sonori

@sonori@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA | High-speed passenger train collides with firetruck in Florida, injuring 15 people⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “High Speed”, as in just about makes the minimum threshold along one section, something standard British intercity services did routinely in the 70s.

  Can we please stop calling every north american passenger line High Speed to make up for the fact that we only have one line that actually meets the standard, and it still has auch a poor right of way that it’s average speed is slower than the highway.

  Like, in most of the world we differentiate between high speed rail lines and snail rail because they behave very differently with high speed lines being significantly faster than driving, meanwhile in the US we don’t have any proper high speed services but try and market all of our trains as high speed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is China striding past Europe, America and Japan on nuclear fusion?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean either way, Fusion is such a long way off that it doesn’t really have much of an impact on climate seeing as we need to reach net zero decades before any significant number of plants could come online. While worthwhile from a scientific and long term perspective looking 50 to a 100 years into the future, we built the first fission reactor in a spare room under some sports seating in Chicago and it’s still to complex and expensive to be cost effective compared to battery backed solar and wind, so a process that’s so expensive and difficult that we haven’t even done it yet probably isn’t going to change anything in the next few decades.

  Honestly, the place where I see nuclear fission making the strongest case is when it comes to large ocean crossing cargo ships. The extra crew and tech make it more expensive than fuel oil, but not massively so, and as such it could work out as being cheaper for very large ships than any other method of decarbonization.

  Of course that only matters if we’re actually serious about forcing decarbonization in all sectors and not just the current method of just where it is cheaper than massively subsidized oil, so maybe we’ll see more pressure to do so in a decade or so. For now, when we’re limited principally from the amount of money we are willing to invest in building clean energy, the long wait times and low return on investment make it seem increasingly like a way to slow solar and wind’s growth, and thusly buy oil and gas a few more years of market share, which is probably why said oil and gas companies went from fighting nuclear with every add campaign they could muster in the 90s and 2000s to their current support for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Midwest wins funding for a new hydrogen hub. Not everyone is convinced it's 'clean.'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The hard part is that there are places where hydrogen really is the best path forward for decarbonization, especially when it comes to making fertilizers or various other industrial processes, and even maybe for marine applications, but the conversation keeps getting pushed towards cars, buses, trains, and other small vehicles where it just isn’t practical.

  Given how involved oil companies have been in marketing it in those segments, and the willingness of certain car, bus, and train companies to be perpetually ‘trialing’ hydrogen instead of just using batteries or centenary, it is rightly often seen as just a way to greenwash and delay from electrification, but there are still things where hydrogen really is the better option for decarbonization and we should be pushing for more green hydrogen production and infrastructure there while calling out the organizations acting in bad faith.

  I’m admittedly uncertain that investing in new battery technology is really likely to help though. We just don’t have the decade or two required for said tech to be discovered, refined, put into production, and then scaled up.

  Between LFP for mass vehicles, Li-ion for space and mass critical applications, and Sodium ion for bulk storage, centenary and marine nuclear for bulk transport, along with solar, wind, and hydro for generation and long term energy storage, I think we already have all the tech necessary to scale up and decarbonize both the grid and overland transport. At this point the focus and funding should instead be put towards applying said technology as quickly and at as large a scale as possible as fast as possible.

  We know what we need to do, we know how to do it, now we just need to actually do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I just installed a sol ark system, and can confirm that they work just as well with a pi and Solar Assistant. Not open source, but integrates well with homeassistant and no need for internet connecting the equipment, just usb.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Know thy enemy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

  While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sydney to Melbourne High Speed Rail Investigation | Australian HSR⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, presumably because 50 minutes is about as close as an experienced passenger can cut it if you get on right as the doors close, which we are also assuming for the train, when he researched that specific flight the time presumably came out five minutes longer than you did, and yes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sydney to Melbourne High Speed Rail Investigation | Australian HSR⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Typically this channel includes the airport arrival wait already, which is where the difference comes from, and the city to city times is to account for time taken to get to and from the city center from the airport terminal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar panels between railway tracks?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Typically not for more than a few hours when it comes to in service track, and management actively despises those maintenance windows even when it’s necessary to the continued existence of the track.

