
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
- "The Expert"
- Label Noise
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Hermann Scheer Hermann Scheer was a visionary, a major guy, who thought deep thoughts about energy, and its implications for humanity’s relationship with physical reality
- Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Five Thirty Eight’s take on why pandemic modeling is so difficult
- Gavin Simpson
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- Lenny Smith's CHAOS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION This is a PDF version of Lenny Smith’s book of the same title, also available from Amazon.com
- Ted Dunning
- American Statistical Association
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- London Review of Books
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on how businesses can help our collective environmental mess Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard set the standard for how a business can mitigate the ravages of capitalism on earth’s environment. At 81 years old, he’s just getting started.
- All about models
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- Slice Sampling
- Tim Harford's “More or Less'' Tim Harford explains – and sometimes debunks – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life
- Why "naive Bayes" is not Bayesian Explains why the so-called “naive Bayes” classifier is not Bayesian. The setup is okay, but estimating probabilities by doing relative frequencies instead of using Dirichlet conjugate priors or integration strays from The Path.
- Pat's blog While it is described as “The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher”, this is false humility, as it chronicles the present and past life and times of mathematicians in their context. Recommended.
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- All about ENSO, and lunar tides (Paul Pukite) Historically, ENSO has been explained in terms of winds. But recently — and Dr Paul Pukite has insisted upon this for a long time — the oscillation of ENSO has been explained as a large-scale slosh due to lunar tidal forcing.
- Professor David Draper
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Darren Wilkinson's introduction to ABC Darren Wilkinson’s introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (“ABC”). See also his post about summary statistics for ABC https://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/summary-stats-for-abc/
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Number Cruncher Politics
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
climate change
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Climate Change: A health emergency … New England Journal of Medicine Caren G. Solomon, M.D., M.P.H., and Regina C. LaRocque, M.D., M.P.H., January 17, 2019 N Engl J Med 2019; 380:209-211 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1817067
- Simple models of climate change
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- Reanalyses.org
- The Sunlight Economy
- Model state level energy policy for New Englad Bob Massie’s proposed energy policy for Massachusetts, an admirable model for energy policy anywhere in New England
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- The great Michael Osborne's latest opinions Michael Osborne is a genius operative and champion of solar energy. I have learned never to disregard ANYTHING he says. He is mentor of Karl Ragabo, and the genius instigator of the Texas renewable energy miracle.
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- Ice and Snow
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- Steve Easterbrook's excellent climate blog: See his "The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet?" for example Heavy on data and computation, Easterbrook is a CS prof at UToronto, but is clearly familiar with climate science. I like his “The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet” very much.
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- And Then There's Physics
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 2 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. The second part.
- David Appell's early climate science
- Climate change: Evidence and causes A project of the UK Royal Society: (1) Answers to key questions, (2) evidence and causes, and (3) a short guide to climate science
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- CLIMATE ADAM Previously from the Science news staff at the podcast of Nature (“Nature Podcast”), the journal, now on YouTube, encouraging climate action through climate comedy.
- Paul Beckwith Professor Beckwith is, in my book, one of the most insightful and analytical observers on climate I know. I highly recommend his blog, and his other informational products.
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- "Mighty Microgrids" Webinar This is a Webinar on YouTube about Microgrids from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), featuring New York State and Minnesota
- The Keeling Curve The first, and one of the best programs for creating a spatially significant long term time series of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Started amongst great obstacles by one, smart determined guy, Charles David Keeling.
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. In two parts.
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- Solar Gardens Community Power
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: Karl Ragabo
“The U.S. should lead the world on climate change”
This excerpt is from Bloomberg Opinion, written by its Editorial Board. I recommend the entire op-ed. Climate change is a global threat requiring global action, so it’s essential that the U.S. join, and preferably guide, worldwide cooperative efforts. Among Biden’s … Continue reading
Posted in alternatives to the Green New Deal, American Solar Energy Society, Amory Lovins, Arnold Schwarzennegger, Benji Backer, Bloomberg, Bloomberg Green, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, capitalism, Carbon Cycle, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate hawk, climate justice, climate policy, climate science, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, ecocapitalism, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, electrical energy engineering, electricity markets, engineering, fossil fuel divestment, global warming, Hermann Scheer, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Ragabo, keep fossil fuels in ground, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, liberal climate deniers, local generation, making money, marginal energy sources, Mark Carney, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Osborne, ocean warming, On being Carbon Dioxide, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Stewart Brand, stranded assets, the green century, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
Leave a comment
What’s wrong with Massachusetts? Land wind turbines!
For groups of people who seriously embrace land wind turbines, there is no downside.
Posted in American Conservation Coalition, American Solar Energy Society, Ørsted, being carbon dioxide, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, Cape Wind, capitalism, CleanTechnica, climate activism, climate disruption, climate policy, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, distributed generation, ecocapitalism, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, education, fossil fuel divestment, global warming, global weirding, Green Tea Coalition, Hermann Scheer, Karl Ragabo, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, microgrids, mitigating climate disruption, On being Carbon Dioxide, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Sonnen community, statistical ecology, Talk Solar, the energy of the people, the green century, the tragedy of our present civilization, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, unreason, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
Leave a comment
Book: 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything
Professor Mark Z Jacobson‘s latest marvelous book, 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything, summarized in a great one hour interview.
