Roughly 20 years ago, setting your user-agent string to match Googlebot was a magic key through most paywalls. These days, paywalls almost certainly also check against lists of known search engine IP addresses.
You're on a site titled hacker news and you can't find a way to get past paywalled content, and you feel it's more important to ban the submissions from paywalled content, rather than find a way around it?
Why should the submissions be changed because you personally can't view them?
Edit: If you want to downvote, at least answer my question.
This question was decided many years ago. The paywalls are annoying and suck, but HN would be far worse off without articles from NYT, WSJ, Economist, and similar publications. (Note: I'm not saying all their articles are good. Just some of them.)
One of these years the publishing industry will get its act together and there will be an actual solution to this problem, but in the meantime, allowing paywalls that have workarounds and excluding paywalls that don't have workarounds is the local optimum.
I was just looking at generation stats here in Ontario. Most of the non-emergency generation is currently fired up with around 20%, some 3600 MW, being exported to America. That's basically the limit of the infrastructure; can't export more.
I find it fascinating that this is considered some kind of doomsday scenario in Europe, but happens regularly in the US. Different priorities, I guess.
Because it didn't winterize much of its generation despite lots of warnings it needed to do so, and doesn't interconnect with the national grid because they didn't want to have to follow federal regulations.
One must put in perspective the difference though. This is a single, contained event during a fairly extreme weather scenario. Contrast that to what could have been a whole winter-long event in Europe had the continent not taken extreme and well-coordinated action very early (and had the international community coordinating as well). Let’s compare them on proper footings.
It's not even that extreme for the northern US. Just that these temps usually happen in Late Jan-Feb. 60 miles east of Buffalo I'm still waiting for the first shovelable snowfall for the season.
Huh, not seeing the difference really, expectations there were also usually not a whole winter-long event but contained events? Or otherwise then totally the same though to the planned load shedding SA is running on now on different levels for some time? Doesn't make it better..
There are various ways to prepare for future potential badness. One solution embraced by Texas, amounts to "yolo", resulting in gas-fired plants being inoperable during the cold snap in Feb 2021[0] . A different solution, favored by many other locations across the globe including in Europe, is for there to be regulations set by the government, saying "you must perform this upgrade". While these regulations cannot alter the fundamental laws of physics, it is eminently possible to “winterize” various aspects of power generation and delivery systems through practices like insulating pipelines.
Doomsday scenario? Narh, but some areas are dependent on electric heating to keep people warm and fed. And there's no backup plan because it was considered inconcievable that electricity wouldn't be widely available.
I'm sure that if we've looked on the electricity consumption per person in the EU vs the US there will be a huge difference towards the US. The American living standards are vastly higher in terms of electricity consumption and are supported by a poorly maintained infrastructure most of the times.
It's a weird thing so say that a higher electricity consumption equals to "vastly higher living standards" when the higher consumption might just be in part because of badly insulated homes.
Americans pay way more attention to ventilation, air quality etc. We euros barely use AC, seeing mold at home in big cities like Porto is just part of living there. I don't think Americans would accept it.
Is that really a lot in the scheme of things? I don't have CFL backlit LCD TV info handy since they've been supplanted by LEDs, but I looked at Best Buy (a big US seller of these sorts of things) and found a popular $500 65" and their most insane 98" $15,000 Samsung ones, 190 and 360 watts respectively.
I'm old and by my family's standards 65" diagonal would be questionable at best, so I checked in the vicinity of 48", 43" and 50" only gets you down to 120-5 watts. Add probably not very many watts for whatever's supplying the signal and it doesn't sound like a big deal, although of course everything adds up.
Several times here and elsewhere I've seen comments from Europeans mentioning they use 5-6 kWh per day which is average to a little above average for their country and wondering how Americans average 29 kWh per day.
Almost invariably, when I cannot figure out how the heck one can get by on 5-6 kWh per day, since I use at least 10 kWh in the early summer when it is warm enough to need no air conditioning and cool enough to not need any cooling or fans and ask for details, I get the same answer.
That answer is that they are using gas for house heating, water heating, clothes drying, and cooking, leaving only a computer or two, a fridge, a few lights, and maybe a TV to be powered by electricity. Americans are far more likely to have an all electric household.
