timconverse.bsky.social
Tech investor (ML, renewable energy). Alumnus of many tech bigcorps and startups. Recovering engineering director. San Francisco resident. Twitter refugee. Two-issue voter (democracy, climate). I like to hear myself write. https://medium.com/@timconverse1
86 posts
550 followers
328 following
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Active Commenter
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What I like about this judgment shortcut is that it dispenses with the onerous step of reading what is admittedly a very long book :)
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Ah, right. Sounds like a particularly stupid version of guilt by association. “Don’t judge a book by (stereotypical associations you might have about) its owners.”
But I’m a fan of DFW and IJ, so I’ve probably already disqualified myself as being that guy. :)
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Bad reputation why?
What do the haters say when they talk about it?
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I’ve always been a fan of RZA and GZA. SZA not so much.
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Uh, isn't leftist a relative term just like centrist? Aren't you still defining yourself relative to the room you're in? Left of what?
I put the original post in the very popular posting category called Reasons Why People Who Disagree With Me Somewhat Are Not Only Incorrect But Actually Evil
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Nah. It can result from assessing your own true beliefs, then looking around the room and noticing that you’re not standing at either edge of the room, then using that one word as a super-concise summary to make it easier for others to roughly locate you
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Tribe Called Quest, We got it from here …
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Elvis Costello, Brutal Youth
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Talking Heads circa 1978
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I’ll take:
But if you really want to hear our views
You haven’t done nothing
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Sure. Which is why you see all these “Natural gas drives out coal!” posts with graphs that omit wind and solar … but you don’t. There’s enough real success in renewables to celebrate without this kind of misleading presentation
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Why do graphs like this so often leave out natural gas?
Natural gas is more responsible for the decline of coal than wind and solar are
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See this piece on negative prices: www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/negati...
Disconnection of renewables source is not that straightforward.
Also, renewables can beat fossil sources on cost in many situations, but not by so much that they still win if you have to discard most of the power
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Thanks for the reply. I think you're underestimating the grid operational challenges of solar intermittency and oversupply.
Again: why do negative energy prices exist? Is it because no one had the sense to go out and disconnect the panels for a bit?
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Hmm, maybe we should switch languages. Have you heard the Latin phrase “non sequitur”
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Thriving actually
Rumors of its demise had been much exaggerated
Yes, ‘rumors’ except for a small minority of its speakers who retained a vestigial ‘u’
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English grew up in England, and lived there for several hundred years. But when it came time to put away childish things it grew up and moved out. Soon it was spoken by many more people than those it had left behind, and it even became big in Japan!
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Elon Musk, aka "free speech absolutist"
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But returning to the metrics question: even in a waterworks world, it would be weird to choose a metric to focus on that celebrated how much extra water you produced during peak flood times. Instead, you'd want to focus on how much you have in the dry times, or how infrequent dry times are
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Negative prices require that it's even possible to deliver the power. Curtailment happens when the excess power can't even be put into transmission lines without damage or instability
Why not just let the electrons spill out over the top of the wire onto the ground? Because electricity is not water
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:)
Grids and waterworks are not analogous
When you build a waterworks you don't have to pay someone to accept your excess water when you have too much
In your analogy, why are negative power prices a thing?
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Analogy: Today my lunch was 4x as much as I could eat. I don’t have a refrigerator so I had to throw most of it away. And I didn’t get any breakfast or dinner.
Still, not too shabby for lunch, eh?
I’m hoping that soon my lunches will be 5x as much as I can eat
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If you're looking for a metric to optimize against, the peak percentage by which supply exceeds demand in a given day is a terrible choice
Look instead for metrics that reward good total systems approaches, where the combination of production and storage minimizes both oversupply and undersupply
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Excess production also causes engineering problems for the grid. Far from being grateful to CA, other states get annoyed when CA dumps power at times which are also peak production times for them.
We're headed for a record month in Apr 2025 for curtailments.
www.caiso.com/about/our-bu...
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Dr. Jacobson keeps posting triumphantly about days where renewable energy far exceeds demand at peak production times, as if it were a good thing
It's not a good thing. If excess production can't be stored, it is "curtailed" (thrown away), or "dumped" (sold at negative prices to other states)
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And then our politicians can also promise a chicken in every pot.
Winner winner chicken dinner!
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Your company is collaborating with all of this. You are an extremely senior and visible person at that company.
Rather than complaining on BlueSky, why don't you quit in protest? That would make some waves.
From Google Maps just now:
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@schiff.senate.gov @aoc.bsky.social @padilla.senate.gov why aren't my senators there? AOC can you help wake up our senators