manfredo (u/manfredo)

manfredo commented on Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030 cleantechnica.com/2021/03... · Posted by u/mg

dang · 4 years ago

You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this hellish flamewar. I realize the other user went beyond the pale in attacking you, but you were also badly at fault. Please stay out of flamewars in the future.

I was going to ban your account as well, but on a closer look it seems that the other commenter was being far more vicious, so I'm not going to do that right now. But perpetuating a flamewar like this is still absolutely against the rules—especially the interminably tedious tit-for-tat sort, which this one was. No more of this, please.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

manfredo · 4 years ago

To be honest I think you should go ahead and delete that account (and this, my main). Upon further reflection I think my engagement with HN has become unhealthy.

manfredo commented on Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030 cleantechnica.com/2021/03... · Posted by u/mg

mgolawala · 4 years ago

Why would we use lithium ion batteries?

I would imagine the approach to store the energy would be to use the energy from solar panels to do work that can be used to produce electricity later.

For example, you could use solar energy to pump water back uphill to flow down through a hydro electric dam later.

Even if it isn't the most efficient, in the long run it would likely provide the best scalability and least long term environmental impact. Once you have the facility in place, the same water could be pumped uphill to flow back down a million times over with the only overhead replacing water lost through evaporation and maintaining the facility.

Am I missing something that makes such an approach unfeasible?

manfredo · 4 years ago

Hydroelectric storage is geographically dependent. You need the right topography and access to water. Likewise, hydroelectric storage takes a long time to build.

manfredo commented on Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030 cleantechnica.com/2021/03... · Posted by u/mg

nicoburns · 4 years ago

> Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually

... so if we could increase battery production by just 10x, then we could create an hours worth of storage every year. That seems... very doable.

manfredo · 4 years ago

And then we'd have to continue that production for two and a half decades to get to 1 day of storage. And we'd also have to drastically increase our battery recycling capacity to match (remember most lithium ion batteries last 1000-2000 cycles).

manfredo commented on U.S. rent has increased 175% faster than household income over past 20 years phys.org/news/2021-03-ren... · Posted by u/finphil

jariel · 4 years ago

No, in your own answer you pointed out the cause: "low interest rates in order to help keep housing priced up".

That is literally the cause.

NIMBYISM cannot be a 'cause' of anything - there is always more demand than supply in SF and in many places (also - people have a right to manage their own communities as they see fit.)

If a million people try move to a village, the price of the houses goes up - the cause is 'zoning'? Or is the 'cause' the the people trying to move into the village? (Propped up with huge leverage due to ever decreasing interest rates?)

manfredo · 4 years ago

The cause is that more people moved into the city than there were housing units constructed. It isn't an either-or question, it's both. San Francisco has more demand than supply precisely because an insufficient number of housing units were constructed relative to the rising population. Had the city built sufficient units to accommodate the new residents there would be no shortage of supply. Had there been no influx of residents there wouldn't be either. But we can't just outlaw people from moving into the city, so the solution is to increase the supply of housing. And NIMBYism is a big obstacle in increasing the supply of housing.

manfredo commented on Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030 cleantechnica.com/2021/03... · Posted by u/mg

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf · 4 years ago

Aren't car battery packs under $100/KWh? Is there some other factor which drives up the price for grid level storage?

manfredo · 4 years ago

The factor that drives up price for grid level storage is scale. Only ~300 GWh worth of batteries is produced globally each year. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity each hour. If anyone tries to install battery storage at a significant scale, demand will vastly outstrip supply and drive prices up.

manfredo commented on Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030 cleantechnica.com/2021/03... · Posted by u/mg

zizee · 4 years ago

I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable.

I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, and appropriately provisioned and placed solar and wind, taking the duck curve into consideration.

manfredo · 4 years ago

Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc.

Realistically we should saturate daytime energy demand with solar, and if there aren't any scalable storage options by then switch gears and proceed with hydroelectric where it's viable and nuclear where it's not.

manfredo commented on Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy quillette.com/2019/03/12/... · Posted by u/elsewhen

manfredo · 4 years ago

I think you're taking the response a very narrow set of people have to this dynamic and assuming a substantial contingent of readers are sharing this response. When I discuss the observations made in the original post with people, the overwhelming response is "of course" without a hint of controversy.

manfredo commented on Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy quillette.com/2019/03/12/... · Posted by u/elsewhen

iujjkfjdkkdkf · 4 years ago

> The revealed preference among most women to attempt to engage romantically only with the same small percentage of men who are perceived as attractive is consistent with the social system called “polygyny,” in which a small percentage of males monopolize the mating opportunities with all females, while many other males have no access to mates.

This whole article and line of thought is bat-shit crazy and needs to have more attention called to it so it can be debunked.

This is the second time this week I have seen this kind of thing on HN. Honestly I'm not well equipped to provide help and information to people that think this way, but this whole line of reasoning is horrible and in my view is on par with conspiracy theories, and can only harm society.

manfredo · 4 years ago

If you're not well equipped to refute the claim, why do you feel equipped to call it horrible, a conspiracy theory, and a harm to society? The notion that women are more selective than men is something I consider neither harmful, nor particularly far fetched.

manfredo commented on GitHub, fuck your name change mooseyanon.medium.com/git... · Posted by u/leontrolski

awbraunstein · 4 years ago

If you're interested in measuring your implicit bias, this site has a lot of interesting tests you can take https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

I was shocked with my own results from the gender/career bias test.

At the end of the day, the test doesn't tell you how to fix it, it shows you that these patterns of thought are deeply ingrained in how we think and the way to "fix" it is to actively go against the biases we have been trained on. There is are some good resources here as well. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html#faq14

manfredo · 4 years ago

This output of this kind of test is determined by the order in which the categories are presented. Put male on the left and humanities on the right first, then put male and science simultaneously on the left side and it will produce the opposite result: men associated with liberal arts and women with science.