Also, I heard that Texas was the best place to build things (cf. Abundance by Thompson & Klein)
I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?
Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had degraded)
This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.
Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects.
The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.
I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw...
Yea, corruption. Tax breaks on past gains are just handouts and everyone wants a handout.
To focus on "past": I don't think deferring the gains for a couple years is a big deal. It's not a handout because he'll still be paying the same taxes if he doesn't end up reinvesting the money. It just offers him some more time to set up a business, instead of having to do it same-year.
To focus on "gains": If you don't like the entire idea of reinvested money not counting as profits, oh boy that's a big objection, and it's not that way because of corruption.
Reinvesting money getting special treatment provides zero benefits to the economy. It falls under the fallacy that rich people can avoid investing their fortunes, inflation already makes that a nonstarter. The only result here is a handout.
Taxing businesses on revenue rather than profits doesn't work because it would bankrupt every business with slim margins, which is most of them, while effectively cutting taxes for the ones with the thickest margins and creating a massive tax subsidy for vertical integration.
> It falls under the fallacy that rich people can avoid investing their fortunes, inflation already makes that a nonstarter.
If all someone cared about was avoiding inflation they could just buy a stack of precious metals. Moreover, the return from typical passive investments (e.g. S&P 500) significantly exceeds the rate of inflation.
The preference for investment is as opposed to spending. If inflation is at 3% and someone is getting a 10% return from stocks, they can avoid real value loss while still spending up to 70% of the nominal profits. But we'd rather people build factories and develop new drugs and technologies than buy second private jets and third personal mansions.
Investment isn’t a business expense.
> If all someone cared about was avoiding inflation they could just buy a stack of precious metals.
Capital gains of precious metals “yield” drops you below inflation.
> But we'd rather people build factories and develop new drugs and technologies than buy second private jets and third personal mansions.
Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P gains. Giving handouts to wealthy people hardly discourages them using a private jet, just the opposite.
Investment is the thing where you pay a business expense today expecting a return in the future.
> Capital gains of precious metals “yield” drops you below inflation.
This is a defect in the tax code. Taxing inflation as a capital gain is ridiculous.
> Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P gains.
And then those companies get a tax deduction. Or in many cases they do make those returns without doing those things, because a lot of those companies have high returns by buying off regulators to constrain competition and then charging high margins to captive customers, which is another thing we don't like to promote over the ones actually making productive investments.
> Giving handouts to wealthy people hardly discourages them using a private jet, just the opposite.
The tax isn't deferred on the money used for personal consumption.
Investments like land aren’t necessarily consumed. You can reasonably deduct when an actual expense happens, but buying steel etc to be used next year doesn’t guarantee it is actually used rather than sold.
> The tax isn't deferred on the money used for personal consumption.
Money is fungible, you hand me money to buy land and I can redirect money I would have spent to buy something else.
In many cases you're buying something intending it to be consumed, even if it hasn't been yet, and have to buy it ahead of time because you have to get it installed or connected or forged etc. before it can start being used.
If you then sell the steel instead of using it, the sale price gets added to your income and the cost was already deducted previously, so that cancels the previous deduction and you're back to paying the tax on it.
> Money is fungible, you hand me money to buy land and I can redirect money I would have spent to buy something else.
In order to get a tax deduction for buying land to build a solar farm, you have to buy land to build a solar farm. You can't spend that money on something else and still get that tax deduction. You can spend other money on something else, but the amount of money you have available to spend on other things has gone down, and the point is to increase your incentive to build the solar farm, which it is effective in doing.
An interest free loan means you’re ahead in that transaction but society is worse off when people do useless things to avoid taxes.
> You can spend other money on something else, but the amount of money you have available to spend on other things has gone down
One can’t invest all their money in any given year or one lacks the ability to buy food. You also can’t spend all your money in a given year or you go broke.
Thus both saving and spending are always happening and the government reducing the amount of money you’re required to save means you can up spending. There’s zero meaningfully differences between piles of money here.
I was like "yeah, I like that thing (solar) and think it's good for the world, I will do it in return for tax incentives"
Why exactly is that bad?
They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.
His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
It's a significantly bad thing if something as straightforward as buying and plugging in solar panels requires special knowledge to not get screwed over.
> His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
Oh come on.
And it's even plausible that ERCOT currently can't handle additional PV in whatever area the Roby parcel was in without adding BESS, although the person you're responding to has no idea if that's true or not, since neither they nor I knows where that is.
The conclusion in the post:
> Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one might succeed. And switching to batteries instead of solar. Or at least solar plus storage.
Okay, how small of a connection would they have to restrict him to for me to be correct?
> BESS, simple curtailment at peak hours, or angle diversity would solve the problem.
That much extra curtailment is a major problem. That much extra angle diversity hurts output. Batteries are a workaround for not being able to properly hook up the panels.
Onsite BESS permits you to not only get by with a smaller hookup but also sell your energy at times when people are willing to pay for it.
I did my calculation already. It said that a 1/3 drop in hookup for panels that were already hookup-constrained is not a proper hookup.
Straightforward math.
He was doing it for the tax credits. Without the tax credits, this project wouldn't have come close to making sense.
Absolutely untrue. Solar and wind can always just be disconnected at any moment. Wind resources are also a huge inertia source- windmill blades are massive grid stabilizers.
Renewable tech does not have a big coal fire they need to keep at a constant temperature. How about instead of requiring batteries with solar, we require coal plants to have sufficient bypass cooling that they don't need the load of a grid connection to stay cool.
