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skagenpilot

128 karma · joined April 1, 2022

mostly lurking :-)
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skagenpilot··on A Pretty Visualisation of the European Power Grid (2022)
There are five synchronous areas in Europe, the largest one being the synchronous grid of continental Europe [1].

Each national grids has interconnections with other grids and you can measure the flow of power through these interconnections to know who is sending electricity or getting electricity from neighbours.

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

skagenpilot··on A pretty visualisation of the European power grid (2022)
It shows a much finer grained representation of the whole transportation network. So you have much better idea of where is electricity produced and consumed within each country. When it comes to figuring out what the electricity mix is made of, electricitymaps is clearer.
skagenpilot··on A pretty visualisation of the European power grid (2022)
When looking at France, at a zoom level where one can see the whole country, all the green dots are located next to nuclear power plants. It's a good reminder that the french grid is mostly powered by nuclear.

It'd be nice to see the same map over summer to see if the different electric mix then gives birth to a different map.

skagenpilot··on Ten implausible-sounding scenarios for 2025
"To navigate the future, it can help to anticipate the unlikely"

https://archive.is/q2D2t

skagenpilot··on Ruby in Jupyter Notebook
Python was the first programming language whose primary focus was not scientific applications, i.e. not MATLAB,Fortran or R, to have support for numeric arrays (matrices) via ndarray and then Numpy, while still being fairly approachable for the scientific community. If Travis Oliphant had picked Ruby for implementing ndarray, maybe would be the defacto language for data science.
skagenpilot··on Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
Yes
skagenpilot··on Docker: French guy changed the life of developpers
Original title in French: Docker : comment ce Français a changé la vie de tous les développeurs . Youtube auto translated captions are pretty decent if you do not speak french
skagenpilot··on High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
This reminds me of Alan work culture [1], Alan is a startup with a zero meeting policy and a very strong culture of writing. They check the quality of one's writing during their interview process.

Alan leaders also have other strong ethos like "no managers" and "complete transparency".

I really wonder if these companies are exceptions or if this organisationel model could be replicated more widely. I guess it caters to some very specific personality types.

[1] https://blog.alan.com/bien-etre-au-travail/who-we-are-and-ho...

skagenpilot··on EU electricity production by country and source
On the production side, renewable production is fully influenced by weather and this influences also the other means of production as renewables have "priority" on the grid.

On the demand side, it depends on how people heat (or cool) their home. In France, there is a lot of electrical heating and the partial dependency between temperature and demand is very well understood (and visible in the data). In countries where they rely more on gas story is different.

A good way to study these dependencies is to do load forecasting with white box models such as General Additive Models [1][2], you get the full picture of partial dependencies between your input variables and target variable.

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/cornec/adaptive-gam-12058258 [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260448958_Short-Ter...

skagenpilot··on AltaRock Energy Melts Rock with Millimeter Waves for Geothermal Wells (2020)
> But because they fracture the rock instead of vaporizing it, there's essentially gravel/sand leftover which is hard to evacuate from a deep vertical shaft, hence their focus on power/fiber trenches not geothermal.

Getting cuttings out of the borehole is a solved problem with present drilling technics used in the Oil & Gas industry or geothermal. The drilling fluidsbrings them back. One needs the drilling fluids (mud) to avoid the well to collapse, I guess Petra is staying clear of deep borehole drilling because they can't operate their technology with drilling mud present. Also the deeper you go, the smaller the hole and they may face miniaturizion issues too.

skagenpilot··on Quaise Energy is working to create geothermal wells
It depends on the rock formation the project is targeting. If one targets a steam reservoir or a sedimentary rock formation, generaly things are ok (save for this one case in Germany where Earth started to rise [0]). In case you target hot (dry) rock that you need to fracture to increase the heat exchange surface, then more often than not you are going to induce seismicity. It's been well studied in Alsace and some small induced earthquake was felt in Strasbourg and attributed to nearby geothermal developments [1].

[0] https://m.dw.com/en/green-good-intentions-cause-chaos-in-two...

[1] https://comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/geoscience/artic...