partial_accumen

The dog thing wasn’t why she’s suing. Its office politics intersecting with legal language and authority disputes.

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I think there is a bit of a difference.

There is, but while the timing is different, the results are now the same.

• Millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession so they didn’t get to expereince a strong job market for their skills and have been playing catch up ever since and had everything stacked against them yielding few positive results.

• GenX entered the workforce and was able to leverage their skills while growing them only to see the job market for their skills decline or evaporate altogether.

Both groups are now currently struggling to find a sustainable livelihood especially with a path to a safe and secure retirement.

As GenX myself, I can identify with some of what was spoken of here, but I also have the self awareness that what GenX is now facing is essentially what Millennials have been facing for their entire time since entering the workforce 17 or 18 years ago.

Anyone employed there should have been paying attention for the last 15 years, and if they weren’t planning long term to find another job or train themselves while working there,

Lots of folks don’t have the capacity or luxury to be highly mobile with regard to their employment. Even if they did, these plant closures are just the beginning. Even those you are praising that do have the high skills and mobility will be facing this same fate in the days ahead. There’s no safe zone for solid future employment for any of us.

can’t say I have any sympathy for them.

I’ll always have sympathy for working people just trying to work scratching out a living.

We probably can’t even afford trump “I did that!” stickers anymore because the print media probably come from China.

It would be cool if it could somehow integrate to a VPN and only do that while the VPN is active. I don’t think it’s possible, though

Potentially possible, but I agree, likely not worth the effort.

When was the last time you checked the length of your DHCP lease?

I’m past caring about giving my IP to a website that I want to use, but what this is doing is handing out your information to every single advertiser that is published on any page you visit. In some cases this plugin would match the definition of “leaking personal data”.

You do you though. I won’t stop you.

If you care about your information and privacy, why are you giving them your information for nothing?

That HTTP request would also show up in the advertisers web logs with your origin IP address.

He’ll always be my Huckleberry.

WOW, thank you for this write up! I am able to follow most if not all of this thankfully.

I’m still learning things like this for myself, so I’m happy to share knowledge.

I recently had the tug of war analogy used in an explanation given to me regarding some engineering work to sync a new generator to the grid and it is effectively eye opening.

The tug-of-war was my third attempt at an analogy when I was writing this, so I’m glad the concepts made it through. I was thinking I should have put made Squid Games reference for more clarity about the stakes, like this:

I also assumed that the ERCOT situation was largely or entirely due to gross negligence and Texas things, so it’s nice to learn otherwise. I’d done some reading on the matter awhile back but I mostly just recall the discussion revolving around winter weather without highlighting concerns such as these.

Oh, don’t worry, as I understand it there is still plenty of ERCOT negligence. Apparently Texas’s ability to deal with over-production or under-production is seriously compromised because of its very small connection to the other grids around Texas (by intentional Texas design). From memory, there’s a small link west of Texas through New Mexico, but it can only pull or push a tiny fraction of the electricity riding on the Texas grid so its effectively useless to handle big gridscale swings.

Texas has finally figured out this is a bad idea, and got a check written by Biden’s DoE for $360M to make big boy connections to the national power grids. source.

I’m fine with some of my non-Texas tax money going to help the people of Texas step into to the grid the rest of us use. We’re all citizens of the USA after all. That is unless Musk and trump decide that $360M is waste that Texas doesn’t deserve and cancels the grant through DOGE. Then Texas is back where it started or will have to foot the entire bill themselves.

Not the dude you’ve been responding to, but I’m curious about the infrastructure and tech limitations just in attempt to be more educated.

Warning: GIANT WALL of text incoming. Buckle up.

We all know what happens when there isn’t enough power on the grid at a given moment: a blackout.

However, do you know what the extreme result of too much power on the grid is at a given moment? Also a blackout.

Curtailment

The term to start reading up on is “curtailment”. Its used in demand (consumption of electricity) but also supply (generating electricity). Meaning grid operators are always on a knife’s edge of generating just enough electricity on the grid without being too much. For a small amount of waste, they have ways to burn it off. Think giant space heaters running outside. The loss of money from that “burned off” electricity is there, but its not that big and its considered a cost of doing business. However, there isn’t much “burn off” capacity infrastructure. Historically there hasn’t needed to be.

Grid operators usually have systems of communication they use to contact their generation partners and ask for more juice to be produced, or more frequently these days telling them to hold off generation. At the grid level though, this isn’t like a light switch of “on and off” it can take many minutes or even hours for a grid scale generator to spin up or spin down generation. Also these systems aren’t meant to be rapidly spun up and down so it gets expensive to operate like that.

So up to know its just been the grid operator guessing demand needs and talking to a handful of generators to scale up and down. Now with massive amounts of electricity generated by thousands of smaller operators (residential as well as smaller commercial) there isn’t the same mechanism for the grid operators to halt production.