Renewables are a boogeyman. The reality is simply that they are always able to undercut any fossil plant and they don't like that. It has fuck all to do with grid stability.
> Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
The project was intentionally limited in scale as to be a "learning project" for me and the whole team. I'm also sort of ok with the idea that it failed, though super frustrated with the entire underlying incentive structure changing so much that we can't use anything we learned to try a second time.
Batteries were intentionally excluded because of the additional complexity overhead they added, and because the way the interconnection rules are written it would have put us into a different MW class which would have dramatically increased a number of other bureaucracy issues.
You are ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT that we would have had a net negative value to the Texas grid without batteries. Batteries are valuable, and increasingly so, but so is raw power (even at mid sun). This is reflected nicely in the hourly price charts, which at this point I'm super familiar with.
In California the companies also systematically under-invest in capacity and maintenance, so the up-front cost of any project, even single home solar can get unpredictable fast.
At least Dr Pepper comes from Texas. There’s that to like. Everything else just always seems upside down absurd.
Predictably, all of those projects dropped out of the interconnection queue / process
Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because that's not what real people sound like.
If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be uncharitably described as "lying"), why should I trust anything else, like the numbers, or the factual claims?
Did any of this actually happen? (I note that there's not a single external link or fact that an ignorant layman like myself could quickly and easily verify, including the Astral Codex Ten part.)
Incidentally, there are a lot of typos in the titles in https://7goldfish.com/ .
> This is a much better read than I expected.
Hm...
I'd expect ChatGPT to make no typographical errors in a list of post titles.
First I want to acknowledge that draft one of this was LLM written, by Claude, though it reflects a pretty detailed outline of an experience pretty accurately. As you point out the quotes from both Mr. R and myself were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well (though not the quotes from external entities)
Mr. R signed off on the draft before posting, and well, it was me. I tended to think of it more as a "movie treatment" than a technical post-mortem, so I wasn't really worried about it. I also was only expecting this to get circulated within my own small/medium sized community so, in general, wasn't really worried about it.
That said, I definitely love using LLMs to write. To be perfectly honest they write considerably better and faster than I do (as you noted, lots of typo-o's and similar. I was still spelling at a 6th grade level when I graduated from Uni with CS degree), though I still feel like I have both ideas and experiences worth sharing. If you click any of the earlier stuff you will probably see the clumsy results that take about 10x the time.
I waffle on the idea of how much disclaimer of "written via LLM, but with multiple revisions and actual thought" vs "just don't bother saying anything" it's worth including. I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment. I notice as I say that that it sounds defensive, and I want it to be a genuine question, as I share your concern about living in a media world where it feels like "basically nothing can be trusted".
For what it's worth, the numbers should be about right, though there is only so much energy we were willing to spend on the post-mortem. If there is some informational reason you would like to get into it deeply I would be happy to share the post mortem docs privately.
I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.
Lots of seemingly little things that are necessary to get something off the ground.
stego-tech•5h ago
All of this results in good intentions being squandered because too many entrenched entities would lose too much hypothetical value on a balance sheet to just do something better for everyone.
Calwestjobs•4h ago
solo solar plant are very weird edge case which was viable only because people with 20 years of schooling could not understand why is solar important, (after multiple oil crises ) so govs invested in this nonsense to speed up adoption. not because it was sensical thing. to open eyes to people that solar is working.
build solar as part of your corps supply chain. dollars are not goal, dollars are means for better life, stronger communities, better republic.
"Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. "
where is battery ? so no this is not about energy self sufficiency, this is just pure only money endeavor. soft power here is not sane. also with battery you can get order of magnitude higher profit AND higher UTILITY, so there are multiple bad things in that endeavor.
Calwestjobs•4h ago
there is insanely huge gap in peoples perception of reality, schooling failed many.
less energy i need, less energy we need to capture (new word for generate), transmit, curtail, store,.... my heat pump is smaller then heat pump in costcos meat refrigerator, so smaller device is easier, quicker to manufacture, less people, cars , cubic feet to store, transport,.... and all this effect from on freaking house.
or hurricane, tornado, flood disables grid in my area, my house will stay livable for 3 days until i have to put on sweater... or today, there is heat wave predicted, at least 10 people will die today,... why?
Spivak•2h ago
My neighbors who heat their houses with wood (in an area where you absolutely don't have to—we have gas and electric at extremely reasonable prices), both have the nice high efficiency stoves to take advantage of the Biden tax credit and it seems to work just fine for them. Cords of wood around here aren't free but damn close to it.
Source: I'm considering a wood stove for my garage for working in the winter and they both talked my ear off about their experiences.
jay_kyburz•3h ago
People here in Australia expect feed in tariff to drop to nothing in the next few years, but electric prices are still climbing.
Our new government has promised battery subsidies as well, so I expect batteries to take off. There is a lot of money to be saved by time shifting all that sun that is wasted during the day until the evening when you get home.
cavisne•2h ago
Is there any actual need for this Solar Farm in the middle of nowhere (that was only built there because of a tax scheme)? Are Texas ratepayers meant to cover the cost of the interconnect in their $/Kwh instead of him?
Better to just pay his taxes and move on, and leave the subsidies for an actual useful solar project.
EDIT: Oh and mineral rights are basically the original cryptocurrency/memecoin, so its somewhat funny that they came into play