When comparing energy use instead of just electrical use Americans still average higher then Europeans but it is no longer a huge difference.
This is the grid operating as intended. There are no mandatory or rolling blackouts yet. That is Stage 3; PJM is calling for Stage 2 countermeasures to avoid going to Stage 3. The operators feel comfortable that this will give them the margin required per the quote on the article, and affects businesses without need for constant power (and this is a known prior agreement for those businesses, with remuneration).
Electricity is a commodity to be managed like all others, and during times of extreme cold this is good management. I think it’s easy to bash grid operators (I know, I live in Texas!) but this seems like proper operating procedure here.
Yes. Here's the actual event, from the PJM dashboard. Note the times. The problem lasted less than 4 hours. Once they got past the early evening peak, things were OK. Times are EST.
An Emergency Load Mgmt Reduction Action and a NERC level EEA2 have been issued. Load reductions should continue until released by PJM. Reductions are mandatory based on product requirements. CSPs should review DR Hub for specific registration details.
Affected:
DR (Demand response hub)
AEP (American Electric Power)
COMED (Commonwealth Edison)
DOM (Dominion Energy)
DPL (Dayton Power and Light)
FE-ATSI (First Energy, American Transmission Systems)
An common use of "emergency" in a similar manner, if I have stomach issues and need to use the toilet now, I will call the situation an emergency even if I haven't yet soiled my pants. If I reach the bathroom in time, the emergency ends with no major incident.
Above didn't say that, everything someone planned for is "not unexpected" to some degree, but doesn't make it less an emergency or deviation from normal operation or how you want to call it?
In theory, the winter storm should have umpteen thousand wind generators spun up nicely across large parts of the US.
In practice...TBD. I just powered down a few more-expensive, more-delicate, and/or more-power-hungry pieces of equipment. Be a good American and all. But also make it easier to get back up, if there's a blackout, with a damaging last-microsecond power glitch when that happens.
There are links to grid dashboards elsewhere in the discussion. Wind generation went up to nearly 8GW whereas at times it was as low as 400MW. Hydro also ramped up significantly.
As for switching off stuff - conservation is always good, but what they really need are for the guys with two-story-tall electric arc furnaces and the like to dial things back.
Coal ranges from a high of 93% in West Virginia (not terribly surprising), to nil in CT, DE, MA, NJ, NY, RI, and VT.
Nuclear does contribute a lot, up to 50% (IL).
New York's hydro, Niagara Falls notwithstanding, is still only 17% of total (though NY is a large energy producer). Vermont is 48.2% hydro, 28.3% wind, and 10.2% solar, though it would be the smallest producer in the north-east.
Even the south-eastern states tend to use much less coal than I'd have thought.
This page shows a graphical depiction of generation sources for states. It's still a bit muddled, but several Eastern states are among the highest in renewables usage, with Vermont leading the country:
This will become more and more of a problem as buildings switch away from gas/oil heating and switch towards green heat pumps.
Heat pumps are particularly bad in extreme cold weather. Their efficiency goes down a lot (sometimes 4x), at the exact time everyone needs to use them the most.
To be honest, I don't think policymakers have considered this, so I suspect we'll see blackouts on cold winter days quite frequently, with grid operators being reluctant to build double the generation and transmission capacity for just a few hours per year when it's super cold across a wide area.
There are potential solutions... For example, heat pumps could be required to have a reserve storage tank containing enough heat for a day or so, and then at times when the grid is most stressed, they use the reserve heat reservoir rather than the grid.
That could be enforced by building code, or by having a monetary incentive to those who have such a system, or a monetary penalty to those who use power on high demand days (although Texas taught us that people don't understand 'prices rise when goods are scarce', and instead see it as 'company jack's prices when I need it the most').
Water is the best option for being driven from a heat pump over a few days in most cases. Phase change materials like sodium acetate or thermochemical systems like NaOH + water seem to work well on paper for long term storage, but haven't received much attention for some reason.
As far as I understand: Water is best for heat pumps because it has a high heat capacity and the operating temperature is below boiling point. Rocks and salt is used for high temperature storage.
