Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Top Posts & Pages
- Comprehensive and compact tutorial on Petris' DLM package in R; with an update about Helske's KFAS
- Another reason we need to stop developing: `If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.'
- Uniform sampling of a disk, and implications for sampling the Internet
Archives
Category Archives: optimization
What if Juliana v United States fails?
This is a replica of a comment I made at another site. As of 23:55 EST on 21st January, it hasn’t been release from moderation. Perhaps the moderator is busy. I do not know. I am proceeding as if it … Continue reading
Posted in an ignorant American public, an uncaring American public, Anthropocene, being carbon dioxide, Boston Ethical Society, carbon dioxide capture, clear air capture of carbon dioxide, climate, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporate supply chains, corporations, ecological disruption, ecomodernism, economics, ecopragmatism, environment, environmental law, extended producer responsibility, extended supply chains, First Parish Needham, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, Juliana v United States, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, Mary C Wood, optimization, Our Children's Trust, pollution, population biology, population dynamics, Principles of Planetary Climate, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, radiative forcing, rationality, reasonableness, sea level rise, sustainability, the tragedy of our present civilization, tragedy of the horizon, United States Constitution, United States Government, UU, UU Needham, zero carbon
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“One of the most interesting things about the MIP ensembles is that the mean of all the models generally has higher skill than any individual model.” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all models are created equal, that … Continue reading
Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION: A Review
(Revised and updated Monday, 24th October 2016.) Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil, published by Crown Random House, 2016. This is a thoughtful and very approachable introduction and review to the societal and personal consequences of data mining, data science, … Continue reading
Posted in citizen data, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, compassion, complex systems, criminal justice, Daniel Kahneman, data science, deep recurrent neural networks, destructive economic development, economics, education, engineering, ethics, Google, ignorance, Joseph Schumpeter, life purpose, machine learning, Mathbabe, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, model comparison, model-free forecasting, numerical analysis, numerical software, open data, optimization, organizational failures, planning, politics, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, rationality, reason, reasonableness, risk, silly tech devices, smart data, sociology, Techno Utopias, testing, the value of financial assets, transparency
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David Suzuki on Agroecology
See Feeding humanity in a warming world. Dr Suzuki links University of California, Berkeley, Professor Miguel Altieri’s “Principles and strategies for designing sustainable farming systems“.
Posted in adaptation, agriculture, Anthropocene, argoecology, Buckminster Fuller, carbon dioxide sequestration, climate, climate change, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, David Suzuki, demand-side solutions, drought, ecology, environment, Epcot, extended supply chains, food, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, Life Cycle Assessment, local generation, Miguel Altieri, optimization, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, resiliency, Sankey diagram, sociology, Spaceship Earth, spatial statistics
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Where’s NY-REV today?
This is a video and link from The Rocky Mountain Institute about New York State’s Reforming the Energy Visions or “REV”. I have written about REV before.