  There is a reason why even when the entire track and ballest on a main line are wiped out by a natural disaster it will usually be up and running again in three to four days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar panels between railway tracks?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t forget that maintaining all this means people working directly in the track trying to fix high voltage electrical issues while dodging trains and hoping dispatch doesn’t forget about them, or that ballast(the gravel between the ties) needs to be renewed regularly, much less all the things like realignment and rail grinding that use specialized machinery that needs to go right in the space between the rails.

  This definitely feels like the sort of idea that some high level manager came up with and no one with any ground level experience was allowed to contribute to.

  Look, if there really is absolutely no possible available space, like say desert, farmland, roofs, parking lots, yards, fences, well just put the panels up on a simple metal frame over the railway, maybe even integrate the catenary hangers if your feeling daring.

  This at least provides some benefit to running the railway by keeping snow and leaves off the tracks to some extent while also keeping the panels out of the way of running the railroad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the California desert, residents are struggling with the influx of massive solar projects⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But have you considered how much worse the poor NIMBY’s views out their windows will be, why you might even see something more interesting than desert, the horror./s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Simple connector for single conductor 0.75mm² (18 AWG) that will remain connected under tension while being spooled⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Depending on how frequently it needs to be connected and how much tension it needs to hold, it might be worth taking a look at some Wago connectors, as i’ve generally been impressed by how well they hold. Not really an option if the connection needs to be regularly connected and disconnected, but if it’s just occasional it could be an option.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the actually wealthy and well off people will just hire an immigration lawyer and fly there while keeping some wealth, and not working their way from dangerous predicament to predicament one step at a time, often dying in the process.

  If you’re well off, you sure arn’t going to give it all up to a smuggler for an asylum claim.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So that’s the one option then, and it’s a good option that a lot of Sunni Syrians (who are not subject to the same religious persecution as converts) take, and as such 30% of the entire nation are refugees or migrants from Palestine and Syria.

  Naturally a small desert country, the influx has caused significant strain on the nations water infrastructure, and with a small economy, limited resources, and limited capital, Jordan is forced to sacrifice 6% of the entire nations GDP on the refugee program. Also worth noting that said national GDP is smaller than just the Norwegian government budget.

  This on top of an already struggling economy, and the fact the nation is dependent on buying foreign food, and the limits placed on foreign dept by international creditors, the nation has been forced to undertake an extreme austerity program in order to prevent mass famine, which has of course further limited economic growth.

  As such not only are people fleeing religious prosecution going to find similar prosecution in Jordan, but the nation is struggling hard to feed its own people and is in no position to take everyone even if it wanted to. As a result it has increasingly turned refugees away, and heavily pushes for non Sunni refugees to go to places where they will actually be safe.

  Since most people arn’t dumb, many take said advice and travel to a nation where they will actually be safe, you know, the whole point of the asylum system.

  The whole reason it needs to be a wealthy land is because the land needs to actually be able to support the refugees for them to all actually be able to go there without trapping the host nation in a cycle of poverty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Given that it’s takes months of work to cross a border for a refugee but it’s only a three day drive from Sochi to the Norwegian border, yes, the number of borders absolutely matters more than physical distance.

  Show me where in article 14 it says that this right only applies the geographically closest nation and all others are except.

  Or, because you keep insisting that there are so very many safe nations with unlimited resources and food for people to wait out the collapse Russia and its puppets with only one nation between them and Syria, list them.

  Note, these nations must not be a theocracy or limit the freedom of religion, not currently be at war, have an effective refuge program that does not limit the number of entrants, and of course not be in need of significant international aid themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Again, Norway is actually very close at just two nations away, one of which has regular race riots and has still taken in literally millions of refugees, while the other is the one that installed the regime persecuting them and is fucking Russia.

  Most of the nations that are closer are either filled with religious persecution, so impoverished as to require vast amounts of western food aid just to feed their own people, or are already taking in orders of magnitude more refugees than Norway.

  Why should the aid a nation provides the international community be based solely on geographical proximity? Does this mean that Norway should also not provide any aid to Ukraine, as it is also geographically far away? Why should it only the the poor nations that should do their part to take in people in distress and not the rich?