Water. Cost per joule is really good so long as you have room for the large insulated tank.
You can use a heat pump to bring the water up to 180 degF, a fail safe mixing valve to use it to produce 120deg water for the baths and taps, and a heat exchanger for radiant heating loops.
It's much more cost effective than batteries to the extent that your energy use is driven by heating demands. If the tank is inside the building envelope the lost heat from imperfect insulation still heats the space too.
For shorter periods, this can be mitigated by local heat storage. You can store 3 days worth of heat in two large insulated pallet tanks filled with water and a heat exchanger. This will also allow owners of heat pumps to draw power when it is cheaper.
The source is unfortunately both pay-walled and in Danish, but this engineer has built a cheap system that is on the way to getting commercialized. I'm definitely going to invest in it for my heat pump, as he claims it pays for itself in just 3-5 years: https://ing.dk/artikel/genbrugsplast-viden-vand-ingenioer-pa...
Smaller spaces will need less. And very small spaces might need a low enough amount that you can afford phase change material and save even more space.
As someone who works on this issues with the very policymakers you are referencing, oh they HAVE considered this. In fact, this is among the reasons that the switch to heat pumps is delayed.
Heat pumps can have back up electric heating elements to provide the heating in the extremes. You get a more resilient system than gas. If you have an oil based system, that's worse. There is no good reason to have an oil furnace nowadays.
> Heat pumps can have back up electric heating elements to provide the heating in the extremes. You get a more resilient system than gas.
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't the backup electric heating elements require, well, electricity to function?
I'm no fan of gas, but the idea of losing heating, phone service (the old copper wire systems could function even in a blackout), the ability to cook (since gas stoves are being phased out), and the ability to travel (EVs and some trains) because a transformer exploded is kinda scary. Like, we're putting all our faith in a system that is routinely knocked out by errant tree branches.
Maybe we could do buried lines, but given infra costs in the US that sounds... expensive. Someone in another thread mentioned heat reservoirs of some kind, but I have no idea how realistic that is. Even if it buys a few extra hours, that'd improve things dramatically.
From the sound of it, you're far more familiar with specific legislation than I, so maybe I'm totally off and all this has been taken into account. But having experienced an extended blackout and my family realizing we couldn't even boil water, I'm apprehensive to say the least. IMO it'd be nice to move away from fossil fuels without betting lives on ConEd doing repairs in a timely fashion.
The OP was trying to suggest that at some point the temperatures drop to the point where the heat pump is less than 100% efficient, whereas a backup resistive electric heating element is always 100% efficient.
The problem with that is..like you mentioned, it still uses electricity.
> we're putting all our faith in a system that is routinely knocked out by errant tree branches.
Ye ... one would have thought that JIT delivery would have gone out of fashion after Covid messed everything up.
With e.g. wood pellet heating the energy is stored in your home already. No amount of tree branches falling in the wrong places will make you freeze to ice.
"Do pellet stoves use a lot of electricity?
They also require electricity to run fans, controls, and pellet feeders. Under normal usage, they consume about 100 kilowatt-hours (kWh) or about $9 worth of electricity per month. Unless the stove has a back-up power supply, the loss of electric power results in no heat and possibly some smoke in the house."
We have a dual fuel heat pump / oil furnace set up. The heat pump is ok above freezing, but you can see the efficiency drop off starting at 40F.
Friday night, we had a several hour power outage as the temps dropped to 10F.
So, fired up the diesel generator (runs off the same fuel as the oil furnace) and had no problem heating the house. Our neighbors with their heat pumps spent a very chilly and uncomfortable night, which could have turned deadly had the power not been restored when it was.
Heat pumps require a considerably larger and more expensive generator, well outside of the reach of most people to buy and keep in good service.
Wood, gas, and oil are all much better than heat pumps in this regard, as even a solar battery can provide enough power so you can survive events like these.
Heat pump are good on average, but have really bad failure modes in this regard.
I'm not sure you understand. The required energy is around 4X the baseline. Most smaller homes could heat on a 220V 20A circuit until it get's very cold (-5f or more), at this point you're up to almost 80A @ 220VAC additional resistive heating load per home.
