Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
Dishonest post. When you bought your system you were grandfathered into either NEM 1 or NEM 2. Please provide proof that your arrangement changed.
Comment · 3 months ago
Australia has been a great success for solar and battery storage.

Your statement about a wealth transfer is putting no value on climate change or good air quality which benefits all.

Comment · 3 months ago
Bluetti already has a product for this available in the EU. I have been posting eveywhere that they need to bring it to the US.

https://www.bluettipower.eu/products/balco-transfer-hub

Balcony solar without storage is actually pretty dumb when we already have integrated battery/inverter/solar mppt units available for a few hundred dollars.

All we need to do is have something like this hub inbetween to ensure grid isolation when an outage occurs.

For crticial loads you would just plug those directly into the all in one battery unit. Almost all of them these day also have a <20ms UPS pass through function as well. When the grid goes down it can isolate the battery from backfeeding the house but the solar will still function and the critical loads will still function.

With a solution like Pila is developing you could even use your homes wiring to transfer power (~1kW) around multiple small battery units (attached to independent circuits) each with some different critical loads and solar attached to them.

Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 7 months ago
A high powered EV charger is 800 volts. Totally safe and outdoors in thousands of places.
Comment · 7 months ago
I see an overwhelming interest in Nuclear power in our media and in online articles posted to reddit and HN. In many discussions I have had online and in person most people are significantly misinformed in that they think that Nuclear power is playing a larger role than it is currently or that we can not scale EVs/heat pumps/AI Datacenters without building a lot more Nuclear power plants. Most people scoff at the idea that wind power, solar power and hydro power with batteries could ever totally meet our needs.

Above I linked live ERCOT data which you can investigate. Another high penetration renewable to investigate is California ISO.

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso

In both cases yes, I do see that Nuclear power is providing a steady baseload of roughly 10% of power generation throughout the day. But Nuclear power as we currently implement it is:

* Very inflexible. * Very expensive to build. * Very time consuming to build. * Still incurs significant downtime for refueling and ends up producing spent fuel which we don't have a great solution for.

I understand research is going into technologies which may address all of those things and that is interesting and exciting. However is it really a blocker for the future?

Just in Texas they have recently peaked at 32GW of solar generation, 47GW of solar+hydro+wind generation, 10GW of batteries discharging, and 79% of demand supported by renewables. In terms of battery storage they have grown from almost nothing 2 years ago: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Tot...

Solar has tripled in 4 years: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Sol...

So the question is, why not just build more solar, wind, hydro and batteries? Why is there so much attention on Nuclear power being the only answer?

I am not advocating stopping research on Nuclear power, or shutting down current plants. I actually think we should just naturally follow the technology cost curve and the market forces.

Comment · 7 months ago
Win8 was a disaster. Hard to understand what Steven is even saying or his point about the Macbook Neo.

The Neo is enabled by the increasing capability of the phone chips and the pre-existing completed move to ARM for MacOS that happened over a 5 year span. Critically the entire app ecosystem quickly embraced the new architecture and there were some nice fallbacks for legacy apps. The sheer scale of the phone chips allows them to be priced to where the Neo becomes doable, especially when using the previous generation of chip.

Windows 8 and Surface RT had no such advantages. Windows was always going to stay primarily an x86 operating system at the time those products hit. There was no obvious chip that had a scale of the iPhone chips. Windows RT was without many apps (chicken/egg problem).

Comment · 8 months ago
The peak max solar record in ERCOT was hit today at over 31GW. Five years ago it was only 5.4GW.

The peak renewables to load was also hit today at 83%. Throughout the entire day solar, wind and battery storage provided the majority share of power.

Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 9 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
The safety aspect of them is probably more important than in grid storage. Also the performance at colder temps.
Comment · 1 year ago
I find it’s best to use it to actually give context. Like prompted with a peice of information that the LLM doesn’t know how to look up (such as a link to the status or logs for an internal system), give it a tool to perform the lookup.

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