  When so much of the world is impoverished and struggling to survive itself, why is it so ‘suspicious’ that when people are forced to start over from scratch they might try and do so in the lands of over abundance and where their children don’t have to worry about being beaten to death by a mob or living in Putin’s Russia?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This all seems like even more reason to be channeling resources into the security needed to stop well equipped Russian saboteurs, as well as systems to better find people who disappeared or traveled to foreign countries after they were welcomed across the border, instead of a fence that does neither.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Um, so let’s think about this. Why are people fleeing the Russian military and its operations to secure the power of its chosen allies in Syria not rushing to seek asylum in the country that blew up their homes in the first place? I mean Russia is obviously such a great nation to live in, with its very high standards of living and no possibility of being forced to either join the Russian military or being handed over to the very regime you are claiming asylum from.

  I also didn’t realize that Türkiye and Russia, the two nations between Syra and Norway, represented ‘the whole of Europe and large parts of the Middle East and North Africa’.

  I guess the one poor country already hosting 3.2million refugees is handling it very well, as there have been absolutely no race riots, violence, or mass deportations back to Syria, and we should expect every single refugee to stay there instead of attempting to make a claim in any other nation.

  I also missed that line in the UN declaration of human rights that says you can ignore applying these rights to people if the Russians are also being dicks to them. /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought you just said the issue the government needed to solve was random people wandering across the border without realizing it. People crossing or being trafficked across Russia in an attempt to exercise their right as a human being under article 14 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, an agreement specifically drafted with the goal of facilitating large movements of persecuted people in the wake of nations turning away people fleeing the Holocaust, well those people are trying to find and be collected by the border agents, so why would a fence change anything about the number of them trying to get out of a dangerous foreign nation?

  I mean it’s not like Norway would be trying to discourage them from holding it to the obligations the nation signed and agreed to that require it to thoughtfully and thoughly analyze each of their claims in court, now would it? I mean if they don’t have even proper shoes, Norway is of course going to spare no expense in welcoming as many of them as show up as quickly as possible, right?

  It apparently has all this extra money to spend on a changing a border system that is currently working very well in your own words.

  Also, you realize we are talking about a press release about the Norwegian government considering future fencing of more of the Russian-Norwegian border, and not the system as it exists currently, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Neglecting the silliness of assuming that we were talking about where the road crosses the border, or alternatively showing a map where the Russian road parallels the border for sections and meaning it to show that no vehicle could even drive near to the border, surely what you said about the guards always knowing when someone is coming from kilometers away and being ready to meet them makes the case for a fence over the whole length worse, as it is evidently is and has not been needed for that purpose?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it the people actually studying effectiveness of preventing security threats from crossing borders, or the politicians and leaders who want to be seen as doing something visible to deal with the ‘migrant issue’ dispite the pure absurdity of suggesting that people who crossed continents will see a fence and just decide to stay illegally in Russia of all places?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Again fences are like cheap locks, they are creating a social barrier to tell people not to pass, not a way of significantly reducing the speed at which someone who wants to will take in doing so.

  How many seconds do you think it takes a truck to drive through one, or prop a ladder up against one? What else, like anything else, could be built or funded with the cost of building these expensive signs?

  If your going to spend massive amounts of money on securing a border, at least spend it on the things that actually have an impact, like more patrols and guard posts, not on expensive signposting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How does any easily cut through or driven over fence help at all, much less justify the significant expense? It doesn’t help stop people, or even particularly slow them down. You’re still relying on guards actually responding and getting out to meet them, now just with higher maintenance costs because there is a hole dozens of kilometers from anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland's example⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Show me a five meter high fence, and i’ll show you a six meter high ladder.

  More seriously, if you want to catch people at the border, you do mainly need to have cameras, sensors and people monitoring it, and you then just need to send some guards out in a truck to go out and talk to the things that walk through it.

  If their arn’t guards, then there is nothing to stop anyone with bolt cutters or a cutting tool coming along and getting through, or as the US found out, coming along and stealing parts of the unguarded fence in the middle of nowhere whenever the price for scrap metal got high enough to be worth the trip.