You wouldn't use resistance heating at -5℉ with a reasonably modern heat pump, such as Mitsubishi or Fujitsu models designed for cold climates. The Mitsubishi ones don't become less efficient than resistive heating until the temperature drops below -15℉. They are 200% efficiency at 0℉ and 300% at 32℉.
Their capacity drops from 100% at 23℉ to 76% at -13℉ so you would want to go with a slightly bigger system than you would in a place that doesn't get so cold.
Thanks for adding more info to my "back of napkin" comment. Heat pumps are fantastic where they make sense, it's -5f here and my 24,000 btu unit is keeping up in 1,000sq ft (DC Inverter Type).
There are pros and cons to oil, and there are certainly reasons to use it even if they don't happen to apply to you.
Oil can't explode. Oil can be carried in as low tech as a pail and stored in an equally low tech tank (where a gas pipe doesn't exist or could fail, where a propane bottle requires a lot more infrastructure).
And these are valuable even in developed areas with gas pipes, because it's always valuable to have that flexability to scrounge up milk jugs and drive them in your car, or a bike, when things aren't all perfect. Just on principle even if you never have to do it.
Similarly, there are reasons why the best way to distribute the heat around the building is actually not any form of hot water or air but ancient steam.
I still look forward to outfitting a house with a fancy buried ground glycol loop heat pump and in-floor water, not oil fired steam, but that's because I can afford to be impractical and I don't kid myself that it's anything else.
> Stage 2 emergencies require businesses enrolled in so-called demand response programs to curtail power use. As part of these programs, companies agree to cut consumption when called upon in exchange for payments.
Are the businesses that enroll in this program generally large consumers of electricity such that their curtailment would make a bigger difference than an ordinary consumer or can any business, no matter the size, enroll in this program? Also, what do the payments they receive in exchange look like?
Looks like you usually need to be over 100kW to 500kW to qualify for (or be required to be participate in) demand response programs, and what your paid depends on your utility.
Some utilities offer $3.25 per kW of load curtailed.
I got an email from my sports club last night that they were closing at the start of the curtail event. They're not a massive power user but it's a large facility to heat and there's an indoor swimming pool.
They probably didn't have to close, but on a night like last night (-20C and 30kt winds) it wasn't worth staying open.
I live in the area managed by PJM. I work for a large utility where PJM is one of the areas we operate. I've been on vacation and I didn't get the memo. Ironically enough I work in customer notifications! We send text messages for when your bill is due or when your power is out, but we don't send any notices that you should be keeping an eye the amount of power you're using. I'm contacting our journey lead now to get this work on the books in 2023!
Update: contacted my team to get this on the books for 2023 and now we're working to get an ad-hoc message out to our affected customers. We're making our list and checking it twice and working to make Christmas nice - for everybody!
103 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadYahoo redistribution: https://www.yahoo.com/now/eastern-us-power-grid-orders-01261...
Bloomberg URL was submitted per HN Guideline: "Please submit the original source."
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
Earlier: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2022/12/23/why-t...
Or maybe it's a volunteer effort by people who are subscribed?
Why should the submissions be changed because you personally can't view them?
Edit: If you want to downvote, at least answer my question.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
One of these years the publishing industry will get its act together and there will be an actual solution to this problem, but in the meantime, allowing paywalls that have workarounds and excluding paywalls that don't have workarounds is the local optimum.
https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data
"In August 2020, hundreds of thousands of Californians briefly lost power in rolling blackouts ..."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/california-blackouts-power-grid/st...
[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-fai...
Most of us will manage power cuts just fine.
I guess that's not Europe.
I'm old and by my family's standards 65" diagonal would be questionable at best, so I checked in the vicinity of 48", 43" and 50" only gets you down to 120-5 watts. Add probably not very many watts for whatever's supplying the signal and it doesn't sound like a big deal, although of course everything adds up.
Several times here and elsewhere I've seen comments from Europeans mentioning they use 5-6 kWh per day which is average to a little above average for their country and wondering how Americans average 29 kWh per day.
Almost invariably, when I cannot figure out how the heck one can get by on 5-6 kWh per day, since I use at least 10 kWh in the early summer when it is warm enough to need no air conditioning and cool enough to not need any cooling or fans and ask for details, I get the same answer.
