Hacker News Reader

spenroseon Why Investors Have Learned to Love Wind and Solar Power

"After a stormy, dependent youth, the wind-and-solar-energy industries have matured into boring, profitable middle age. This year’s plunging interest rates make that a more appealing proposition than ever for investors. Wind turbines and solar panels, which once proliferated thanks to government handouts, now produce energy more cheaply than coal and natural gas."

spenroseon After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

A summary of the virtuous cycle created by cheap renewables and hydrogen electrolyzation:

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2020/6/17/renewables-p...

Lots of comments on this thread that reveal folks are up to date with the state of hydrogen infrastructure c. 2017. It's changing really fast as billions of dollars are poured into R&D and pilot projects. For example, storage and transport:

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-hydrogen-chiyoda-cor...

Siemens has pledged to make turbines that run on 100% hydrogen by 2030: https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/stories/energy/hyd...

Hydrogen trains: https://www.snam.it/en/Media/Press-releases/Agreement_Alstom...

Hydrogen in steelmaking: https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...

I could post 15 more. Our collective priors were well-grounded just a couple years ago, but it is time for a big update.

spenroseon Lessons learned from bugs in models of human history

"Abstract

Simulation plays a central role in population genomics studies. Recent years have seen rapid improvements in software efficiency that make it possible to simulate large genomic regions for many individuals sampled from large numbers of populations. As the complexity of the demographic models we study grows, however, there is an ever-increasing opportunity to introduce bugs in their implementation. Here we describe two errors made in defining population genetic models using the msprime coalescent simulator that have found their way into the published record. We discuss how these errors have affected downstream analyses and give recommendations for software developers and users to reduce the risk of such errors."

spenroseon 'Renewables plus hydrogen' – almost all that we need

"The purpose of this note is to provide basic details of the major large-scale experiments and commercial projects in Europe and elsewhere that demonstrate that hydrogen can fully complement green electricity and will provide the energy source for almost all activities that cannot be electrified. I write because I think that the development of a ‘renewables plus hydrogen’ economy should be the policy priority for the UK and other countries."

spenroseon Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

As a fellow Kubernetes-hater, this is the best explanation I've read for its virality. Thanks!

spenroseon East Australian Humpback whale bounces back from near extinction

Let me Google that for you: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hump...

spenroseon Look for Elon Musk to Unveil a New Battery That Will Shake the EV Market

Both

spenroseon If you use GNU grep on text files, use the -a (--text) option

Love ack for source code and text docs: https://beyondgrep.com

spenroseon New nuclear reactor designs promise safe, clean electricity

Great question. Some points:

1. That source is a mess; three of us spent a couple years trying to update it only to be foiled by classic alpha Wikipedians who are happy to see an article rely on 10 year old price estimates, but not to see standard industry terms used. Note the age of the LACE sources.

2. The LACE frame is an important complement to LCOE, but also imperfect. Take California's recent decision to require solar PV on new homes. Really high LACE, right?: California is already being forced to pair marginal PV additions with gigawatts of rapid response gas to handle the "neck of the duck curve" when the sun goes down but LA is still using gigawatts of electricity to power AC. Well, the LACE of that low-marginal-value PV is dependent on how many batteries we add, how much offshore wind appears, etc.

3. The people who promote LACE won't let you include the social cost of carbon as part of the discussion. They'd rather see the page wither.

spenroseon New nuclear reactor designs promise safe, clean electricity

Thank you for this wonderful work.

spenroseon New nuclear reactor designs promise safe, clean electricity

Wind and solar don't scale as well as the nuclear plants that aren't being built would scale, if they were being built at scale, but they're not.

Wind and solar scaled better in 2019 than the Chinese were hoping nuclear would scale when they made big plans c. 2015. Those plans weren't realized: https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656

Again, I am rooting for nuclear to take off. The best realistic plans are that low gigawatts will start to arrive towards the end of this decade. Meanwhile, wind and solar will be added at that scale every year in between, and more and more of it will be used to create liquid fuel:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mega-projects-h...

Advocating for clean power is good. Failing to update the priors that Stewart Brand et alia formed 15 years ago when wind and solar were an order of magnitude more expensive and three orders of magnitude less deployed is not good.

spenroseon New nuclear reactor designs promise safe, clean electricity

I am rooting for lots and lots of new nuclear, but this piece is silly. Let's dig in:

"But what if there were sources of zero-carbon electricity that didn’t require heavy-handed regulation to make them viable in the marketplace? ..."

Wind and solar are cheaper now than nuclear advocates hope nuclear will be by 2030.

1.https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

2. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/30/latest-bnef-report-find...

"... What if we could produce more power—and do it affordably, with minimal environmental impact? That’s the almost utopian vision that some backers see for the next generation of nuclear power. ..."

