The whole point is to build a power grid that IS wasteful. Unless you have 140% too much green energy capacity you won’t have enough capacity for when energy generation is poor.

And if those 95% efficient hydrogen electrolysers end up being the real deal and not corporate wank the smartest thing we can do is start building tank farms. H2 is half the weight per unit of energy of Jet A and is the best option for ships, trains and eventually aircraft. Stored cryogenically as long as you burn 1% of your fuel per day it will stay as a cryogenic liquid with no external energy inputs. That is perfect for comercial use.

Plus you can use those that surplus H2 to fire existing gas fired power plants with very little modifications. Most will burn a 15% methane 85% H2 mix easily. That gets you through a cold dead month or three in winter.

Hence why you put them in areas with ocean currents. Spend any time scuba diving? There are a LOT of areas that are absolute deserts in the ocean. Sandy and empty. There’s nothing around for miles.

And the currents. Oh my. Does water move. You get caught in one and you are going for a ride. Planning current dives is very popular. Relax in the current, go for a ride. Arrange for a boat to pick you up or sometimes it’s a long wall dive and you end up a long ways out.

The ocean? It’s big. Real big. Insanely big. As long as you have some water movement, you could put a city sized discharge pipe into of these areas and with a 2kph current the brine uptick would be basically undetectable 1km away. The sheer volume of water is nuts.

As long as you locate where water is moving and away from a big habitat area there is ZERO issues.

Brine only has 2-3x the local salt content. If you are running a giant RO system for every 1 litre of water I get out of the system I am creating around 0.5-0.6L of reject water at best. Maybe the new membranes can get down to 0.3? I don’t know what the state if the art is.

(I care for a RO system that can do 10,000L/hour).

San Diego has access to open ocean and ocean currents. The solution to pollution is dilution in some cases. Ocean damage only happens in trapped ocean areas like the Black Sea and other dead head areas.

Since a storm would wipe that off the face of the earth, desalination is absolutely cheaper when you look at the cost over 20 years.

Brine buildup is only an issue in places like the black sea. Anywhere with open, circulating ocean and water currents is fine (most ocean sources).

Maybe put the discharge pipe a half a kilometre offshore and you are golden.

The grocery store is the perfect location for FastDC (200+kW) chargers.

DON’T USE GREASE! It will make a mess every time you put the key in. Plus grease + lock mechanisms = bad. It can cause a pin to hang up from suction and you are done. The lock won’t turn. Remember the pins go up AND down as you insert the lock.

I buy a THIN teflon based lubricant from my locksmith called Tri-flo. This is what the ‘professionals’ use.

Me too. Held onto my plasma until the bitter end.

Because an OLED has REAL black. It’s off. This is the correct way to display video.

LCD is awful. Once you see that grey bleeding into black it’s all you can see.

I have power monitoring in my house using Home Assistant and a iotawatt. My custom gaming rig (3070/5800x cpu) pulls 600W when I’m gaming. 65” OLED is a couple of hundred watts.

Heat pumps were by far the best power consumption investment. If you have electric resistive heating just bite the bullet and get the heat pump. My 3400 sq ft shop costs less than half to heat when compared with the boiler. And I keep it at 16-19C depending on the time of day. If you live in a cold climate (more than 20 days averaging below -20C) go with a ground source heat pump not a air source model.

Our Dryer remains the elephant in the room. But it’s old and works really good. 6kW of heating power baby. But the new dryers suuuuuuuck right now. They clamped down on the power efficiency rules so the new ones use way less power but have to run twice as long to dry so that is a no go for us. Heat pump dryers are starting to show up but they still suck. They won’t suck in a few years so we are waiting. Right now it’s like ‘early emission controlled carbureted engines’. They still suck.

TV power consumption has been going back up. Because almost everyone now tends to upsize to a bigger tv when they upgrade. A 65” LCD probably drinks more power than your 42” cold cathode backlit LCD or your 30” CRT.

My 3kW kettle takes 42 seconds to make 1 giant mug of tea.

I installed this in my Canadian kitchen. Because it kicks ass.

Crush up the blue pill with the red pill, snort it and find out.

Yet I will be able to buy a electric chevy pickup with 640km of range, 250kW charging and a 2000 cycle rating starting next month. That’s a million km battery.

Sometimes battery tech DOES make it to the public.

Range = the best power to weight ratio.

I’m assuming the battery has a reasonable power to density ratio but there is actually a LOT of room for batteries in a car when you build a dedicated EV skateboard style chassis. You run out of weight capacity long before you run out of space to install batteries. And a pound of battery saved is a half pound of suspension and structure saved. It really really matters. A lighter battery makes the entire car lighter.

The car world cares a LOT more about weight to power than density to power ratios. Weight is everything. And I would assume that the size to power density is reasonable.

Also the article is saying that it’s capacity is 300ah/g. That is on par or better than current state of the art NMC lithium cells.

400 cycle tests are claimed to have ‘no degredation’? Well ooookay. Maybe run some more testing cycles. GM’s new battery is rated for 2000 cycles. Tesla cells are 1500 cycles.

But any battery improvements are welcome.

Cyberpunk wasn’t the best example, but it ran great most of the time on my 3070oc at 4k. Got a good CPU to match? I’m running a 5800x and it seemed fine.

I do have the factory overclocked version (no overclocking enabled besides the factory setup) so maybe something inside ran better? I know it has quicker memory. I also built the mother of all cooling systems with 3d printed ducting feeding the CPU and GPU so I was always under 60C when under full stress. That helped keep it at full clock speed.

There were certainly times when cyberpunk ran like dog shit but I chalked that up to bad coding. The game itself was hit and miss at best for quality.

I would say that. Then I enabled ray tracing and wow. I’d happily trade a few FPS for some beautiful liquid eye candy. Having light behave like real light is amazing. Shadows, reflections, god rays. It’s beautiful.

Especially on a 65” OLED.

Screwed however you can rinse out the drywall compound with warm water from a hose, pop the tiles off, let the backer board dry and do it again properly.

Time to chrome plate and polish those missiles/mortars to reflect laser light.

It’s one thing tracking centralized systems. Oil gas water. All metered. Stand alone solar? It’s actually difficult and expensive to develop a monitored metering system that works across a vast spectrum of different custom systems that are all different? Not an easy task at all.

Invest in energy efficiency if you are out of roof space. You can spend money on anything from better appliances to insulation to reduce consumption.

Or simply rely on your grid tie to make up the surplus. If you only meet 80% of your energy needs…. Well that is fine. You reduced your power bill by 80%. Stop worrying about 100% solutions.

As for expensive prices right now, ever hear about the chip shortage? China fucked up hard between covid lockdowns and the complete collapse of their power grid this year. The answer is patience, grasshopper. We’ll get back into a PV equipment price falling price cycle quickly enough. EVERYTHING is overpriced and expensive right now. All the forecasts are for the chip market to shift from famine to feast (glut) within 6-18 months. It is a 3+ year cycle for industry to ramp up and we are over half way there.

You’ll also probably see all sorts of rebate programs come and go. The governments of the world are offering all sorts of subsidies. Milk one.

You can also put a PV system on your garage, shed or even in the yard. We have a 3kW system on the old bus that we use as our RV and I am wiring a new breakout plug in my shop so that when the bus is plugged into shore power it will heat and cool my shop.

Carbon taxes are also a thing now. Because the atmosphere is not a free garbage can.

We also pay the disposal cost of those PV panels when we buy them so that the end if life is already taken care if.

I could not see a PV energy tax happening. People would lose their shit. Everyone would bypass the meters. We need to meter grid power so that was easy. Metering home generation would be a logistical nightmare.