That answer is that they are using gas for house heating, water heating, clothes drying, and cooking, leaving only a computer or two, a fridge, a few lights, and maybe a TV to be powered by electricity. Americans are far more likely to have an all electric household.
When comparing energy use instead of just electrical use Americans still average higher then Europeans but it is no longer a huge difference.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/berlin-kicks-of...
Extreme weather events are actually very predictable the question is do you build resilience for these rare events? If not you get 1953.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953
Electricity is a commodity to be managed like all others, and during times of extreme cold this is good management. I think it’s easy to bash grid operators (I know, I live in Texas!) but this seems like proper operating procedure here.
An Emergency Load Mgmt Reduction Action and a NERC level EEA2 have been issued. Load reductions should continue until released by PJM. Reductions are mandatory based on product requirements. CSPs should review DR Hub for specific registration details.
Affected:
DR (Demand response hub)
AEP (American Electric Power)
COMED (Commonwealth Edison)
DOM (Dominion Energy)
DPL (Dayton Power and Light)
FE-ATSI (First Energy, American Transmission Systems)
FE-PN (First Energy, Pennsylvania)
Posting time: 12.23.2022 17:51
Start time: 12.23.2022 18:00
Cancellation time: 12.23.2022 21:30
imagine not dialing 911 because you don't want to give the news free content...
To be an emergency or not to be an emergency, that is the question!
In theory, the winter storm should have umpteen thousand wind generators spun up nicely across large parts of the US.
In practice...TBD. I just powered down a few more-expensive, more-delicate, and/or more-power-hungry pieces of equipment. Be a good American and all. But also make it easier to get back up, if there's a blackout, with a damaging last-microsecond power glitch when that happens.
As for switching off stuff - conservation is always good, but what they really need are for the guys with two-story-tall electric arc furnaces and the like to dial things back.
You know, it was only the largest battery in the world for like 30 years...
<https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/electricity-sources...>
Coal ranges from a high of 93% in West Virginia (not terribly surprising), to nil in CT, DE, MA, NJ, NY, RI, and VT.
Nuclear does contribute a lot, up to 50% (IL).
New York's hydro, Niagara Falls notwithstanding, is still only 17% of total (though NY is a large energy producer). Vermont is 48.2% hydro, 28.3% wind, and 10.2% solar, though it would be the smallest producer in the north-east.
Even the south-eastern states tend to use much less coal than I'd have thought.
This page shows a graphical depiction of generation sources for states. It's still a bit muddled, but several Eastern states are among the highest in renewables usage, with Vermont leading the country:
<https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/electricity-generation-by-...>
Original source is Visual Capitalist:
<https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/road-to-decarbonization-...>
Jpeg: <https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/...>
It'd be interesting to see sourced data comparing them to data centres and crypto farms on a mean monthly total usage basis.
Heat pumps are particularly bad in extreme cold weather. Their efficiency goes down a lot (sometimes 4x), at the exact time everyone needs to use them the most.
To be honest, I don't think policymakers have considered this, so I suspect we'll see blackouts on cold winter days quite frequently, with grid operators being reluctant to build double the generation and transmission capacity for just a few hours per year when it's super cold across a wide area.
That could be enforced by building code, or by having a monetary incentive to those who have such a system, or a monetary penalty to those who use power on high demand days (although Texas taught us that people don't understand 'prices rise when goods are scarce', and instead see it as 'company jack's prices when I need it the most').
You can use a heat pump to bring the water up to 180 degF, a fail safe mixing valve to use it to produce 120deg water for the baths and taps, and a heat exchanger for radiant heating loops.
It's much more cost effective than batteries to the extent that your energy use is driven by heating demands. If the tank is inside the building envelope the lost heat from imperfect insulation still heats the space too.
The source is unfortunately both pay-walled and in Danish, but this engineer has built a cheap system that is on the way to getting commercialized. I'm definitely going to invest in it for my heat pump, as he claims it pays for itself in just 3-5 years: https://ing.dk/artikel/genbrugsplast-viden-vand-ingenioer-pa...