Utopian?! We are adding gigawatts of wind and solar this year, and modulo coronavirus we'll add more next year. New geothermal plants are measured in dozens of megawatts:

* https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-01-22/califor...

"According to Ted Nordhaus, founder of the “eco-modernist” Breakthrough Institute, SMRs could offer a more decentralized, entrepreneurial approach to reducing CO2 emissions without hobbling the economy."

Wind and solar are extremely de-centralized and competitive. The economies that install them at scale—China, California—are doing as well as any.

“Will any of them ultimately be a success in the marketplace? You can’t say for sure,” he said. “But I think a bunch of them will get licenses to build test plants.”"

While we are waiting, offshore wind farms will continue to be installed at hundred-megawatt scale:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms#La...

Please continue promoting new nuclear; we could really use it. But please stop with the anti-variable-renewable BS, and FFS stop giving Nordhaus airtime when he insist on talking like this.

spenroseon Turning Water into Watts

Thank you for the correction and the "correction". When I Google, the top 3 results all show that:

1. 60% is too high for current turbines; 45% is about what recently installed turbines do. 2. Only old (and outmoded) turbines are anything like 25%. 3. The newest 12MW turbines should achieve 55-60%, as Hywind did for the (windy) winter months. Since future deployments are the topic here, that's the relevant number. Call it 55%, and say I was exaggerating by 10%.

I'm glad that ~10GW of nuclear is coming online, albeit at high LCOE. We don't know how to accelerate deployment. We do know how to accelerate the wind deployment that is already at higher volume. The small-modern nuclear camp is hoping to reach 10GW a year a decade from now at higher-than-wind LCOE. And I hope they succeed! But that is not a reason to talk down the wind and solar-plus storage wave happening right now.

Nuclear electricity is good. I wish we had a lot more of it. Nuclear advocates spend way too much time bashing variable renewables, including with trivially-Googleable misinformation such as your "25%", and not enough tackling the horrible political economy of nuclear. Safe micro-nuclear plants are an excellent start on the "economy" side of "political economy." Now y'all need to build a political coalition—and pro-variable-renewable peeps such as myself must be part of your core coalition if you are going to get anywhere. So start treating us as allies.

spenroseon Turning Water into Watts

Good points. Note that you could make the same comparison with offshore wind farms, which have similar nameplate capacities at much lower cost per watt, run at about 60% of nameplate over time, and are, unlike nuclear reactors, actually being deployed now and in the near future.

spenroseon Turning Water into Watts

https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we-decarbonize-7fc2f...

"There is enough wind in the world to supply the entire world’s energy needs. Solar supply exceeds even that by many times and is by far the largest renewable resource. In reality, wind is a second-order effect of solar energy anyway — the sun differentially heats the oceans, atmosphere, and land, and these thermal differences create the wind. This wind, in turn, makes waves; while there is, in fact, a lot of energy in the waves of the deep ocean, there is very little nearer to shore. Even if we captured all of the waves hitting every coastline on the planet, that’s not enough to meet humanity’s demand for energy. The ocean is a fragile ecosystem and capturing large portions of wave energy would negatively affect the oxygenation of the oceans, among other effects."

spenroseon I Learned French in 12 Months

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/opinion/contributors/lear...

spenroseon Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?

An important Google developer who created a product most of you use was a BMUG member, as was a current Siri developer, a former head of MacOS ... devrel IIRC, and others. BMUG probably deserves some credit for my own 20 year career as a programmer.

spenroseon Germany eyes new offshore wind farms dedicated to green hydrogen production

That's the price range for the Hawaii projects. The cost for the (much larger) Eland and Gemini projects is $35 MWh (previous and [4], respectively).

WRT intermittency, the point of this conversation is that hydrogen generation is a solution: over-provision and generate combustible hydrogen (or ammonia, etc) that can be used later and / or where electricity performs poorly: long haul transport and high-temperature industrial processes. Many links on @ChrisGoodall2's excellent "Carbon Commentary": https://us9.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=a336c39e55a6260d59a...

[4] https://www.barrons.com/articles/warren-buffett-berkshire-ha...

spenroseon Germany eyes new offshore wind farms dedicated to green hydrogen production

When I Google large recent projects, I see 4hrs [1][2] or (at 1.3GWH!!) 2 hours[3] of storage at much more than 10MW, and at lower prices today than the people selling nuclear hope to reach in 10 years.

Nuclear is good! We should deploy it as fast as we can! That happens to be quite slow relative compared to our deployment of utility scale solar and wind. Let's go faster if we can. But for heavens' sake, nuclear advocates should, well, advocate for nuclear, not badmouth the clean energy coming online today at grid scale.

