HN user
Electrical engineer operating a 100 MW wind farm.
Vancouver Island, Canada.
It's not a hidden charge because as you said, you can still travel without paying it.
And it provides a method of price discrimination between people who care where they sit and those who don't.
A hidden charge would be if you had to pay for seat selection to sit anywhere at all and it wasn't included in the original price.
Most of the van life you see depicted on social media is actually this though - people who've rented a van short-term for as much as a hotel room or who live in a house and have a van that costs as much as a second home as an accessory for weekend trips.
People who actually live in vans are far less common than people who take photos of themselves in vans.
If people want to use less electricity, they need to have reasonable options to do so in the marketplace without needing a computer engineering degree to figure what sleep states their motherboard supports. That's one purpose of these regulatory mandates: to make the market more transparent and efficient.
Consumers shouldn't have to waste time sorting through products that are broken from day 1 in non-obvious ways.
Red tape is definitely an issue, but freight costs to Nepal are also extremely high. It's a landlocked country with very poor transportation networks. Air courier (eg DHL) to Kathmandu is in the range of $5/kg, and if the final destination is in a village it needs to be hand-carried there. So accessing cheap stuff from abroad is much harder than we might think coming from developed countries. There is no such thing as slapping on a FedEx label right to the final destination.
Any audio encoder - lame is an open source option for mp3 - will have low pass filters. Most encoders will filter inaudible frequencies to improve compression even if not told to, but there are explicit parameters you can set.
An important and related fact, addressed in the article, is that Amazon currently escapes consumer product liability laws because they are neither seller nor manufacturer. But they also cannot tell you with any degree of precision who the seller or manufacturer is.
There is a public interest in making /someone/ liable for defective products, as it provides a incentive for sellers to do due diligence on what they sell.
The party most able to root out sellers of defective or counterfeit goods is probably Amazon, but they currently have no incentive to do so as the liability is offloaded to judgement-proof Marketplace sellers.
Amazon's business innovation here is figuring out how to run a multi billion dollar retail business without product liability, and that's negative for society.
Search for any Costco-exclusive item on Amazon and you'll find exactly this strategy at work, complete with 300% markups on the Costco price.
Air source heat pumps are fine for the places where most Canadians live including southern Ontario & Quebec and coastal British Columbia. If you live in Winnipeg or Saskatoon it might be dicey, but unless it routinely drops below -20C for extended periods you're fine. And you can have backup resistive heating elements for the occasional cold snap anyways.
Are GP mentioned, the safety procedure to protect you from a line you're working on becoming inadvertently energized is temporary protective grounding. A grounding jumper is connected to each phase of the power line near the work location so that the worker touching the line works in a zone of equipotential. Because everything the worker is touching bonded together, if the line becomes energized the worker's hands and feet are elevated to the same voltage simultaneously, so there is no potential difference across the body and no current flows through the worker.
But since lives are at stake here, we prefer to have layers of protection rather than just one thing. Grounding jumpers can fail if not properly connected (a large mechanical force will be applied to the jumper when the phase-to-ground fault current flows through it).
Bottom line, respect the electrical code and connect generators through a transfer switch. These rules are in place for a reason.
I personally believe that DHS should make this sort of thing illegal for critical infrastructure.
I can't speak to non-electrical infrastructure, but the NERC CIP "high impact" standards already make it largely impossible to operate critical electrical infrastructure from anywhere other than a secured control centre. Operating from your laptop or iPhone from the kitchen table is however allowed for "low impact" assets like small power plants.
Thanks for articulating this as I never understood why iOS suffers from this phenomenon. The only other place I've seen "typing too fast" result in garbled input is on Android based VoIP phone handsets, where if you try to "type" numbers too fast some of them get dropped - an amazing example of a device with many orders of magnitude more computing power than what it replaced still managing to be less performant.
No, but you at least realize an analog filter is a thing that exists. You don't remember the specifics, but you could study them if you needed to.
As a practicing EE (power systems), I agree. It often becomes clear when someone is unable to distinguish a practical limit (this equipment is not rated for X, our operating procedures prohibit doing X) from a physical one (X is not possible because of underlying physical principles).
The ostensible benefit to DC distribution in homes is to be more economical and simpler for devices that already run on DC - not to redesign ever device ever made to accept mains-voltage DC. If your iPad and your laptop and your blender still need a power brick to work, what's the point?
