symbolic

I visited Europe recently and used a rideshare service, the guy was driving a new BYD compact SUV. I was surprised at how nice it was. The interior styling was still a little eccentric, which is something I noticed before with Chinese cars, but the build quality appeared to be very good. It was definitely a vehicle I would consider if they were for sale here in the US. American car manufacturers must be relieved to be protected by arbitrary trade barriers.

I’m just pointing out an issue with residential PV which, when I first heard about it, surprised me. I hope it does not surprise the people making these laws.

Imagine if, some years from now, seasonal solar oversupply might become in the UK and the people with these by law mandated panels face the choice to either manually switch off their systems or pay to send their solar energy into the grid. It sounds stupid but this seems to be happening in places with high PV density.

And btw you’re getting me wrong, I am a big fan of residential solar. I’ve got a small system. It’s just, at scale, apparently more complicated than covering every roof with panels…

People who install solar on their roofs usually expect to recoup some of the costs by sending energy to the grid. When, increasingly often, they have a choice of either shutting the system off and wasting this energy or sending it to the grid at low or even negative rates, this becomes a problem. The expectation of “my solar system will pay for itself in X years” might become “my solar system will never break even”. At least that’s an issue in some places with high PV density.

Of course, it depends on the conditions. But any (temporary) overcapacity becomes a problem for people with solar panels when they expect to pay off the cost of the panels not just with a reduction in drawing power from the grid but also with credits from sending power to the grid.

However, there are problems, with some grid operators even charging customers for energy sent to the grid during peak times, such as in NL: https://innovationorigins.com/en/solar-feed-in-tariffs-climb-18-in-six-months/

Solar without storage is less ideal than most people think.

Absolutely. But I also read about these concerns in The Netherlands and Belgium, which aren’t quite California.

While solar power is great and possibly the future, I sure hope they fully thought this through. A lot of areas with large numbers of solar panels are struggling to manage overcapacity. Solar energy produced is not always sent to the grid but wasted, as there is often not enough grid-scale storage capacity to absorb it. I’m no expert, but I wonder if mandating smart in-home sodium-ion batteries which intelligently charge and discharge based on grid capacity wouldn’t be more effective.

The same with Lightroom sadly. The open source alternatives are either too buggy or have UX designed by very “opinionated” people, making them painful and frustrating to use. I currently want to get rid of Lightroom but can’t.

Perhaps that’s because Steam doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to “lock in” developers to their platform. Devs are free to sell their PC games on Gog or Epic or whatever. Steam is popular because it’s a good platform. This freedom for developers or customers mostly does not exist on mobile or on consoles, except for the EUs efforts here.

Even their “console” the Steam Deck can, relatively easily, run games from other stores. I’m not saying a 30% cut should be considered fair but they do seem to take a different approach to digital sales than the other large players.

All for-profit tech eventually yields to enshittification.