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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Currently on Windows 11 (yuck) and have a Galaxy S23.

    Next devices I’m looking at are a Framework laptop and Fairphone.

    The QR code sounds super easy which is a good sign. I guess most of my complaints rest with what a full FOSS and pro-privacy cyber-system would look like overall. I come from a Windows world so I have those household names stuck in my head, like Word, Outlook, etc. I guess I’m really looking for a guide that has a 1:1 for the entire OS from Windows to Linux, and maybe more if it improves people’s lives. Thinking Jellyfin and Bitwarden and all those purpose-driven applications.

    At this point I don’t know what I don’t know, and I just wish that some of the awesome devs on Lemmy would post a guide to all of this, soup to nuts style. Maybe one day




  • I protested in front of the DNC this year with the Palestinian supporters.

    The DNC is definitely part of the problem. There are establishment Democrats there too that help decide who gets to run the big ticket. We saw it in 2016 between Hillary and Bernie.

    Still, as a progressive, I believe the only path forward is to still work within the system we have else we risk fracturing and ceasing organization. We need to lead a new platform within the Democratic party, and that will be much harder given the sentiment Americans have of them as was shown in this year’s election results.

    2022 wasn’t half bad though. So there’s still hope.




  • And this is one of the reasons why people shifted Republican in this last election.

    If the Democratic party won’t represent Democratic ideals, then out of either anger or apathy, their base will vote for the party that can do it better, Republicans, or not vote at all.

    I agree with a lot of people on Lemmy that the average American is an idiot, and our shortening attention spans coupled with our changing media diets isn’t helping with that, but I see these as features not bugs.

    Americans in general like their shiny toys, and one of the best ways to capture their attention is by politicians giving concessions and offering things that will benefit their lives. Think carrots on sticks more than sticks themselves.

    I will never stop hanging most of the blame on the Democratic party for leading us to today conclusion after Tuesday.






  • It’s two sided.

    Yes you waste money by not exporting the electricity-transformed version of your resource (wind, sun, chemical potential, etc.).

    But on the flip side if you export lower across your whole site, this means more losses at the inverters which can shorten operational lifetimes and lead to quickened inverter failures and needs for replacement. Those maintenance costs eat into your profit as well.

    As someone in the industry, I’d imagine that inverter-based producers really just react to the rate structures of whatever grid and utility they hook up to. If the incentives of that utility favor one mode of operation during supply-demand mismatches - such as complete site curtailment - then that is what generators will do. If the incentives favor partial generation where only certain blocks of your solar or wind or BESS plant are switched off while others remain on, then we could see more producers do that.

    Ultimately though you need to have a way to operate your site in those conditions to help balance out operation and nonoperation. If whenever a curtailment signal comes to your site, and in response you always shut off Block B while leaving Block A on, then Block A will experience accelerated lifetime degradation over Block B. Inverters, transformers, cables, panels will fail faster in Block A than Block B. But if you could rotate your curtailment/demand response such that certain blocks/strings are used sequentially and that lifetimes are averaged out, this might solve the problem. Think about how farmers rotate which crops they plant in which of their fields to avoid famine and soil degradation.

    I think demand response is taking off in the utilization markets like in buildings and industrial settings, but really I think the principles we’ve learned from that should be carried over to generation markets as well. It’s only a matter of time as the industry matures and smart technology penetrates the grid and generation markets.


  • You can do more with them too actually. You can ramp down the AC power production incrementally to meet curtailment requirements, in theory. When you do that though you subject your inverters to greater strain/losses and less efficiency which shortens your lifetime.

    If inverter-based producers in solar, wind, and/or BESS want their sites to last for 30-40 years so that ROI is achieved via operation, then it is in their interest to protect their equipment and operate as much as possible at rated conditions or de-energized conditions.

    You might think that it would make sense to have more of a slider control between ON and OFF to save everyone, from producers to grids to consumers, but my guess from being in the industry is that grids don’t really supply incentives for that kind of operation. If they did, maybe you’d see more variable control at utility- and community-scale levels.


  • I’m in solar/BESS, and I mean more and more DER sites are making use of string inverters which break out arrays into greater chunks than with central inverters. With those, you have more granularity of control where you can drop entire blocks/strings at a time to fall to your curtailed export rate.

    You might ask yourself though why DERs can’t just ramp inverter outputs up or down to match curtailment automatically across a whole site. You can absolutely do that, but what happens is your solar or wind resource stays high on the DC or low frequency (LF) AC side, respectively, while power frequency AC is low on the other side of the inverters. This is referred to as DC:AC ratio in the biz, and the higher that ratio, the more losses your inverters experience and less efficient they are. This also puts a huge strain on your inverters and can lessen their operational lifetime.

    But really, DERs tie into the grid at distribution level and so they don’t fall under the regulations of FERC & NERC (at least in North America). This means that smaller producers don’t have the same requirements for control as do utility-scale players, so the incentive to control these string inverters at that granular level isn’t there. It’s much easier to just trip the main breaker and wait until the utility gives you the go ahead to turn back on.

    I suspect that at lot of producers may want to look into greater control capabilities in the future, but this also depends on inverter OEMs too allowing that control.


  • One solution to what you’re describing is to expand the grid. If your grid stretches half the planet, when the East starts to experience night, the West still experiences day and can ship electricity from renewables to the East to make up for their self curtailment. The same goes for wind where if one location on the planet doesn’t experience wind, odds are another location does and the power can be shuffled around.

    Another option is to build out more battery storage such that any clipped energy from solar or wind - that is, the energy that can be generated from your solar or wind resource but that can’t be exported because it would overload your inverters or transformers or exceed your PPA agreement with your utility - is stored and can be exported for 2-4 hours as the sun goes down or wind dies out.

    Not a lot of renewables sites are colocated with battery storage, but more and more are.


  • The original commenter’s (OC’s) point has nothing to do with renewables’ reliability.

    It is entirely to do with generation vs demand. Grid operators could ask other generators like coal, nuclear, hydro, etc. plants to curtail so inverter-based renewables can export power, but that’s not likely because those producers can’t ramp generation up and down as easily.

    Grid stability is a problem when you have overcrowding of generation without enough demand on given feeders. This is moreso an issue with the utilities anyways and how they plan their transmission and substation upgrades.



  • I guess it comes down to whether we want to primarily communicate battery size in terms of charge (Coulombs = Amps * Time) or energy (Joules = Watts * Time).

    The first metric you multiply by your operating voltage to get the second metric, whereas the second metric you have to divide by your voltage to get the first. Depends on what comes easier to most people.