Posted in #youthvgov, an uncaring American public, Ørsted, being carbon dioxide, Benji Backer, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, climate activism, climate business, climate economics, climate education, climate hawk, climate mitigation, climate policy, control theory, decentralized electric power generation, distributed generation, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, emergent organization, fossil fuel divestment, Green New Deal, grid defection, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, Karl Ragabo, keep fossil fuels in ground, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, Mark Jacobson, Michael Osborne, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sankey diagram, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, stranded assets, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
1 Comment
“Climate Hope” from Climate Adam
Rainmaker, a little faith for hire Rainmaker, the house is on fire Rainmaker, take everything you have Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, so bad They’ll hire a rainmaker Springsteen, 2020 (h/t Andrew Gottlieb, Association … Continue reading
Posted in #youthvgov, bridge to somewhere, climate activism, Climate Adam, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, climate grief, climate hawk, Climate Hope, climate mitigation, climate nightmares, climate policy, climate science, ClimateAdam, Debbie Dooley, distributed generation, Eaarth, ecocapitalism, Ecology Action, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, Emily Shuckburgh, global warming, Green Tea Coalition, Karl Ragabo, Mark Carney, Mark Jacobson, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, the green century, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
Leave a comment
Choices.
This is a retake of a presentation at the invitation of the Walpole Greens and made at their meeting of 9th November 2020. It is longer and more leisurely. I interleave some of the answers to questions that followed the … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, agriculture, agrivoltaics, agroecology, alternatives to the Green New Deal, American Solar Energy Society, argoecology, Ørsted, being carbon dioxide, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Botany, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide sequestration, Clausius-Clapeyron equation, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate hawk, climate policy, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Conservation Action Coalition, Debbie Dooley, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, distributed generation, ecocapitalism, ecological services, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, ecopragmatist, electric vehicles, electrical energy storage, electricity, emissions, energy, energy storage, energy utilities, engineering, environment, explosive methane, forests, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, fracking, fragmentation of ecosystems, gas pipeline leaks, global warming, Google Earth, Green Tea Coalition, greenhouse gases, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Ragabo, Keeling curve, keep fossil fuels in ground, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, liberal climate deniers, local generation, local self reliance, meteorology, microgrids, mitigating climate disruption, natural gas, nuclear power, NuScale, ocean acidification, ocean warming, oceans, On being Carbon Dioxide, plankton, Principles of Planetary Climate, public utility commissions, RethinkX, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Stewart Brand, the energy of the people, the green century, Tony Seba, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
5 Comments
More reasons why centralized grids and ISOs/RTOs cannot be trusted, with an afterthought
From Inside Climate News and I’m sure it’ll eventually show up at Legal Planet, where they touched the matter over a year ago: The new rules, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, are designed to counteract state subsidies that … Continue reading
Posted in American Solar Energy Society, an ignorant American public, an uncaring American public, Ørsted, Berkeley Haas Energy, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, Carbon Worshipers, children as political casualties, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, Cult of Carbon, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, distributed generation, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, electric vehicles, electrical energy storage, electricity, electricity markets, emissions, energy levy, energy storage, fossil fuel infrastructure, green tech, Green Tech Media, greenhouse gases, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, IEEE, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, Karl Ragabo, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, Mark Jacobson, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, Michael Bloomberg, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, population dynamics, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, regulatory capture, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, SunPower, the green century, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, utility company death spiral, Westwood, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
Leave a comment
In case you wondered if Carbon Dioxide increases caused climate change, here’s the latest news
In case you wondered if Carbon Dioxide (also called, carbonic acid, CO2) increases caused climate change, here’s the latest news … from 1856-1896:
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, American Meteorological Association, AMETSOC, an ignorant American public, an uncaring American public, Anthropocene, atmosphere, being carbon dioxide, Blackbody radiation, Boltzmann, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate education, climate grief, climate models, ClimateAdam, Cult of Carbon, Eaarth, earth, Earth Day, ecological disruption, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, evidence, fossil fuels, gas pipeline leaks, global warming, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, Humans have a lot to answer for, Hyper Anthropocene, ice sheet dynamics, investments, Karl Ragabo, klaus lackner, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local self reliance, moral leadership, new forms of scientific peer review, philosophy of science, physical materialism, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, radiative forcing, rhetorical science, science, scientific publishing, stranded assets, supply chains, support of black boxes, Talk Solar, Tony Seba
1 Comment
Solar plus storage is now cheaper than any non-solar electrical power
More details. And, from that Lefty Socialist rag, Forbes.
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Solar Energy Society, Amory Lovins, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, Cult of Carbon, Debbie Dooley, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, ecomodernism, economics, ecopragmatism, electrical energy storage, electricity markets, energy storage, energy utilities, fossil fuel divestment, Germany, Green Tea Coalition, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Ragabo, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local self reliance, Mark Jacobson, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Spaceship Earth, Stanford University, stranded assets, Talk Solar, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
2 Comments
“Strong First Quarter Growth and Fracked Gas Takes a Hit”
(To see a larger figure, click on image to open it in a new browser window. This is from ILSR‘s “Of New Power Generation, How Much is on the Roof? Quarterly Update — 2019 Q1“.) It was once warned, and … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, electricity markets, energy utilities, green tech, grid defection, ILSR, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, John Farrell, Karl Ragabo, Michael Osborne, microgrids, public utility commissions, regime shifts, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Talk Solar, technology, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
Leave a comment
October 2013 retrospective … Karl Ragabo on ‘Talk Solar’ podcast, regarding value of solar generation
In October of 2013, Karl Ragabo was interviewed on the Talk Solar podcast from Beth Bond of Decatur, GA. This was shortly after the first version of the Value of Solar report was issued by IREC. Listen to it below: … Continue reading
Posted in Beth Bond, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, CleanTechnica, climate disruption, climate economics, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, distributed generation, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, energy storage, energy utilities, engineering, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Ragabo, microgrids, public utility commissions, regulatory capture, resiliency, RevoluSun, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Sonnen community, Stewart Brand, stranded assets, Talk Solar, the energy of the people, the green century, Tony Seba, utility company death spiral
Leave a comment