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate change, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, distributed generation, Ecology Action, efficiency, EIA, electricity, electricity markets, energy, energy reduction, energy storage, energy utilities, feed-in tariff, fossil fuel divestment, global warming, Green Tea Coalition, greenhouse gases, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, Life Cycle Assessment, local generation, long-term contract for differences, marginal energy sources, Mark Jacobson, microgrids, mitigation, optimization, planning, prediction, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, rationality, reasonableness, regulatory capture, RevoluSun, risk, Sankey diagram, solar domination, solar energy, Solar Freakin' Roadways, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Spaceship Earth, stranded assets, sustainability, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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On the simple pleasures of Solar
(To see a larger figure, click on image. To return to blog, use your browser’s Back Button.) RevoluSun installed our SunPower solar panels late last year, and they came online on 31st December 2015. We have made a number of … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, clean disruption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, disruption, distributed generation, efficiency, electricity, electricity markets, energy utilities, engineering, fossil fuel divestment, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, Massachusetts, microgrids, New England, optimization, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, rationality, reasonableness, RevoluSun, Sankey diagram, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Spaceship Earth, SunPower, sustainability, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, zero carbon
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Germany’s Energiewende aims to make baseload power obsolete
In a December 2015 article in Forbes, William Pentland seeks to answer the question “What is so revolutionary about Germany’s Energiewende?” Mr Pentland begins: Germany’s energy revolution has become the perennial punching bag of American energy policy. In particular, American … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Arnold Schwarzennegger, bifurcations, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, disruption, distributed generation, Ecology Action, efficiency, EIA, electricity, electricity markets, energy, energy reduction, energy storage, energy utilities, engineering, Epcot, feed-in tariff, FERC, fossil fuel divestment, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal climate deniers, local generation, marginal energy sources, mesh models, microgrids, optimization, planning, politics, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, rationality, reasonableness, regime shifts, regulatory capture, Sankey diagram, solar domination, solar energy, Solar Freakin' Roadways, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Spaceship Earth, sustainability, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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Of my favorite things …
(Clarifying language added 4 Apr 2016, 12:26 EDT.) I just watched an episode from the last season of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled “Force of Nature.” As anyone who pays the least attention to this blog knows, opposing human … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, bridge to somewhere, bucket list, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Sagan, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, compassion, data science, Earle Wilson, ecology, Ecology Action, environment, evolution, geophysics, George Sughihara, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, life purpose, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, numerical analysis, optimization, philosophy, physical materialism, physics, population biology, population dynamics, proud dad, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, rationality, reasonableness, science, sociology, statistics, stochastic algorithms
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I ask again: Does Massachusetts have a share of the clean energy future?
Or is Governor Baker and the Massachusetts House going to subcontract that to other states, like Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New York? They are coming. Update, 2016-02-23 Where does Massachusetts get its energy now?
Posted in Anthropocene, Cape Wind, Carbon Cycle, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, ecology, EIA, electricity, electricity markets, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, environment, exponential growth, extended supply chains, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, global warming, greenhouse gases, greenwashing, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, investment in wind and solar energy, Mark Jacobson, methane, municipal solid waste, natural gas, optimization, pipelines, planning, politics, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, rationality, reasonableness, Sankey diagram, solar energy, Solar Freakin' Roadways, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Spaceship Earth, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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“Grid shading by simulated annealing” [Martyn Plummer]
Source: Grid shading by simulated annealing (or what I did on my holidays), aka “fun with GCHQ job adverts”, by Martyn Plummer, developer of JAGS. Excerpt: I wanted to solve the puzzle but did not want to sit down with … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayesian, Bayesian inversion, Boltzmann, BUGS, Christian Robert, Gibbs Sampling, JAGS, likelihood-free, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Martyn Plummer, mathematics, maths, MCMC, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, optimization, probabilistic programming, SPSA, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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high dimension Metropolis-Hastings algorithms
If attempting to simulate from a multivariate standard normal distribution in a large dimension, when starting from the mode of the target, i.e., its mean γ, leaving the mode γis extremely unlikely, given the huge drop between the value of the density at the mode γ and at likely realisations Continue reading
