191–200 of 216 posts
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> sat relaxed and watched others in great stress and anxiety planning on how to preserve their refrig/freezers while visually panicking over their sump pumps not running in their basements. I hope you at least offered to help...
Yes, I did mention this in closing: "can also make one revenue."
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Oh I’m totally with you! There is a long and storied history of passive design strategies, and exterior shading is one of the oldest ones out there! But what I stated is plainly true, and many people simply don’t want exterior shades (or just don’t think about it). The point I was trying to make was just that there are thermal implications to the orientation, and you should think those through (using thermal simulati…
I was not describing exterior shading. The terminology is hard. I was describing overhangs that create shade during the summer.
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What if he added previous generation crypto miner (so it's cheap) and use the excess electricity instead of selling it to the grid? This could also save some money on heating in winter unless he has a heat pump priced in already.
prev gen crypto mining is phenomenally inefficient in terms of energy that ends up being converted to heat, but it is absolutely not what you would use to take electricity and create heat given any other choices.
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> 10.7k TWh globally Agree I hate this, but at the same time I don't know if I would have groked it correctly on first read if it had listed "10.7Pwh globally". We simply aren't exposed to numbers at that scale on a regular basis. Not sure what the correct solution is here.
SI prefix words are just kind of silly. We should just use the exponent as a number instead of having a different word for every 3 zeros. 10.7 E15 Wh or something similar. Scales to everything, you do not need to know any mapping, and directly supports mathematical manipulation. We should also do the same for large number words in general. No thousand, million, billion, etc. E3, E6, E9, etc. Now you can count and rep…
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The solution to that is as much distributed storage as possible and cryptocurrency mining (or LLMs) for monetizing excess energy.
Sorry, capex for crypto -- let alone llm (datacenters must be on 100% of the time to pay nvidia) -- is way too high. It must see high utilization for amortization to be favorable. You only see crypto in areas that have really cheap, 24/7 power. Big crypto mining operations are only built near remote hydroelectric power stations, or worse, natural gas or coal rich areas. Places where fossil fuels are made but that don…
But crypto is running 24/7 because energy price is still positive so people buy latest, most efficient hardware to be as efficient as possible. But latest hardware is expensive. You can buy prev gen mining hardware for peanuts comparatively. It can make you money if you run it when you have more energy than you can use or sell.
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I was not describing exterior shading. The terminology is hard. I was describing overhangs that create shade during the summer.
Overhangs are considered exterior shading in the industry/practice/academia. Any obstruction that prevents solar gains by blocking radiation from entering the window falls within the general category of external shading, whether that’s a fancy high tech actuated shading system, a grille, a simple awning, a structural overhang, vertical fins, etc.
As someone who has researched DSM availability across the globe, Google's Solar API is a top contender. Other option is government LiDAR surveys but the coverage, file formats, projections, etc are all fragmented. I think it would be great for the mapping community to create a world wide DSM map tile dataset similar to the ground elevation tile dataset that contour lines and 3D terrain views are generated from. Maybe…
Thos exact abbreviation is so overloaded that it doesn't hurt to list the words once.
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Your electric bill 20 years from now is just as likely to go down as it is to go up. In two decades, we could see advancements like mobile generators offering free power, ultra-affordable battery packs delivered to homes to meet energy needs, or even the widespread adoption of low-cost fusion energy. The key takeaway is that predicting the future cost of electricity is as challenging as it was to predict today’s sola…
When did PGE prices ever go down?
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Watt-hours is a perfectly pragmatic unit. Measure instantaneous power and multiply by a common human unit of time. It's easy to compare.
Part of me is tempted to suggest kilograms as a unit of energy. 428.6 kg relativistic mass-energy equivalent: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10.7PWh%2F%28c%5E2%29 But then, I am a silly person.