First Roll Of Film, Shot On My Second.

#727 #yoke #boeingtour (at Future of Flight Aviation Center & Boeing Tour)

This is a bad tweet

So before I go into why, I want to make clear that I'm pro-solar for a lot of reasons, I own a couple panels, I think we should do more of it, etc. etc. and I'll talk more about this at the end of the post.

But basically there's a couple reasons why solar can be problematic for an electrical grid.

Reason one is exactly what the MIT article said, the peak generation is not exactly aligned with the rhythms of power use. For the most part in the current electrical grid you have to use power at the same time as you make it, or it is lost forever. If you want to use the energy you made in the middle of the day in the evening, tough luck! Fortunately there's a lot of work going towards grid scale power storage, but each method has tradeoffs:

- batteries: biggest issue is just that we're not making enough of them. We need orders of magnitude more to do grid-level storage. They're cheap enough that a lot of people can afford a house battery now (although that can cause other issues) but the grid is very large. There's also some issues around lithium extraction (do we have enough? Can we do it in a way that's not an environmental disaster?) but overall they're still better than fossil fuels so. Alternative chemistries (like flow batteries and iron batteries) are in the works but they're years from being grid ready so at the moment batteries means lithium.

- pumped storage: Pump water uphill using power in the day, let it flow downhill at night (or whenever there's a need) to generate power. Stupid simple, uses the same tech as a dam. The main issue with this is that you need a place to put all that water high up next to a place where you can put a lot of water low down, so you need to be in the mountains, and you need to be okay with flooding somewhere (maybe two somewheres) to hold all that water. You can't just plop it down anywhere like a battery. It's expensive to site a massive dam project. Luckily it's possible to retrofit some existing dams with pumps to store power, but this is still rare.

- Hydrogen: Use energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then recombine it in a fuel cell to get the power back sometime later. Hydrogen is neat because you can store it and move it somewhere else (say, to power a ship) but it's flammable, can move through metal, needs to be kept cold, and the electrolysis process is very inefficient with current tech. Oh and also oil companies are using it for greenwashing because right now most hydrogen is made from methane, which is very not green.

There are ways to "cheat" without storage, like running certain industries that can ramp up and down quickly only when there's an excess of power, but that means you've got stuff sitting around idle much of the time and not every industry can stop and start that quickly.

Currently we use stuff like coal (not as common in the US anymore), hydro, or nuclear to provide a baseload that runs all the time and let solar/methane/wind handle the peaks. If you have so much solar you're generating most of your power by it in the daytime, that can cause an issue for nuclear since those plants take hours to ramp up and down. Hydro as baseload can be easily ramped (also to follow peaks) but since it provides seasonal storage and minimum flow for water there can be limitations during certain parts of the year.

Reason two is that solar is also an example of a distributed power source. Traditionally, the power company makes power in one place and then sends it out to many other places. The grid is designed with this (more or less) one way flow in mind. But if a significant fraction of houses now have a few panels on the roof this flow pattern gets reversed, and now you may need to retrofit lines or add new ones. You also need to consider stuff like, if the grid goes down is there a way to let neighborhoods run isolated if they have independent generation? It can be done, but somebody needs to plan it, put up switches to turn stuff off, etc. But since a lot of households aren't paying for power anymore (since they have their own solar) or are even receiving money, who is paying for these infrastructure changes? It's not realistic to expect everyone to ditch the grid install solar and a battery either, because the capital cost is still relatively steep for a whole house system (although it pays off quickly and the price is getting cheaper all the time), and we also have stuff like steel production on the grid which really can't generate power locally (or be integrated into a neighborhood).

Another option is to send power really far, because while generation is peaking in California use might be peaking in NYC, so if you can send energy cross-country (or even between continents) you can better take advantage of the peak. There are already some large interconnect projects under construction in the US, but they're expensive and take a long time. Doing something like sending energy from the US to Europe (or vice versa) could be a way to distribute excess ultracheap solar energy, but we're a long way from doing that.

