "Lets own everything" capitalists apparently didn't realise they needed to own the Sun and Wind (modulo Simpsons cartoon) but I guess maybe yours do? How much do you pay for a sunny day, on average, and if you won't pay do you get clouds or what ?
Which translates to "the local power company was knowingly using ineficient sources to steal from their clients, until their clients did something about it and forced them be efficient".
Decentralization might be dollar-inefficient, but brings resiliency and redundancy to the system. The whole internet infrastructure would be probably cheaper with more centralization. Data backups are also ridiculously innefficient dollar-wise.
These systems are not truly redundant in that sense though - as they are intended to be centrally coordinated (the manufacturer provides a web API). So they are potentially vulnerable to e.g cyberwarfare.
Not all inneficiencies are bad. If the cost to build ridiculously redundant systems is low enough, the system overall is more robust to black swan events than any central planner could ever be.
The subsidy has the effect of prompting the wealthiest consumers to spend around 2.25x the amount of subsidy on battery installations while reducing the load on the grid, lowering prices for all grid users.
Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount on power bills.
Cost is never the only factor though. Being energy independent and self-sufficient feels awesome. Also whole house backup rocks, together with a smart app showing and optimizing your energy usage.
My neighbour has a battery installation because where I live they subsidise both - the panels and the battery. In the event of a power outage he can keep running his house for ~3 days if being somewhat frugal with consumption.
A distributed grid is a resilient grid. Legacy grid needs massive transmission infrastructure. Solar + batteries at home have zero real estate costs, zero transmission infrastructure costs. Keeps a lot of people employed.
It makes enough sense in rural areas for a Vermont power company to lease batteries to residential customers. They avoid having to do expensive upgrades that way:
A government subsidized home improvement project is an easy political sale. It gets the homeowners on board, because they will see an immediate drop in energy costs, plus they also get to personally pocket the increased property values.
Versus spending money on utility scale buildouts, where the benefits will come at an undetermined later date, unceremoniously, when the utility company lowers prices. And even after that happens your political enemies will still wag finger at the price tag of your project and ask why don't you spend that somewhere else.
Inefficient and overly preferential towards homeowners? Sure. But better than a policy that will be dead by political reasons. It is what it is.
So too is building single-family homes an inefficient way of providing housing, compared to apartment buildings, not to mention the cost of suburban roads and utility connections etc.
> We are a society
Indeed, and part of living in a society is about making progress that is politically feasible. That the 2nd Avenue subway (in New York City) costs such a stratospherically insane amount in time and money is not an argument against subways or public transportation.
Politics is the art of the possible, and Australia's progress should be celebrated here, not second-guessed.
There are still advantages to distributed power generation beyond overcoming governance failures—-microgrids lie somewhere in between and can increase resilience in the face of more severe and unpredictable climate events.
Are we a society though? Margaret Thatcher famously said "There's no such thing as society" and a lot of people have been doing their best to make that true.
There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.
For the record, the full quote is :
* think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and [end p29] there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”. That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look! It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”*
Sort of. While not really mainstream, there are private roads (and long driveways), wells, and a (limited) amount of home-schooling. Not hospitals obviously as that requires specialized training and equipment.
Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term.
This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!
The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.
Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.
No. The modern grid has little relation to capitalism. There is some private ownership, but there are massive government barriers to entry and massive regulation of the system.
Electric grid are excellent example of natural monopoly.
"An industry is a natural monopoly if a single firm can supply the entire market at a lower long-run average cost than if multiple firms were to operate within it."
Final numbers are not known yet. The Australian government's own 'Gencost' report put grid vs home based storage at 2x as efficient. In this subsidy program, the ratio of private to public money per a battery is about 1:2 (ie 70% subsidy). It was in my own case. Therefore, we would have had more battery storage if the government had just built grid storage.
Having your own battery + inverter setup dramatically reduces the ability for the grid utility to screw you over.
Everyone I know has had that happen at one time or another, and it’s extremely common to want home battery just for the degree of ‘power sovereignity’ it grants you.
It says the subsidy is 30%. You just said it's 70% and that it's 50% in the same sentence. Surely you can give one link to something that backs up anything you said.
Everyone in my office paid around 7.5-8.5k AUD for batteries around the 24k mark, so I know this to be the case. I could email you the invoice if you don't believe me xD
You can read up on the subsidy itself too - they basically set a cost per kwhr target based on the few bespoke batteries on the market, before it was flooded with cheaper Chinese options. Because it was based on capacity rather than a percentage discount, this caused the effective discount to be much higher than intended at the outset.
We don't know the final numbers yet - but government has reforecast for 7 billion for the program's duration, which includes a much smaller subsidy continuing until 2030. I expect it will be close to about 5B spent so far.
The program is of course much more complex than can be fit in a HN comment, and it has evolved over time. The simplest answer is the government contributes $252/kWh. Approx. 4x the cost if the government funded a utility scale BESS - noting the installed cost of a home battery is 400-1200$/kWh depending on brand/options etc.
> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?
That's simple! As per Felon Musk - to sell overhead to electricity providers. Allegedly they will gladly buy energy from you! So with big enough roof, you can just sit home relax and watch TV, while your solar panels make your living.
> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?
Because government is failing to address these issues?
Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time.
But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.
Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal level. But our electricity provider is just unable to reliably keep the lights on through winter and wildfire season, I.e. most of the year. Since installing the batteries a couple years ago our home has stayed warm and lit through two multi-day outages when neighbors have had to go stay in a hotel.
It is, yeah. The condition of the subsidy is that up to 60 times a year the electricity company can pull the power from our batteries to cover higher demand. When I said "at a societal level" I was more imagining solar farms and grid level storage though.
I find this seeming opposition (not from you or on this thread train) to installation of backup systems to be a bit befuddling. Battery backup systems, solar roofs/panels, &c. all effectively add excess capacity and resilience to our existing infrastructure. Aside from something like worrying about China's continued dominance in the space I don't really understand the hang up folks seem to have.
Plus in some sense the utilities are regulated by the government but they are private companies. If they're getting out-competed in the market by battery backup systems or other alternatives because of poor performance and high cost, fuck em' they can go out of business. We'll (free market democracies) figure it out.
This isn't a federal government issue in the US. Local and state governments dropped the ball here. No one wants to pay what it costs to bury power lines in most locales, and we have a ton of byzantine regulations that make it slow and expensive to add generation capacity.
What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it? How many days will it take? Have fun.
Depends on the availability of installers. Or your skills.
I don't know why this is some gotcha. How many times have you had a storm rip your roof off and take down the entire neighborhood's grid? And if that happened would you still live in your house or find temporary accomodation?
} What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it?
How is that different than any other weather related house damage? You'd call your insurance company and a licensed contractor.
Assuming the house is habitable, you'd still have grid power, or if not you'd move temporarily while repairs took place.
The point is, if it's your home solar system, damages and repairs are your problem to manage. Localized grid outages might be more common, but you don't have to lift a finger or pay anything extra to get them repaired. The utility just does it. And they start working immediately, even in the middle of the night or on weekends.
> Localized grid outages might be more common, but you don't have to lift a finger or pay anything extra to get them repaired.
I'm not arguing against the electric grid. In fact, I'm an advocate. The grid has different failure and restoration modes than local generation and storage.
Unless you actually have no grid connection option at all (or it's prohibitively expensive) it makes a great deal of sense to pair a solar+battery system with the grid.
Done smartly, these systems can actually support each other.
> Localized grid outages might be more common, but you don't have to lift a finger or pay anything extra to get them repaired. The utility just does it.
Could be like my one neighbor who built a whole 8kw rig of panels on a wheeled frame so he can pull it into his garage during storms (Hurricane prone area). Otherwise he just moves it around his yard daily to prevent dead spots in the grass.
A better phone sent by horse would get to my hands sooner than a phone I don't give a shit about that can be shipped by airpost.
I moved from high end to a "mid-range" Samsung phone that's way better than it needs to be given how boring phones have become. The only upgrade I wish on it was more open source software.
"Because the common denominator between both of these distinct incidents was Firebase, we are taking the additional step of immediately removing it from our tech stack altogether to definitively eliminate the risk of similar vulnerabilities in the future." - from their post-mortem.
Thank god the root cause was definitively identified! /s
This is absolutely insane. This is the most inefficient way imaginable to deploy solar power.
We could deploy 100x the capacity $/Wh with utility-scale farms. Unfortunately we are just completely failing on basic coordination problems like this in the west, every man for himself.
It is inefficient in the grand scheme of things yes. But it is very efficient on the level of the individual home owner, especially if they do not own the building so cannot install solar. It is a good way to cheaply reduce the cost of electricity.
Yes, installing the solar power globally, and getting a globally connected grid would be more efficient in terms of solar panels/kW(h). But alas, that also requires a lot more infrastructure.
In the mean time this can reduce the energy bill for many people. Especially, if tied to a battery. It is not intended to provide independence, for that you need a lot more capacity.
AFAICT, the Continental US does not have a fully connected grid. This allows electricity providers to charge wildly different rates depending on the state/region. It also requires each net to individually ensure capacity and uptime.
Having a connected grid is a requirement for being able to transfer energy from places with significant amount of renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro) to others. Even if this comes with large losses in transfer it is still a net positive. Especially if you factor in the resulting stability.
Does $1 on home solar take away $1 from utility solar? Probably not. Does it take away more than $0.00? Definitely.
Who knows if it takes away an amount that actually matters - however in the short term at least it absolutely makes things better for the individual installing them, which is good.
Historical weather data is discrete. You need continuous state for weather modelling which is currently achieved through conventional reforecasts using those historical observations.
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