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, Bayesian inversion, boosting, chance, Christian Robert, computation, ensembles, Gibbs Sampling, James Spall, Jerome Friedman, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, mathematics, maths, MCMC, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, multivariate statistics, numerical software, numerics, optimization, reasonableness, Robert Schapire, SPSA, state-space models, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search, stochastics, Yoav Freund
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Massachusetts Solar Suburbs (a Google group)
I have just created the Massachusetts Solar Suburbs Google group. It’s Welcome Message reads: Welcome to the Massachusetts Solar Suburbs! This group exists to provide a forum for owners of solar installations, typically residential, or serving residences, to share their … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Carbon Tax, Carbon Worshipers, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, diffusion, diffusion processes, economics, education, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, environment, ethics, fear uncertainty and doubt, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, global warming, Google, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, MA, meteorology, microgrids, optimization, physics, planning, politics, public utility commissions, rationality, reasonableness, risk, Sankey diagram, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, sustainability, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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climate impacts upon corporate supply chains
http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/advisory/consulting/risk/resilience/publications/business-not-as-usual.html https://www.aig.com/Chartis/internet/US/en/TheVulnerabilityofGlobalSupplyChains_tcm3171-663222.pdf http://phys.org/news/2014-02-quantifying-global-chain-due-climate.html http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/06/27/address-climate-risks-supply-chain
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, chance, civilization, climate change, climate disruption, climate justice, compassion, COP21, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporate supply chains, economics, evidence, forecasting, games of chance, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, meteorology, optimization, planning, risk, Sankey diagram, science, sustainability
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“More benefits for everybody”
Posted in Anthropocene, bifurcations, Carbon Worshipers, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, ethics, forecasting, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, mesh models, meteorology, microgrids, mitigation, optimization, planning, politics, public utility commissions, PUCs, rationality, reasonableness, Sankey diagram, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, sustainability, taxes, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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Irrelevant power utilities
Irrelevant. Power utilities and fossil fuel companies are the walking dead, because they simply cannot compete in a free market with solar installations and locally installed and used wind, even without subsidies. And, they are trying to use regulations and … Continue reading
Posted in bridge to nowhere, chance, clean disruption, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, ignorance, investment in wind and solar energy, mathematics, microgrids, optimization, physics, planning, public utility commissions, PUCs, rationality, reasonableness, risk, selfishness, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Spaceship Earth, sustainability, Tea Party, the right to know, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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Deep Recurrent Learning Networks
(Also known to statisticians as deep exponential families.) Large scale deep learning Four easy lessons on Deep Learning from Google
Posted in Bayes, Bayesian, neural networks, optimization
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“Dismantling the Utility Model is the Fastest Path to a Cleaner Electricity Infrastructure”
Dismantling the Utility Model is the Fastest Path to a Cleaner Electricity Infrastructure, by Thomas Conroy.
Posted in Cauchy distribution, clean disruption, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, economics, efficiency, EIA, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, global warming, investment in wind and solar energy, maths, mitigation, natural gas, optimization, pipelines, politics, public utility commissions, rationality, reasonableness, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Tony Seba, zero carbon
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“Solar: A convenient truth” (2016)
http://solarpv.tv/embed/163 A major documentary regarding the revolutionary emergency of solar energy is in the works, scheduled to be released in 2016. Update, 23rd September 2019 Apparently not only wasn’t this made, but the site touting it has gone away. Would … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, carbon dioxide, clean disruption, climate, climate change, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, exponential growth, fossil fuel divestment, global warming, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, meteorology, optimization, physics, politics, rationality, reasonableness, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, sustainability, temporal myopia, the right to know, Tony Seba, wind power, zero carbon
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Solar array with cloud predicting technology launched in WA
Australia’s first grid-connected solar power project with cloud predicting technology launched at Karratha Airport, WA, in bid to smooth solar supply. Source: Solar array with cloud predicting technology launched in WA
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, carbon dioxide, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, dynamic linear models, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, environment, ethics, forecasting, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, Kalman filter, mathematics, maths, meteorology, microgrids, mitigation, NCAR, numerical software, optimization, physics, prediction, probabilistic programming, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, solar power, stochastics, sustainability, time series
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Your future: Antarctica, in detail