A lot of power companies are making bad choices in response, doing stuff like banning new home solar (yikes) or require people to pay a minimum fee even if they're totally disconnected from the grid. Having a separate "grid maintenance" fee and "power generation" fee might be one option and some companies are doing this but I don't claim to have the answer. IMO it's a good thing companies are starting to feel backed into a corner by solar, it means that adoption is actually becoming significant relative to total generation!

So while corporate greed is 100% a factor in this, the truth is a lot more complicated. The power grid is one of the most complex systems humans manage while also being one of the most critical to our continued existence. All of its components have to work together in a delicate balance all day, all year.

But to circle back around, we're going to have to figure this stuff out and quick if we want to stop global warming. There is no perfect solution to power generation, we're going to need to do solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, tidal, etc. and we're going to have to reshape the grid to make it happen. Solar has huge benefits and even with the cost of storage it's still cheaper than a lot of fossil fuels. Having excess generation capacity before we have storage figured out isn't necessarily a bad thing, either.

My power company has a "green power" option which (due to the laws of physics) can't guarantee all green electrons to my outlets but it does fund buildout of infrastructure for renewables. Some companies just use this kind of thing as a greenwashing slush fund so definitely research where the money actually goes, and it's understandable if you can afford a larger power bill.

I'm a fan of nationalization of energy infrastructure to remove the profit motive and make subsidization of new infrastructure more palatable. There's probably a lot of different ways to make this work and we're going to have to "yes and" our way through it. There's have been some pretty big successes in running moderate scale grids on renewables and I hope to see that continue and expand.

This is a bad tweet because it pushes an oversimplified reaction which just serves to get you mad. It's an easy sell because power companies can be some of the most ghoulish out there (see: Texas cold snap surge pricing) and there's a kernel of truth (power companies would absolutely like to monopolize solar, which they have successfully done in some regions).

It's worth noting that a lot of this policy is being decided at the state and local level. You can make a big difference by getting in contact with your state government and telling them this is a priority, as well as voting for people with a forward-thinking energy policy. It may feel like your vote goes nowhere but these elections are often decided by thousands, hundreds, or even tens of votes so you can absolutely make a difference.

Also non book stuff too, DVDs, CDs, audiobooks, ebooks, 3d printing (not everywhere but more places than you'd think), computer access, bathrooms!

And lots of libraries have self-checkout now if you don't want to interact with anybody! Although it's good to get to know your library staff if that's an option since they're great resources.

Libraries are such an incredible resource and as a voracious reader I am so thankful we get to enjoy them!

...I had a guy come in today asking about how to get his kids library cards. I told him. He asked me how hard it would be for them to get them, and I said that all it took was their presence and his government ID.

He told me about how nice the system was here, where it was so easy to get a card; he said that there was a beautiful public library in Beijing that was top of the line and everything, but that the only way to access it was if you were a high ranking government official or a top professor or something. Instead, our library "serves the reader." His kids will be able to take chapter books home at no cost. He'll even be able to get books in Chinese here so that his native language skills don't atrophy.

I didn't even really know what to say, so I told him how to ask us to buy books for him that we don't already have so that he can still read them at no extra cost. I don't know how to shore up what it must feel like to know that there are books out there you can't read; I've always grown up with a good library nearby. It reminded me of working in my old library, though, where families who spoke Spanish were startled to find out we took any government ID with a formal address in town— even foreign IDs— so that their kids could get access to all of our titles in all the languages we offered.

Ah. Anyway, I hope you check out a library book with this thought in mind. I checked out the first volume of YJ98 today with that thought in mind. I didn't have to pay anything. I put it on hold, and there it was.

at Easton Glacier Mt Baker

I loved seeing the cruncher thing work when they were demolishing the Alaskan Way Viaduct a few years back, great drawing!

grazing on rebar

Washingtonians! It's not too late! You can still register in-person to vote up to and including on election day! Look up your elections office here: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/voter-registration/county-elections-offices

If you've already voted make sure to check your status here in case there's an issue: https://voter.votewa.gov/portal2023/login.aspx