Solar Just Makes Sense

In the last year I've started to get more interested in power banks and solar energy, both to reduce my usage since starting work-from-home in March, and to have energy ready to charge my phone and stuff in case I lose power here at home. This interest got more acute in the last couple of weeks, when Texas's power grid failed spectacularly.

I already had a collection of power banks acquired from conferences in my old job, and two of those were at least nominally solar-powered. I then decided to buy another one at Christmas, from a name-brand power bank manufacturer, but while it has a lot of capacity it turns out to be pretty bad as a solar charger (it's from Anker, incidentally, but I intend this to discourage you from getting the solar versions of these power banks, rather than that brand).

So instead I went on Wirecutter and found a rundown of portable solar panels, and bought one to see how it worked. I got the X-Dragon, their second choice, because the Big Blue was more expensive than what Wirecutter had (prices change).

Since then, I've set up the panel in my office window every morning, and connected up or two devices. Usually I'm filling up one of the power banks (primarily that solar Anker), and sometimes I'm charging the iPhone or AirPods or something. But usually it's the power banks, since filling those up lets me charge other devices when the sun isn't out.

I'd thought I might have trouble keeping all of the power banks charged, but between charging my iPad and iPhone every day, I'm actually running a surplus of power for those (which means I can connect a USB-connected desk fan my sweetie gave me last year). Unfortunately I can't connect the solar panel to my laptop, or to anything that connects to it, so any reductions in energy I'm using are relatively small, though consistent.

But this leaves me with the sense that we need to build out much more solar capacity, at least in parts of the world where sunshine is easy to count on. With technology like Tesla Power Walls, we'd be able to store up a lot of capacity for when the sun isn't shining, and by pairing with other renewables, like wind (properly winterized, of course), hydroelectric and geothermal, we should be able to generate enough electricity in any sort of weather.

The other thing that occurs to me is that everyone having their own home electrical battery - let's say supplied by their building or homeowners' association or even their city - would completely change the nature of electrical utilities, if not do away with them.

You can argue that the function of a PG&E or a Con Edison is to maintain the physical infrastructure of the power network, including the cables and wires that bring the centrally generated power to each home. But if each house has their own decentralized way of generating that power - most likely to be solar or geothermal, since wind and hydro are harder to generate at that scale - what is the utility company's function?

Because solar is unreliable, and geothermal is expensive and not available everywhere, the utility probably needs to continue to act as a central storehouse of energy. Though again, if the individual home's storage is designed well enough (and with enough capacity), the central power grid becomes redundant, doesn't it?

This is all spitballing, because I'm not an electrical engineer or an architect of power grids. But the question becomes relevant - if a common carrier service like electricity generation actually should be run by a private corporation with a profit motive that doesn't necessarily align with the needs of its customers.

That's not to say that profit is by its definition wrong - but the quarterly driven thinking of basically all companies nowadays means that an energy provider's focus is on increasing its profit at the end of the quarter, rather than on providing the best amount of energy to its customers.

As I said, all spitballing. But again, my experience with solar in the last week or so is showing me that we're missing a huge opportunity to generate clean and reliable energy, for free, from a completely renewable resource. It's great that I can charge my iPhone, iPad, iPod and AirPods (and as I discovered today, my Apple TV remote) completely from solar energy collected on my Anker power bank. But those are a drop in the bucket compared to my TV, personal laptop, work laptop (and monitor), lights and appliances.

It'd be good to figure out this question sooner rather than later.

Coronavirus: Failures of Leadership and of Vision

As we trudge on toward a year since my company sent us to work from home and the Bay Area and State of California closed down, I find myself thinking about Australia.

One of my sisters happens to live there now, a decision that seemed a little unwise at this time last year when large parts of that continent were on fire. But since the pandemic, it's seemed a little wiser - she's still working from home but the shops and restaurants are open, she can see her friends, and life looks to have gone back to something approaching normal.

More gallingly, a google search for "Covid Australia" brings up a little graph that indicates two points. One is that the deadliest day for Australia during the pandemic was 4 September, when 59 people died of the disease - more people died yesterday of the coronavirus in the US than in Australia since the pandemic began. The more damning statistic is that Australia appears not to have had a Covid-19 death since 28 October.

I'm not saying Australia is easy to emulate. For one thing, it's an island/continent way out in the Southern Hemisphere, relatively far from anywhere else - because it's the only nation on that continent/island it's easy to limit travel in and out. It's also not the country with the best Covid response, nor even in the top five - the likes of Taiwan and New Zealand and Vietnam have all had fewer than 40 deaths. By the way, for some reason my source doesn't mention Mongolia, which has had a whopping 2 deaths from the coronavirus - wtf?