  The only problems with this approach of just sending guards out is that it doesn’t look as imposing in stock footage, and that it’s harder to deny people a chance at the universal human right of asylum if they’ve set foot on your territory and you have to talk to them and escort them back instead of pushing them away from a fence with your fingers in your ears saying I can’t hear you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Russia downs over 100 Ukrainian drones in one of the largest barrages of the war⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, Ukraine has managed some pretty impressive saturation attacks on Russian ammo depots recently, so the total number of launched drones might not be as far off as it has been for most of the last few years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Plenty if you don’t want grid tied, otherwise your local utility probably has an list of the ones they’ll accept somewhere. There is a list of things an inverter will have to be certified to be able to meet for grid tied such as anti-islanding requirements, and in this case i’m afraid you’re almost certainly better off to be going with a reseller the inverter manufacturer actually recommends.

  From my understanding here it tends to be easier to just stay off the grid for very small systems, either by just plugging in a few panels to a battery and small dc to ac inverter(with appropriately rated fuses between all connections) or else getting an automatic transfer switch and treating the whole thing like a generator.

  RVs and camper vans are a thing here, and there may be some more plug and play systems in that direction but small 12v systems are a bit out of my wheelhouse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless you’re meters have a whole lot more protections built into them than ours I don’t think that they would have anti-islanding or grid frequency protections built in, that latter at least seems like it has to be done at the inverter level.

  If it is the case than why bother with any registration or monitoring at all beyond requing a smart meter for anyone with a grid tied inverter?

  As for the meter reading itself it’s going to depend on whether the inverter is connected to the gird, and if it is whether or not the inverter is set to grid export or only to provide as much power as the home is using at the time, possibly minus something for reactive power or some such.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Surely ability is determined by having the proper inverter though? The panels are irrelevant as without a proper grid matching inverter all connecting to the grid is going to do is destroy the inverter.

  Also, as someone who is currently going through the process of registering a grid connected inverter here in the states, surely the whole point of the registration process is the part where an appropriately licensed electrician comes out to physically verify that the inverter is grid compliant and anti islanding, as that is the part that is likely to actually kill someone if it is improperly installed or configured.

  It’s also something the government/utility has to take on trust to be declared, as a miss wired generator or battery backup transfer switch poses the near exact same risk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chinese solar panel boom threatens Pakistan’s debt-ridden grid | Industry rushes to switch to clean energy as cost of state power network becomes crippling⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It will probably happen eventually for gas stations in very rural areas, but keep in mind that you only really need one gas station in a given county staying open to keep gas vehicles viable, and you don’t really need all that much traffic to keep a pump open, especially if there arn’t any other options and as such you can increase margin drastically.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's a pretty solarpunk fact that small, distributed wind turbines use steel more efficiently than big centralised ones⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They use steel more effectively, but use other resources like wind, land, labor, and electronics less effectively, and all of which are harder to recycle. It also didn’t mention household or village scale as much as was still comparing very large grid scale systems, which is important as once you get much smaller than that energy efficiency falls off a cliff.

  Finally, while a detailed look into a specific resource can be very interesting, it’s important to take a holistic look at how energy sources compare and not just evaluate on one figure.

  Ultimately, as our ability to manufacture steel is not currently a major constraint to decarbonization, more important limitations like installation and maintenance costs are going to be dominant at least for the next few decades. Similarly as the low hanging fruit like electricity generation make up less and less of our collective GHG emissions, we’ll have more resources like plentiful wind energy to throw at problems like decarbonizing steel, as its still a problem will have to solve sooner or later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s climate ambitions have a modern slavery problem as materials for renewable energy technology is likely sourced through forced labour in China, researchers say⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Especially since the raw materials for grid scale storage are almost all mined in Australia, mass manufactured in China, then bought back. Australia could absolutely move up the value chain on these if it wanted to and the government put investment into it, but that would require the best nation in the world for solar to stop trying to subsidize fossil fuels at every opportunity.

  China even gives you a clear step by step example of how to do it. Just take the billions they are trying to make contingent on nuclear and instead use it to provide a minimum order guarantee for LFP and Sodium Ion cells.

  It is absolutely possible for the largest supplier of lithium in the world to build batteries with it instead of just selling it raw, all that it would take is the smallest bit of future planning and not outright bowing down to a dead end industry, which of course means that it’s never going to happen and the government will continue to prop up coal, petrol, and gas while its citizens continue to buy back actually useful energy infrastructure from China.