21–30 of 42 posts
This occurred a few years ago in Europe - I graphed what happened with my solar panels. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/03/the-eclipses-effect-on-sola... For UK / Europe the effect was broadly similar to normal cloud cover. Something that California rarely experiences ;-) An eclipse is more predictable than the weather - so other sources of energy can be used to offset any disruption.
I love the GIF in the article and how it was copyrighted in 2000 about an event that would happen in 2017. I'm a reader/follower of N. N. Taleb and agree with him about how difficult it is to predict future events. And meanwhile, the conditions in space and the laws of physics allow for a model like this to be made with what seems to be a lot of precision. Can anyone speak to how accurate/precise that GIF model _coul…
QZ has become a spam and advertising cesspool. I couldn't find the story the first two times I tried until I realized by default it only shows ads and garbage until you click the small "show story" button.
I clicked over to the linked site using Firefox running NoScript in default deny JS mode. The whole text of the article appeared, ready to read. Granted it is a very short article, but it appeared just fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is during peak air conditioning load, and air conditioning is used most when when... wait... the sun is out.
Yeah but this article is silly. Solar isn't a given, you can have a cloudy day. Or days. So the grid already has to be prepared to deal with this. It's a known problem, happens every night. The company that solves storage in a meaningful way is gonna get rich. By meaningful I mean at scale and portable. I know you can pump water up to a reservoir and let it back out to generate power but that's not portable. Anyone k…
The article isn't silly.
It's a known problem, but utilities and operators move at a glacial pace due to their scale and regulatory issues. This can make it difficult for startups to get sales and stay afloat.
Lots of people are trying to get rich in this space and it turns out to be a non-trivial set of problems.
And yes, it is a fun problem to work on. I would encourage anyone who is interested to get into the storage / smart grid management space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is during peak air conditioning load, and air conditioning is used most when when... wait... the sun is out.
But again, the sun is not out during an eclipse.
https://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2006/faq.php
"Typically, how big a temperature drop do you get during a total solar eclipse? It would probably be equal to the typical daytime minus nighttime temperature difference at that time of year and location on the Earth. It would be modified a bit by the fact that it only lasts a few minutes, which means the environment would not have had much time to thermally respond to its lowest temperature, so it would probably only be 3/4 or 1/2 the maximum day-night temperature difference."
-- Elon Musk