As someone who works on this issues with the very policymakers you are referencing, oh they HAVE considered this. In fact, this is among the reasons that the switch to heat pumps is delayed.
Heat pumps can have back up electric heating elements to provide the heating in the extremes. You get a more resilient system than gas. If you have an oil based system, that's worse. There is no good reason to have an oil furnace nowadays.
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't the backup electric heating elements require, well, electricity to function?
I'm no fan of gas, but the idea of losing heating, phone service (the old copper wire systems could function even in a blackout), the ability to cook (since gas stoves are being phased out), and the ability to travel (EVs and some trains) because a transformer exploded is kinda scary. Like, we're putting all our faith in a system that is routinely knocked out by errant tree branches.
Maybe we could do buried lines, but given infra costs in the US that sounds... expensive. Someone in another thread mentioned heat reservoirs of some kind, but I have no idea how realistic that is. Even if it buys a few extra hours, that'd improve things dramatically.
From the sound of it, you're far more familiar with specific legislation than I, so maybe I'm totally off and all this has been taken into account. But having experienced an extended blackout and my family realizing we couldn't even boil water, I'm apprehensive to say the least. IMO it'd be nice to move away from fossil fuels without betting lives on ConEd doing repairs in a timely fashion.
The problem with that is..like you mentioned, it still uses electricity.
Ye ... one would have thought that JIT delivery would have gone out of fashion after Covid messed everything up.
With e.g. wood pellet heating the energy is stored in your home already. No amount of tree branches falling in the wrong places will make you freeze to ice.
https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/wood-and-pellet-heating
In other words the same situation as when you have a natural gas furnace: the electricity goes out and your furnace no longer operates.
A pellets heated water system will need power to circulate the water so that won't work.
The gasoline power generator needed to power a pellets furnace is way smaller than for a heat pump system. Like 200W vs 10kW.
I meant more inline with "you got the energy in your house already".
Friday night, we had a several hour power outage as the temps dropped to 10F.
So, fired up the diesel generator (runs off the same fuel as the oil furnace) and had no problem heating the house. Our neighbors with their heat pumps spent a very chilly and uncomfortable night, which could have turned deadly had the power not been restored when it was.
Heat pumps require a considerably larger and more expensive generator, well outside of the reach of most people to buy and keep in good service.
Wood, gas, and oil are all much better than heat pumps in this regard, as even a solar battery can provide enough power so you can survive events like these.
Heat pump are good on average, but have really bad failure modes in this regard.
Their capacity drops from 100% at 23℉ to 76% at -13℉ so you would want to go with a slightly bigger system than you would in a place that doesn't get so cold.
Oil can't explode. Oil can be carried in as low tech as a pail and stored in an equally low tech tank (where a gas pipe doesn't exist or could fail, where a propane bottle requires a lot more infrastructure).
And these are valuable even in developed areas with gas pipes, because it's always valuable to have that flexability to scrounge up milk jugs and drive them in your car, or a bike, when things aren't all perfect. Just on principle even if you never have to do it.
Similarly, there are reasons why the best way to distribute the heat around the building is actually not any form of hot water or air but ancient steam.
I still look forward to outfitting a house with a fancy buried ground glycol loop heat pump and in-floor water, not oil fired steam, but that's because I can afford to be impractical and I don't kid myself that it's anything else.
Unless we do something about it. Better isolation. More renewables + storage and nuclear power.
Continuing to use fossiles is not a viable option.
Are the businesses that enroll in this program generally large consumers of electricity such that their curtailment would make a bigger difference than an ordinary consumer or can any business, no matter the size, enroll in this program? Also, what do the payments they receive in exchange look like?
Some utilities offer $3.25 per kW of load curtailed.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/femp/demand-response-and-time-va...
They probably didn't have to close, but on a night like last night (-20C and 30kt winds) it wasn't worth staying open.
Happy Holidays HN!
Don't forget to thank your sysadmin today!
Being after the event was resolved, it may be post-hoc.
https://hourlypricing.comed.com/live-prices/?date=20221223
The 1600-1700 hour last night saw $3.64/kWh, a 3700% jump over what non-RT users pay.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...