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Cake day: April 6th, 2024

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  • Heat pumps easily exceed 2.5 COP. More like 4 in the UK climate. And gas isn’t 100% efficient either. But yeah it’s a wash or can be more expensive to heat with heat pumps where electricity is really expensive. It helps if we all conveniently ignore externalities like pollution and carbon too.


  • What are you actually advocating for here? Not electrifying and waiting another few decades for hydrogen? You come off as excessively defensive of the practically nonexistent H2 industry and excessively critical of electrification, which is basically the Shell and Exxon position. We don’t have time wait for anything, we need to use the tech we have now to reduce warming. Where do we get the hydrogen in your world? Is it blue or green? Blue is just fossil fuels with extra steps and green doesn’t make sense until we have significant excess renewables and already electrified the easy stuff (buildings) and then it might still make sense only for industry/shipping and niche stuff. H2 itself has a GWP of 11 or so, and we will leak quite a bit. So again, what are you actually arguing for? I can’t buy hydrogen, period. I can’t buy a hydrogen vehicle, or a hydrogen furnace, or a hydrogen anything. What do you actually think we plebs should be doing here? I already want green steel as much as you do.




  • It’s just microclimates. I particularly hate the article’s framing of white materials as “geoengineering”, which implies that black asphalt roofs and roads are somehow not. We also know urban heat islands shift moisture downwind. So they’ve modeled some micro interaction that shows piecemeal application of low and high albedo surfaces can possibly result in some weird local effects on precipitation, all packaged up for misinterpretation by EPDM manufacturers.

    Meanwhile everyone with a brain knows that black asphalt and roofs are hotter than white surfaces. The solution is of course stop black roofs and the bate minimum amount of roads/parking lots, not try to make everything heat absorptive in the name of equality.
















  • What a mess. It seems like the fundamental issue here is allowing the grandfathering of old NEM rate structures, much like CA allows folks to grandfather in their old property taxes while screwing over new purchasers. Nobody should expect rate certainty for 20 years into the future, that’s just an absurdly long time period to expect guaranteed rate structures.

    It’s not that complicated at a high level really - when nobody has solar, full net metering is reasonably fair. When everyone has solar, the whole scheme collapses because production doesn’t align with usage exactly. So every few years during a rate case, they should all work together and shift the value of solar generation accordingly (likely downward). Folks need to take on a little risk with their major purchases because anything else is even more unfair to early and later adopters. The time value of solar production varies year to year and solar owners should be compensated accordingly. Batteries will bring value back to solar by allowing for load shifting, and much like solar, can be done by individuals or utilities.

    Obviously the specific details are muddy as hell and will be contentious, but that’s normal and reasonable compromises usually prevail.

    The reality is some east facing panels in LA aren’t that valuable these days. And the person with east facing panels from 5 years ago shouldn’t get massive long term benefits locked in because they did the install earlier.

    I live in Colorado, have solar, and fully expect the value of my generation to reduce over time. Expecting full retail value of my excess June production to offset power I badly need in Jan to run my heat pump simply isn’t fair.