
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- In Monte Carlo We Trust The statistics blog of Matt Asher, actually called the “Probability and Statistics Blog”, but his subtitle is much more appealing. Asher has a Manifesto at http://www.statisticsblog.com/manifesto/.
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- What If
- Awkward Botany
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- 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.
- 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
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Slice Sampling
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Karl Broman
- 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.
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Busting Myths About Heat Pumps Heat pumps are perhaps the most efficient heating and cooling systems available. Recent literature distributed by utilities hawking natural gas and other sources use performance figures from heat pumps as they were available 15 years ago. See today’s.
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Risk and Well-Being
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- Prediction vs Forecasting: Knaub “Unfortunately, ‘prediction,’ such as used in model-based survey estimation, is a term that is often subsumed under the term ‘forecasting,’ but here we show why it is important not to confuse these two terms.”
- 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/
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- "The Expert"
- James' Empty Blog
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- "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.
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- 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.
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Ted Dunning
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
climate change
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- "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
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- "When Did Global Warming Stop" Doc Snow’s treatment of the denier claim that there’s been no warming for the most recent N years. (See http://hubpages.com/@doc-snow for more on him.)
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- "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
- Social Cost of Carbon
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- SolarLove
- 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
- 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.
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- 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
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Earth System Models
- The net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- Isaac Held's blog In the spirit of Ray Pierrehumbert’s “big ideas come from small models” in his textbook, PRINCIPLES OF PLANETARY CLIMATE, Dr Held presents quantitative essays regarding one feature or another of the Earth’s climate and weather system.
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- 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.
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: technology
“Trump supporters go to Washington”
People don’t only have to worry about a government tracking them by their smartphones. In this case, the social effects of this capability were beneficial, because “some very bad dudes” were able to be found and identified. But most people … Continue reading
… [T]oo detached from my natural origins to see the problem …
The proprietor of the false progress blog which I mentioned in an earlier blog post made a comment about another one of my posts. Actually, that’s not quite right in three respects. I don’t really know if it’s really the … Continue reading
Posted in afforestation, Amory Lovins, being carbon dioxide, bridge to nowhere, bridge to somewhere, carbon dioxide, clean disruption, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate policy, Cult of Carbon, decentralized electric power generation, degrowth, development as anti-ecology, ecocapitalism, ecological disruption, ecological services, ecology, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, extended producer responsibility, extended supply chains, fossil fuel divestment, global warming, Green New Deal, greenhouse gases, Hermann Scheer, investment in wind and solar energy, Joseph Schumpeter, lichens, luckwarmers, luckwarmism, Mark Jacobson, Mary C Wood, mosses, Nature's Trust, nuclear power, NuScale, ocean warming, On being Carbon Dioxide, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, supply chains, technology, the green century, the tragedy of our present civilization, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
1 Comment
On the Nuclear option
Where does a state government turn when they have a strong mandate to remove fossil fuels from electricity generation, heating, cooling, and transportation? Suppose they proposed a cross-border hydropower purchase from Quebec? Suppose they planned to roll out land-based wind, … Continue reading
Posted in alternatives to the Green New Deal, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Solar Energy Society, an uncaring American public, atmosphere, Ørsted, Benji Backer, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, Cape Wind, carbon dioxide, CleanTechnica, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate mitigation, climate nightmares, climate policy, climate science, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, electricity, electricity markets, energy utilities, environment, Ernest Moniz, Falmouth, fossil fuel divestment, global warming, greenhouse gases, investment in wind and solar energy, New England, nuclear power, NuScale, ocean warming, On being Carbon Dioxide, photovoltaics, solar energy, stranded assets, technology, the green century, Tokarska and Zickfield, wind power, zero carbon
Leave a comment
Peter Kane’s net positive energy, CO2-free custom built home
Posted in American Solar Energy Society, climate mitigation, climate policy, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, ecomodernism, energy storage, energy utilities, global warming, investment in wind and solar energy, keep fossil fuels in ground, Mark Jacobson, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, mitigating climate disruption, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Peter Kane, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Talk Solar, technology, the green century, zero carbon
Leave a comment
Good news, and a beacon of progress, with hope for more to come
That’s Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet. Ørsted : “Love your home”
Posted in afforestation, agrivoltaics, Alphabet, argoecology, Ørsted, being carbon dioxide, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, carbon dioxide sequestration, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, climate mitigation, climate policy, ecocapitalism, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, electricity, emissions, engineering, fossil fuel divestment, Global Carbon Project, global warming, global weirding, Green New Deal, greenhouse gases, keep fossil fuels in ground, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, Mark Jacobson, moral leadership, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, solar revolution, Sundar Pichai, sustainability, technology, the green century, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
Tagged Alphabet, cumulative carbon emissions, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, Google, solar domination, solar energy, solar pv, zero carbon energy
Leave a comment
“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
Earth Day 2019: So how do people transition to the new energy economy?