But Australia, like New Zealand, Taiwan, Iceland, Singapore and Vietnam, has set out explicitly to eliminate the virus from its shores. They haven't eliminated it completely, as yesterday there were 6 new cases reported in Australia, but it's clear that setting an ambitious goal to get to zero has allowed Australia to take steps that let it get the virus under control.

I contrast that with the response here, where from the start the talk has been to "flatten the curve". The implication being that we'll all get the virus anyway, but we should at least make sure that we don't overload our local health services when we do.

Except, news flash: there were parts of the holiday season just gone when certain regions of California had no ICU beds available for severe cases. Own goal.

There might be a lot of immediate reasons for this - it could even be that hospital groups want a certain amount of traffic to come their way, since they get paid per procedure here in the US. But more important is the idea that we've become so unwilling to swing for the fences that we think we can't do any better. And so the message from Washington DC and from Sacramento has focused on slowing the spread, rather than stopping it.

As a country, we seem to have thrown up our hands and given up on all of the problems facing us. We did it in 2012, when Sandy Hook Elementary was shot up; since then the Onion has had to regularly trot out its school shooting headline: "No Way to Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

We did it in 2014 when Michael Brown was shot in the back by a police officer. And we did it in 2009 when the Affordable Care Act added a layer of complexity to our already byzantine healthcare system. We're doing it again in 2020/2021, with the coronavirus and the California wildfires and the complete disintegration of Texas's unregulated power grid following a once-in-a-lifetime winter storm.

That last one, incidentally, is the granddaddy of them all, because we've also thrown up our hands and given up on tackling climate change, which means these once-in-a-lifetime storms are going to become once-a-year storms.

We've given up on tackling income inequality, finding people good jobs after technology has made their existing ones obsolete, securing our government and election infrastructure from foreign and domestic cyberattacks, supporting our allies in Europe and Asia, preserving abortion rights here at home, and on finding ways for convicts and veterans to re-enter society.

A blogger my girlfriend reads notes that countries descend into fascism when elites can't even recognize that problems exist - his point is that with each of these problems we fail to tackle, we inch (or stride, or even leap) closer to the day when a presidential candidate succeeds in subverting the democratic process to take power and eliminate his enemies. And that's the most heartbreaking thing we've given up on: rule of law and protecting democratic norms, following the coup attempt on 6 January at the Capitol.

America likes to say it's number one, but we're not doing anything to maintain that status. And if America ceases to be the guarantor of personal and political freedoms (even when it's denied those freedoms to people in the Global South), there's no telling how long countries with open societies and liberal democracy will be able to hold onto their own freedoms.

Sort it out, America.

Super Bowl LV: What a Difference a Year Makes

I have absolutely no thoughts on the actual Super Bowl that just ended, other than to congratulate Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for their victory, and to offer my condolences to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.

But all I can think of as the curtain falls on this year's event and the NFL season just ended, is where I was when I watched last year's Super Bowl. It was early February, and I was up at Bear Valley for a weekend of skiing with my dad. We watched the first half of the game at the pizza place at the Bear Valley Lodge, then drove down the mountain, in driving snow on a non 4-wheel-drive, to the Round Table Pizza in Arnold for dinner, where we caught the final quarter.

How was I to know then that it would be my last trip outside the Bay Area for a year and counting? Coronavirus was a thing, of course, especially because my girlfriend was traveling for work that weekend and had to take precautions, but we were still more than a month off from when my company had us start working from home, and from when the Bay Area instituted its first stay-at-home order.

At the time it was shaping up to be a normal year - I expected I'd do my usual trip to Europe, and hopefully take some other nice trip with my sweetie. Instead the farthest I've been from my house since then has been... San Francisco.

Gosh.

It begs the question of where and how I'll be watching the Super Bowl next year. Vaccines for the coronavirus exist now and they're filtering out into the population, but predictions are sometimes worse than meaningless. It'd be nice to be watching it at Bear Valley again, ideally not when there's a snowstorm and an hour-long drive ahead of me, but even that would be nice, as it'll mean we can leave home safely again.

And maybe I'll take this opportunity to hope for some improvements in America and the world. We're seeing some decent management from the new administration so far, even if the vaccine roll-out isn't going as well as we'd like, owing to the previous administration's incompetence and negligence. But more than good management I'll be hoping for vision - paying attention to the actual problems facing America and the underlying issues that leading to all this polarization and extremism.

It might be nothing more than a pipe dream, but I'm still keeping my fingers crossed.