Climate and geophysical accuracy demands fine modeling grids, and very large supercomputers. The best and biggest supercomputers have not been available for climate work, until recently. Watch how results differ if fine meshes and big supercomputers are used. Why haven’t … Continue reading
Posted in Antarctica, Anthropocene, bridge to nowhere, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate zombies, disingenuity, ecology, ensembles, forecasting, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, IPCC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL, living shorelines, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, mesh models, meteorology, multivariate statistics, numerical software, optimization, physics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, sea level rise, spatial statistics, state-space models, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastics, supercomputers, temporal myopia, the right to know, thermodynamics, time series, University of California Berkeley, WAIS
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Utilities for dummies: How they work and why that needs to change (from grist.org)
“Utilities are shielded by a force field of tedium.” “Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities.” Utilities for dummies: How they work and why that needs to change“, a compact introduction, from grist.org. And there’s an additional … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, bifurcations, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, conservation, consumption, corruption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, disingenuity, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, ecology, economics, education, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, environment, ethics, exponential growth, finance, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, fracking, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, mathematics, maths, meteorology, methane, microgrids, natural gas, optimization, physics, pipelines, politics, prediction, public utility commissions, PUCs, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, solar power, statistics, sustainability, taxes, temporal myopia, the right to know, time series, Tony Seba, wind power, zero carbon
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Solar installation progress, courtesy of MacSolarIndex.com
The MAC Solar Index tracks a set of solar manufacturing and installation companies. It is also the basis for the Guggenheim Investments “TAN” Exchange-Traded Fund (“ETF”, *). They recently published a progress report on global solar installations, which I wanted … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, carbon dioxide, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, ecology, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, environment, exponential growth, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, microgrids, open data, optimization, physics, politics, prediction, rationality, reasonableness, risk, science, science education, solar power, sustainability, the right to know, time series, Tony Seba, wind power, zero carbon
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SCIENCE OF DOOM takes on assessing zero Carbon power and a zero Carbon grid
Updated, 2127 EDT, 10th August 2015 The blog, Science of Doom, has taken on a new thread discussing the technical feasibilities and problems associated with building out zero Carbon energy in the context of an electric grid. As such, it … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, clean disruption, climate data, climate disruption, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, engineering, environment, exponential growth, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, microgrids, open data, optimization, prediction, rationality, reasonableness, risk, solar power, state-space models, stochastics, sustainability, the right to know, time series, wind power, Wordpress, zero carbon
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“Cauchy Distribution: Evil or Angel?” (from Xian)
Cauchy Distribution: Evil or Angel?. From Professor Christian Robert.
“… the most patronizing start to an answer I have ever received …”
Professor Christian Robert tries to help out a student of MCMC on Cross Validated and earns the comment that his help had “the most patronizing start to an answer I have ever received“. I learned a new term: primitivus petitor.
“A vignette on Metropolis” (Christian Robert)
Originally posted on Xi'an's Og:
Over the past week, I wrote a short introduction to the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, mostly in the style of our Introduction to Monte Carlo with R book, that is, with very little theory and…
“Unbiased Bayes for Big Data: Path of partial posteriors” (Christian Robert)
Unbiased Bayes for Big Data: Path of partial posteriors.
Notes on distributed generation of electricity and stability of microgrids
Here are some links on the question. Distributed generation, from Wikipedia Decentralized control techniques applied to electric power distributed generation in microgrids, a doctoral thesis by Juan Carlos Vásquez Quintero Distributed generation and microgrids for small island electrification in developing … Continue reading
Posted in bridge to nowhere, Carbon Tax, citizenship, civilization, climate, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, demand-side solutions, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, engineering, environment, fossil fuel divestment, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, meteorology, microgrids, optimization, politics, rationality, reasonableness, risk, solar power, wind power
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On nested equivalence classes of climate models, ordered by computational complexity
I’m digging into the internals of ABC, for professional and scientific reasons. I’ve linked a great tutorial elsewhere, and argued that this framework, advanced by Wood, and Wilkinson (Robert), and Wilkinson (Darren), and Hartig and colleagues, and Robert and colleagues, … Continue reading
Posted in approximate Bayesian computation, Bayes, Bayesian, biology, ecology, environment, forecasting, geophysics, IPCC, mathematics, maths, MCMC, meteorology, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, optimization, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, probabilistic programming, R, science, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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