• 0 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 19th, 2023
  • cloud_herder@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•That door must be very heavy
    19·
    2 months ago

    I’ve never purchased a home but I imagine it’s hard to find a good realtor AND trust them. There may be tons of great realtors who are worth more than their commissions but the bad ones probably say the same things the great ones do AND have basically the same headshot.

    I feel like I wouldn’t know if I had a good realtor until after the transaction, if at all, or until I’m fucked.

    The only time I’ve used a realtor was to rent a house and I am pretty sure she worked with the listing agent to get me to agree to pay $100/mo more because there were other people wanting to sign for the house. Which, I feel dumb for but didn’t realize until later. But I’ll also never know if that was the case.

  • cloud_herder@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Services for removing your data from public databases
    9·
    3 months ago

    I’ve used Optery since they posted on Hacker News a few years ago. Really satisfied with them - I get quarterly reports that show screenshots of my information being found on a site, then the same site and search not showing results after they’ve finished the takedown. The spot checks I’ve done myself show the same. Can’t find me by phone number, name, etc.

    They have different tiered plans and over time I’ve upgraded my account to the top one for a few hundred per year just for extra peace of mind and to support them. Their plans range from $3.99/mo to $24.99/mo.

  • cloud_herder@lemmy.worldtoA Boring Dystopia@lemmy.world•US slows plans to retire coal plants because of AI power usage
    5·
    3 months ago

    Yep! Base load generation is the amount of energy that is constantly required and it has to be consistent. Any city or area will always use a certain minimum amount of energy, at every hour of the day. There is never a minute that demand dips below and this is called the base load. Intermittent renewables without storage can’t cover it, yet.

    The other problem is economics. Hydro, geothermal, natural gas, nuclear, and coal can be operated to generate consistent reliable amounts of energy to cover it but at different costs. Removing hydro and geothermal as not all regions can leverage it - leaves, generally, coal, nat gas, and nuclear. Coal has been generally actively phased out over the last decade (in the US at least, I’m sure elsewhere), leaving natural gas and nuclear as options.

    Nuclear with a substantially lower, if not negligible, carbon footprint outside of construction has so much red tape and lack of expertise and economies of scale that each plant and part ends up being close to bespoke with high costs and long construction times. Something like eight years and multiple billions of dollars.

    Natural gas plants can be brought online in something like 1.5 to 2 years for substantially lower costs due to mass production, broader expertise, and less regulation.

    What this leads to is a price per kW for being something like $.80+ for nuclear and like ~$.20 for natural gas over the lifetime of the plant.

    These are all figures I loosely recall and haven’t confirmed or updated in my mind in a few years so I’m sure I’m off but the differences are roughly the same.

    Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are looking to innovate to solve this economic problem with nuclear by providing mass production capabilities of nuclear power but we aren’t there yet.

    So, for now, economically, natural gas is often chosen over nuclear just as coal was before it. Hopefully that changes in the future sooner rather than later.

  • cloud_herder@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How do Texas residents afford electricity during high-demand?
    261·
    4 months ago

    I’ve done lots of tech projects within the retail energy industry in Texas - this is the right answer.

    To expand a little bit:

    Retail energy providers (REPs), like NRG, ClearSky, Just Energy, etc. make their money by forecasting the amount of energy that will be needed as far in advance as possible and purchasing that amount from power generators like CenterPoint and marking it up a few cents. The farther out, the cheaper they can get it. I’ve helped build forecasting engines for a few that ingest historical usage data from meters (all meters in Texas are smart meters), weather data, and others to use machine learning to forecast how much individuals will need and aggregate it together to help the energy traders make better informed trade decisions farther out.

    If they mess up or an unforeseen event happens and they don’t have enough energy bought for that time segment (forgot the term for a window of time they use), they have to go to the spot market which is where the prices fluctuate and can be many many multitudes higher than the rate the customers are contracted to pay.

    In a storm scenario or a freeze, it can be thousands of times more expensive because demand is so high and supply is so limited. This is when REPs go bankrupt if they don’t have the cash on hand.

    There are also insurance plans that the REPs pay for that cover very specific conditions for different types of events or outages that can kick in to cover the huge costs they would otherwise incur on their own buying electricity at that spot rate. I’ve known a few that were only able to stay operating because someone a few years prior had bought an insurance policy that covered said weather event.

    Griddy died because of the ice storm in Texas a few years ago and the huge costs people incurred. I actually met with their CIO the year prior as part of a technology assessment of their stack. Nice guy.

    Edit: also you can largely thank Enron and Rick Perry for deregulating Texas’ energy - which directly led to the terrible “performance” of the Texas grid during the winter storm Uri in 2021. Same for Enron in the constant blackouts in California in the early 2000’s.