How to Run the Economy on the Weather | Hacker News Reader

How to Run the Economy on the Weather

lowtechmagazine.com

27 pointsRed_Tarsius19 comments

Very good piece: I've linked to it from my home page!

When people say "solar PV doesn't fit 9-5 very well" I say that's because 9-5 is totally artificial and, to a degree, inhuman. Let's cut our suit to fit our cloth, and shift more of our work to when the energy is available, get up with the sun, and go to bed with dusk when we feel like it.

One of the freedoms of working for myself is that I can do just that. And it feels better.

So not only is it a nicer life, we also eliminate the need for a lot of expensive energy storage.

Whether 9-5 doesn't fit well or whether work when energy is available reasonable depends entirely on where on the planet you live.

While I agree entirely with the freedom of choosing your own schedule limiting it to sun hours isn't much better than 9-5 in that regard.

So I'm not suggesting building a new straight-jacket, and for example I am not suggesting people should be forced to work all 16 hours of daylight in a UK summer and never any more than 8 including travel mid-winter.

But working from home for most using power only for lighting and laptop in the the winter on days that would otherwise be a grim commute sounds better all round I think. Apart from anything else a lot less time lost to flu! As an employer I've thought a bit about the logistics and it could work well.

Can we kill DST while we're at it, please? B^>

I'd like to get rid of timezones altogether.

Why?

If you want to convert from one time zone to another then you have to: remember the adjustment, remember if it's daylight savings or not, and if it's plus or minus. And then you calculate it. This is incredibly unintuitive and is designed so that everyone works nine to five everywhere in the world. There is no reason for this other than we decided to do it this way. Alternatively I propose we would all just use UTC-0 and then everyone adjusts their day to the time. After an adjustment period there would no confusion over time zones because being awake from 3pm - 8 am means the same to everyone because they are on the same time.

Except now you have to remember working hours in every timezone you interact with, not their offset.

...Which in practice means you remember the offset for every timezone you interact with (eg, "they start their day 3 hours behind, so 6 instead of 9"), and I'm not seeing the improvement over the usual timezones.

It improves some things (like announcing events that happen simultaneously between zones) while making others harder (announcing something happens at "3am" in every zone, for example).

(There are already at least two times that do vaguely what you're saying, UTC and Epoch for example.)

Have you actually tried to do what you suggest? I have -- all my work scheduling is done UTC and coordinated with Epoch (which is what the servers speak) -- and I can't say that it's really any easier mentally (at least, for me).

With a reengineered manufacturing workflow factories could slow and speed with available energy. Energy will soon be free, but only during daylight hours. If one was going to have a PV powered machine shop, it would more advantageous to spend nearly all the money on building the largest sized array with almost no battery storage. One could run a welder, lathe, etc directly from PV. On days when not using generating capacity, dump it into a kiln, pump water, smash gravel, etc.

James Burke, "Water Wheel Industrial Revolution" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ii_x2QxHlI

Yes, the "slow and speed" insight is good. For many processes it need not be binary.

Maybe your favourite highly processed calorie-heavy snack is made in slightly smaller batches in winter and gets a bit more expensive. Demand may be more elastic than currently expected.

So many processes in modern civilization have no feedback mechanism. They have to operate open-loop sync'd only with the wall clock. The clock is a crutch. Where variable speed manufacturing will have problems is in large batch chemical processes that occur at their own rate but still need input/output power to maintain the proper reaction.

All of this parallels clockless computing [1]

I think rapid prototyping tech will lead to smaller, more async factories where things are built on demand, not via an assembly line. These can naturally be run on available power. Imagine a milling machine or robot that could be start/stopped at will and could be dialed down to different power consumption curves all while not losing track of the work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit

there are already some demand response technology that can be put in place. See http://www.energy-pool.eu/en/

Or more generally, "make hay while the sun shines".

To some extent this is already happening, as large energy users are already adjusting use according to the spot price of electricity, which varies based on renewable output.

If you build a dam it doesn't matter when it rains.

For interseasonal energy storage it does, sadly!

It takes generally a few years to fill up the reservoir, not two seasons. No one who relies on power from a dam cares that it doesn't always rain between 9 and 5.

Solar output fluxes on 12 hour timescales, dams flux on 3 year timescales, that's three orders of magnitude in difference.

That said, pumping water into a reservoir is a pretty good way of storing solar energy so that it can stop mattering that it's not sunny at night, it's just that no one does it because mother nature already does it for us.

This is only the case in practice if you have far more (nominal) dam capacity than (yearly) demand. And let's leave out the important distinction between energy and power for this. Let me introduce you to the UK. We would only be in the position you describe if we flooded a lot of Scotland and the Lake District in the north of England. Various people would object.

I was born and lived much of my childhood in the north of England and the world might IMHO be a better place for serious strategic flooding there, but that's a political issue out of scope of this article. B^>

I live in Vancouver we're so dumb that we protest dams so we can keep fossil fuel plants open. It must be nice to live in an area where people would choose hydro if it were available to them. The funny thing is the reservoir for the new dam is so tightly packed it will flow right to the base of the upstream dam. I think we've got 8 dams on that river already we just constantly reuse the same water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generating_stations_in...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/site-c-un-pan...

Substantially all of BC's power already comes from hydroelectric dams.

I have serious reservations about the process (or lack thereof) used to approve the site C dam. There are also serious questions about whether BC needs the additional generating capacity.

All that said, however, I think I am largely in agreement with you. What seems to be missed in the discussion is that substantially all of Alberta's electricity comes from coal power plants. It is rapidly changing to natural gas which is somewhat better I suppose, but still far from ideal from a global warming point of view. Alberta should be transitioning to hydro power generated in BC which would definitely supply the necessary demand to support site C. However, so far there is no such commitment . . . it doesn't seem to even get serious discussion.

Site C is going to be necessary as we transition to electric cars, unless we want to burn the fossil fuel centrally instead of distributed.

We won't need it until it's painfully obvious we need it, and be we I mean all the places BC supplies electricity to (California). BC has plenty of generating capacity to meet only BC's demands.

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