[1] https://microgridknowledge.com/solar-plus-storage-prices-hec... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/11/la-8minute-solar-ink-lo... [3] https://www.environmentalleader.com/2019/12/gemini-nevada-so...

spenroseon Germany eyes new offshore wind farms dedicated to green hydrogen production

Not sure how to parse this comment, but 11 months ago bid prices for solar plus storage were about $35 MWh [1]

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...

spenroseon Germany eyes new offshore wind farms dedicated to green hydrogen production

The earliest and cheapest we will get new nuclear at low-gigawatt scale, according to the people building it, is in 10 years at which time if everything goes right the cost will have fallen to $65/MWh. Today we can deploy on-shore wind and solar at ~$30/MWh, and generate hydrogen with surplus per the article. Here is a thread citing nuclear industry advocates for building new nuclear power on the state of the efforts:

[$65/MWh, end of thread] https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1224019148562321408 [start, focusing on China's nuclear buildout] https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656

spenroseon Mozilla lays off 70

"User" is a perfect encapsulation of the mindset we need to leave behind. For the people who use web browsers, Google's ad tracking is the least of their worries. Here's Schneier:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/facial-recognitio...

spenroseon Mozilla lays off 70

I left Mozilla (brief undistinguished tenure; briefer overlap with you) in part because I felt it simply refused to acknowledge that the Internet of 2005 (dominated by 500M people using web browsers in democracies) was not the Internet of 2015 (3B people, mostly apps on smartphones, tracked by their SIM cards and social networks). I was thrilled to start working on FirefoxOS, then soon experienced it as a kind of doubling-down of denial. Skimming Brave's About page, I don't see anything that addresses the existence of Verizon or Windows OS-level security, let alone WhatsApp. I have no idea the extent to which other people think this way, but to me the silence of Mozilla and Brave on the extent to which browsers on laptops have simply been overwhelmed by the rise of other tools and other layers makes it hard to take their pronouncements seriously.

PS, thanks for saving the Web when you did. It seems genuinely heroic to me.

spenroseon Toyota believes hydrogen fuel cells are the future

After 10 seconds of Googling, here are the new (BEV: 11 models / PHEV: 9 models) models shipping in the US next year: https://evadoption.com/future-evs/new-electric-vehicles-in-2...

I will leave as an exercise for the two of you to Google:

1. How many new EVs arrived in 2019, in the US and worldwide? 2. How many are committed for 2021, in the US and worldwide?

You might start with VW committing to 27 models in 2022: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1118857_vw-plans-27-ele...

spenroseon Toyota believes hydrogen fuel cells are the future

Toyota is ready to make BEVs at scale: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/28424/toyota-subaru-suzuki-and...

And is investing in making solid-state batteries affordable at scale: https://www.sae.org/news/2019/09/battery-show-solid-state-ba...

spenroseon The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Smaller and Safer

Maybe nuclear reactors will be easier to deploy in China, where the government has more control: https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656

spenroseon Downtime at 'Aging' Nuclear Plant

Tucked near Mississippi's border with Louisiana, deep in Entergy Corp.'s territory, rests the largest single-unit U.S. nuclear power station.

It's called Grand Gulf, and it boasts a 1,443-megawatt capacity.

But it hasn't been acting like a dependable backbone of the power grid.

An E&E News review of federal daily reactor status reports from 2013 through last month found Grand Gulf listed at full power roughly 52.5 percent of the time. It was at zero percent power almost 21 percent of the days studied. On other days, it was at various reduced levels.

Does that sound like a baseload plant?

"No," said Ted Thomas, chairman of the Arkansas Public Service Commission.

spenroseon Dynamicland and the Whimsical Digital Object: Analoguing the Digital

The phrase comes from the article, and I think it is silly.

spenroseon Dynamicland and the Whimsical Digital Object: Analoguing the Digital

Good / bad / ugly ...

The good: unlike 20 love letters to Bret's work previously upvoted on HN, this response pays it the respect of considering whether it has inherent shortcomings.

The bad: this essay cites Donna Haraway approvingly, which places it firmly in "critical theory" territory, which for some of us flips the bozo bit. Way too much grad student virtue signaling, and while I genuinely admire her decision to think through Dynamicland's PARC heritage, the OOP bits don't work.

The ugly: the author notes Dynamicland's commitment to "working closely with the Oakland community", then blows it off. Having visited Dynamicland, I can confirm that they are serious about being a particular human space. If you're going to challenge their vision (and we should IMHO), you need to grapple with their actual vision, which is of people gathered in a room working together. No "creepy animism" there.

spenroseon Uber thinks it’s a ‘good thing’ for cities but cities are having second thoughts

"on their way to ending car ownership, Uber and Lyft got sidetracked and ended up clogging cities with more traffic. Between 2010 and 2016, traffic congestion in San Francisco increased by about 60 percent, and Uber and Lyft were responsible for more than half of that increase, according to a study published this year. Another study found that Uber and Lyft have added 5.7 billion miles of driving annually in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC."