[PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth

Tue Feb 18 19:04:00 UTC 2025

I have the same issue! answers inline

On 2/15/25 5:13 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> Around 15 years ago when SolarWorld was running around trying to give people solar setups I had them eval my house.
> 
> I have a sloped south facing roof.  They said based on their calculator it would be worthwhile for me to do it.
> 
> However, my roof does not use the standard King Post trusses or Howe trusses.  It uses attic trusses.  So - yeah.  I got 2 rooms up there.  We raised 2 kids in them.
> 
> But...the downside is...the roof is not strong enough to hold PV panels because of this.
Did you have an engineer come evaluate this?
This is solar installers being overly cautious, if you have a structural 
engineer sign off on the load bearing capabilities you CAN add solar 
panels.
The secret is that some of these old dimensional lumber are made of old 
growth wood with higher strength than today's. See the solar worksheet 
from portland [0] page 10 - 13.
Unfortunately, the estimate for this structural evaluation was around 
$3k for my house. I havent gone through with it because I have multiple 
large trees shadowing my roof so solar wont be worth it on my house anyway.
-Eldo

[0] https://www.portland.gov/ppd/documents/solar-worksheet/download
> 
> I'd have to gut out the upstairs, demolish everything down to the studs - and rebuild the attic (which actually wouldn't be that hard nor that expensive - an afternoon with a compressor, nail gun, saw and pile of 2x4's would do it) to gain the strength in the roof for panels.
> 
> I'd probably lose at least 1 room.
> 
> One of these days.  Sigh.
> 
> Kids - the gift that keeps on taking...lol
> 
> Ted
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: PLUG-talk <plug-talk-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org> On Behalf Of Tomas Kuchta
> Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2025 11:06 AM
> To: Off-topic and potentially flammable discussion <plug-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: Re: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth
> 
> Here is some hard data from a north state.
> 
> I drive EV almost daily for the last 2-ish years. So is my skiing/kayaking buddy.
> 
> He has solar on his modest 2k-ish sq. feet house. I don't because I don't own my town house condo roof.
> 
> His solar roof produces more electricity than he can use in his heat pump + car, averaging over the year. The way it works over here, he can offset/supply generated surplus power with nearby address - his son who does not have favourable roof orientation. That lowers his son bill by about 1/3 during the summer last year. I do not have more details.
> 
> He has ordinary market solar cells, not some crazy efficient space type ones. I am told that his year output is about 15MWh. Obviously more on sunny and summer days than in the winter and cloudy days.
> 
> I have no heat pump (20+ year old AC) - my yearly hosehold power consumption for the whole house + EV is about 10MWh. EV accounting for about 2.5MWh at about 12k miles driven.
> 
> This is the reality I live in - not a dream - 4.3 miles per kWh without a rack, or 3.4 miles per kWh with sea kayak on the roof. Give or take.
> 
> I wish I could get 1MWh delivered for wholesale $70-$100. I pay $360 per MWh delivered.
> 
> Best, Tomas
> 
> 
> On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 00:29 Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com> wrote:
> 
>>> From: Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com>  >while they careen down
>>> residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 horsepower > (50
>>> kilowatt) SUVs.
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 09:41:16PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> TM> Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument.
>>
>> No, its the old "I will ignore what you wrote and spout misanthropic
>> hallucinations instead" argument.  I'm sorry you dislike traffic
>> cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who dodges speeding cars on the
>> increasingly rare days when I go east to Portland.
>>
>> TM> You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every
>> TM> single
>> day,
>> TM> don't you?  At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from
>> TM> your
>> job.
>> TM> And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store
>> TM> it
>> in a
>> TM> battery for nightly charging of your EV.   There's a LOT of energy in
>> solar
>> TM> power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need
>> TM> to
>> be.
>> TM> But that is coming.
>>
>> So many claims, so little time.
>>
>> I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers like me.
>> Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to practical maximum,
>> increasing from 15% to 16% over two decades.  Cost has plummeted, but
>> that is mostly GIGANTIC factories in China.  Concentrator system
>> efficiency has more than doubled, but the watts per hectare has not.
>>
>> In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed natural
>> biodiversity (where your next superdrug will emerge), or convert an
>> inadequate fraction of greenhouse gas CO₂ back into oxygen and trees
>> and toilet paper.
>>
>> Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global warming, but I've
>> done the physics and the math, and I'm afraid they are mostly correct.
>> I take comfort in the fact that they are entirely mistaken about
>> systems and engineering ... but that includes nearly everyone.