So what happens when there is a huge excess of electricity and that relatively small “burn off” capacity is quickly consumed? If that excess electricity is allowed through, things literally blow up in the electrical grid, in businesses, and in homes. Those gigawatts of electricity that cannot be allowed to exist on the grid. So grid operators can use another mechanism to try to burn off that excess electricity: negative electricity prices. They can pay people and businesses to use the excess. A note here, in the years and decades ahead, our society will evolve to use this excess more efficiently by timing high consumption at times of excess, but except in a few small examples, we just aren’t there yet. If there aren’t enough people taking money to use the electricity, the grid operator may have to cut off sections of grid to keep from blowing them up. Here’s the blackout from too much electricity. A full blackout also means coming back online later is a much slower process as sections of the grid are brought up slowly to make sure the demand can meet supply.

Even in state sponsored electrical grids (like I assume France is), grid operators are expected to cover their own costs at least when providing the electricity service to the state. So forget that they still have to maintain the grid with all its equipment and employees when electricity prices are at zero, during these peak times they’re having to pay people to use more electricity. So even if they were at break-even before, they’re now at a loss because they’ve had to give out money to use their service. Again, in the future societies and technologies (power storage) can address this, but we’re not in the future. We’re here today with these problems. At its extreme, how many of us will continue to work at if we aren’t receiving a paycheck?

Grid forming/Grid following

One other difference in grid scale generators vs many/most solar generators is the responsibility for forming the grid. This means, keeping the frequency (60Hz in the North America and half of Japan) (50Hz in most of the rest of the world and the other half of Japan). This is done by grid scale generators with GIANT spinning generators and are required by their mandate to make sure the frequency is always stable.

Imagine a game of tug-of-war. The grid scale operator would be the leader closest to the middle and the leader of the team. This is the grid former. All the solar producers are behind the leader all pulling at the leader’s instructions. These are the grid followers. So in the middle of a match it is clear that our team is losing and slowing being pulled toward the line. The grid followers don’t want to be hurt in the fall, so some of them start dropping the rope protecting themselves. As each one drops, the amount of force on the leader and those remaining increases. More team members drop the rope. The forces increase again! The leader cannot drop the rope because they are not allowed to even though they can see what’s coming and is eventually very violently pulled across the line and seriously hurt while all the team members (grid followers) are unharmed because they dropped the rope before anything bad happened to them.

This is what happened in Texas a year or so ago. The result was huge blackouts across the state.

This feels like something that should be celebrated regardless of needing to clean up and awareness to improve the grid and electrification moving forward.

It should be celebrated, but it should also be recognized that it creates its own set of problems. We can’t simply “take the win” and not make any changes. We’ve got systems set up for different circumstances and we haven’t change the system even though the circumstances have changed.

Nah, let’er rip. Just a clueless bystander here. Tell us why capitalism demonizes free energy. We’ll pretend to be shocked, surprised and to have learned something new along the way.

Capitalism demonizes anything free because free is the antithesis of a version of trade that requires differing values of goods.

Do keep in mind that “lost profits” are not a real thing in the space we’re trying to move in.

Keep in mind MOST of the arguments you hear are bad faith fossil fuel operators so I’m not going to defend those. However, there are a number of issues that this abundance of temporary solar energy creates today with the systems and infrastructure we have deployed today. Keep in mind grid operators are measuring and changing the grid an intervals of fractions of a second to keep everything up and running.

Primary difficulties:

• Electrical generation curtailment
• Scaling non-solar generation back up when the temporary energy isn’t there to avoid blackouts

Our grids today aren’t built the way they need to to properly take advantage of large scale solar. We need to change how grids are built, and how we behave with how we use electricity as consumers and businesses.

I appreciate your attempt to engage in good faith, but no, my question was very rhetorical. I am not really interested in discussing any answers to that question that neither you nor I would support.

I understand. I’ve faced some of the same frustrations I’m feeling in your post.

I think most of the opposition to solar panels comes from disingenuous efforts by companies with a financial interest in fossil-fuel,

Most is, I agree. However there are some truthful reasons too because of currently deployed infrastructure or technological limitations, but I agree the majority of anti-solar/ant-wind are bad faith arguments used by fossil fuel invested companies and industries to continue to justify their existence.

Why is this always worded in such a shitty way that makes it sound like a bad thing. “swamps the grid” “overwhelming the region” “prices slumping”.

I’m happy to provide some real answers to you questions if you’re looking for discussion. Some of the answers I don’t personally like myself, but they make sense. I say this as a solar advocate as I am happily watching my own solar production climbing with the change of the season.

If you’re just looking to rant though, I won’t get in your way.

My email provider allows for unlimited aliases. So, while I have 600+ email addresses, emails to them all end up in the same mailbox.

I do this too. The unique email address I create for each is identifiable to the place I’m using it. This has other benefits. If an organization you created and account with sells or has a data breech you know exactly which company it was when you start receiving spam or phishing email directed to that address. This is also nice because you can “black hole” that email address and all the spam goes with it even future spam not sent yet.

The challenge is usually repatriating this funds back to the “home” country. However, many multinationals have been quite happy leaving the profits outside of the “home” country for additional foreign investment in those regions.

Can “dead” people be charged with crimes or are they immune from prosecution?