I’ve been pretty hard on the Green New Deal. That’s partly because its proponents don’t seem to see that a transition to a new zero Carbon energy economy is inevitable. It’s opponents don’t see that either. It may not come … Continue reading
Posted in Amory Lovins, an ignorant American public, Ørsted, capitalism, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate justice, compassion, corporate citizenship, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporate responsibility, corporate supply chains, corporations, ecomodernism, electric vehicles, engineering, ethics, extended producer responsibility, extended supply chains, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuel infrastructure, Gaylord Nelson, global warming, Green New Deal, Hermann Scheer, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, John Farrell, Joseph Schumpeter, LBNL, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, Mark Carney, Mark Jacobson, microgrids, New England, NIMBY, organizational failures, Orsted, percolation theory, planning, public education, public welfare, RevoluSun, Richard Branson, science, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Sonnen community, SunPower, sustainability, sustainable landscaping, Talk Solar, technology, temporal myopia, Tesla, the energy of the people, the green century, the right to know, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, utility company death spiral, UU, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
Leave a comment
Welcome to snowy New England … Bad place for solar PV, right?
And this is ISO-NE, who, as little as three years back were highly sceptical anything other than additional natural gas generation could supply the ever increasing electrical power needs of the region, particularly with the withdrawal of generation from oil, … Continue reading
Posted in American Solar Energy Society, Amory Lovins, Arnold Schwarzennegger, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, climate economics, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, corporations, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, distributed generation, ecological disruption, economic trade, economics, ecopragmatism, ecopragmatist, engineering, entrpreneurs, green tech, Green Tech Media, grid defection, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, Joseph Schumpeter, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, rate of return regulation, reworking infrastructure, rights of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth, Sankey diagram, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, SolarPV.tv, Sonnen community, Spaceship Earth, technology, the energy of the people, 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, UNFCCC, Unitarian Universalism, unreason, utility company death spiral, Wally Broecker, wishful environmentalism, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, zero carbon
Leave a comment
“About” section of this blog has been revised, and rules of commenting made more prominent
See the About section of this blog for a revision in the blog’s description and rules governing commenting made more explicit and prominent. In fact, I have copied these at the bottom of this post. The heading of the blog … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, blog, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, CleanTechnica, climate change, ecology, Ecology Action, ecomodernism, ecopragmatism, ecopragmatist, engineering, global warming, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, ILSR, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, Mark Carney, reasonableness, secularism, solar democracy, solar domination, Stewart Brand, technology, the energy of the people, the green century, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
Leave a comment
These are ethical “AI Principles” from Google, but they might as well be `technological principles’
This is entirely adapted from this link, courtesy of Google and Alphabet. Objectives Be socially beneficial. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias. Be built and tested for safety. Be accountable to people. Incorporate privacy design principles. Uphold high standards of … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, artificial intelligence, basic research, Bayesian, Boston Ethical Society, complex systems, computation, corporate citizenship, corporate responsibility, deep recurrent neural networks, emergent organization, ethical ideals, ethics, extended producer responsibility, friends and colleagues, Google, Google Pixel 2, humanism, investments, machine learning, mathematics, moral leadership, natural philosophy, politics, risk, science, secularism, technology, The Demon Haunted World, the right to know, Unitarian Universalism, UU, UU Humanists
Leave a comment