>>
>> Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons.
>> That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia, Chile, China,
>> and Argentina.  The US extracts 1% of the world supply, though we have
>> 4% of the lithium brine reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide
>> cloudy-day storage for millions of electric vehicles.  Extracting that
>> lithium creates a LOT of pollution.
>>
>> ----
>>
>> I've published journal papers about an entirely different approach to
>> energy storage.
>>
>> A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy storage
>> combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer; On winter nights, we
>> use power generated by summer day PV in Australia (at other times
>> South America or China or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a
>> surplus.
>>
>> http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop
>>
>> The technology isn't too difficult; I've built desktop demo maglev
>> systems.
>>
>> The principal change required is Pacific rim peace and mutual
>> cooperation.  I'm not holding my breath, sigh.
>>
>> DARPA offered to fund my research, but at age 70, I said they should
>> find energetic younger researchers to do the work.  I explained that
>> the system capacity scales as the square of the cost; double the cost,
>> quadruple the delivered value.  Thus a 100 meter demo is expensive and
>> sorta useless.  A 100 kilometer demo is a thousand times the expense,
>> but a million times the productivity and usefulness.  Still not global
>> scale.
>>
>> That kind of scaling sounds like pie-in-the-sky to folks who haven't
>> ridden the Silicon Wave from RTL NOR gates to tera-transistor solid
>> state memories.  I expect thousands will understand it, out of
>> billions who've never wielded a wafer probe.  Anyway ...
>>
>> A mature 10,000 kilometer system would be 100 times more expensive,
>> 10,000 times more productive, but damned difficult to protect from
>> sabotage in parts of the world that "we" don't control.  It would
>> serve billions of people around the Pacific Rim.  Probably five or ten
>> giant systems, for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade.
>>
>> But as always, billions of resentful people will be left out.  It
>> doesn't take many resentful people to fly planes into skyscrapers, or
>> depth-charge undersea energy systems.
>>
>> The principal construction materials would be iron (for the rotor) and
>> aluminum (for the wiring).  Plus a shit ton of electronics; a small
>> but costly silicon mass fraction controlling a mega-shit-ton of wire
>> and rotor.
>>
>> Anyway ... it won't be ready next week or next year.
>>
>> Neither will the megatonne lithium supply for hundreds of millions of
>> stationary and mobile batteries, or any of the other green
>> technologies relying on constrained resources and giant mining and
>> giant factories that we haven't started building yet.  This isn't as
>> easy as a blog post, or increasing an exponent in a spreadsheet.
>>
>> And NONE of it will be costless, or without serious side effects
>> requiring costly mitigations.  The world is way too crowded to throw
>> our shit over the fence; the people on the other side will fire
>> artillery shells back IF WE ARE LUCKY, and engineered pathogens if we
>> AREN'T lucky.
>>
>> ------------------------------------
>>
>> KHL> I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The
>> KHL> Consequences
>> of Mass
>> KHL> Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane.  Published in 2001,
>> KHL> and
>>> sitting
>> KHL> on a shelf in the PSU library ever since.  Shane claimed that
>> KHL> laptop
>> screens
>> KHL> narrow our thinking in time and breadth.
>>
>> TM> Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all.
>>
>> The point is that our brains and visual systems evolved for 360 degree
>> awareness, combining saccades of our retinal fovea into a much larger
>> gestalt "image" of the landscape and PEOPLE around us, in 3D+T.  It
>> isn't the screen pixels that matter, it is our retinal pixels and the
>> brain regions they drive, and how those affect us semi-evolved social
>> apes and our cooperative skills.
>>
>> Or lack thereof, fellow geeks!
>>
>> Shrivel that megayear-evolved process, and you shrivel a large
>> fraction of what makes us civilized, aware, mostly cooperative humans.
>> Shane was a media consultant; his job was to peddle media
>> effectiveness, but his avocation was asking "What does this mean?
>> What might happen?"
>>
>> Yes, billions of people don't have that avocation.
>> More neurotypical people are aware of (and appreciate) such skills,
>> even if they have fewer of them.  The mind blind, not so much.  I tend
>> toward the latter, sigh.
>>
>> Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge of your screen,
>> regardless of screen pixel count.
>>
>> "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt
>> of in your philosophy" (Hamlet, W.S.)
>>
>> TM> The problems aren't tech.  The problems are people and always have
>> been.
>>
>> And the most important problem is that crazy person I see in the
>> mirror, darkly.  Apostle Paul referenced that mirror before Star Trek.
>> We may never learn where Paul plagiarized it from.
>>
>> "Good artists copy, great artists STEAL" (Picasso)
>>
>> Implying Picasso's self-awareness and self-criticism.
>> Criticizing others is not the path to enlightenment.
>>
>> Keith L.
>>
>> --
>> Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com
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