Using high-voltage unnecessarily to avoid using a DC converter is also not going to save money. Yeah, you can use a 300 V DC motor in a coffee grinder, but why? It's just going to cost more money to make.
As you note, for facilities like data centres that are engineered for a specific type of load, a building-level rectifier makes sense. For a home where you have many devices using a little bit of power at a variety of voltages, you're going to end up with lots and lots of small DC converters everywhere which defeats the point. Just run 120 VAC.
Even if power generation is distributed and localized, you still need higher voltages than what is in a home to transmit it unless you're talking about not having a power grid at all. You still need voltages on the order of 1 to 40 kV to distribute power around a neighbourhood, for instance. You aren't going to wire your house at distribution voltage - it would be expensive and unsafe.
As it is, typical home electrical systems have no active components. There are just wires, panels and bimetallic circuit breakers. These systems are nearly maintenance-free over a lifespan similar to that of the structure.
A DC distribution system in the home would require both a high power rectifier at the main panel to something like 125 VDC, then many smaller DC/DC converters throughout the home for your usable voltages like 5/9/15/20 V that are too low to be effectively distributed.
All of those things would need to be maintained and upgraded over the years, because there is no such thing as power electronics that last forever. After a few electrician visits, you might find that you haven't saved any money at all.
Even if you have solar, you still need a DC converter because it will not output a constant voltage let alone all of the DC voltages you need for your devices. And generation any further away than your own rooftop is going to need to be stepped up to higher-than-home voltages and then back down for use in your home - all of which is exactly why we currently use AC for distribution.
In several instances I've seen, it's because that function has been outsourced but the company doesn't want to advertise that, even to its own employees. If you could talk to that department on the phone, you'd realize you were talking to someone in a different country (plus they'd have to work at strange hours in India, the Philippines, etc.).
You should check if your device can run a third party ChromeOS distribution that is still updated, like Cloudready. That's what I did with my Asus CN60 that would otherwise have become a doorstop without security patches and it runs perfectly.
Some of the EOLed devices are commodity x86 hardware and can run the latest Linux distros or Windows 10 if the bootloader is unlocked, which really shows how arbitrary Google's end of life policy is.
Diesel engines for power generation will have a governor control that sets the throttle based on the load to maintain whatever rpm is required for 60 Hz (constant speed control). The load in this scenario is uncontrolled and the genset simply follows it.
A diesel locomotive's engine controls are about producing the right amount of power to match the operator's throttle control. Electrical frequency at the generator (alternator) terminals is irrelevant since that output is being rectified to DC anyways. This is great for a train, because it means you can have full power at any speed - the speed of your train and the speed of your engine are completely decoupled from each other. But if you now connect this normally variable frequency AC output directly to 60 Hz loads, you will need to figure out how to set the throttle to best maintain something close to 60 Hz and your power output will be limited.
Correct, most modern locomotives are diesel-electric and not fundamentally different from a large standby generator that would be found in a hospital or data center. The locomotive has the great advantage of being easy to move, although a bit of MacGyvering would have been needed on the control/operation side since a traction power engine probably doesn't have a ready-made 60 Hz governor control.
I have both a technical and a practical answer for you.
The technical answer is that demand response resources are considered dispatchable or interruptible load. Load shedding is the dropping of "firm" or non-dispatchable load. Typically, load shedding due to energy inadequacy only occurs after all demand response resources have already been called in. It's not one or the other, it's always both in tandem.
The practical answer is that during extreme weather, there are never enough people willing to voluntarily freeze. The demand for heat when it's below freezing in a state where homes aren't insulated and people don't own winter clothing is relatively inelastic.
Load shedding is implemented at the distribution substation level, not individual customers (unless they are very large customers connected directly to the high-voltage network like a manufacturing plant).
Furthermore, the retail energy providers offering these wholesale pricing schemes are just over-the-top resellers of energy, they don't own or operate any part of the electricity network. They can't instantaneously turn off anything.
A significant gap in culture between the United States and many other developed countries is the idea that there can ever be an "entirely you thing".
Even your own health and well-being is not entirely you. Whatever you do to yourself has ripple effects on society. You go without health insurance, but when you fall ill or die prematurely, who takes care of your dependants?
Or more to the point, you sign up for Griddy and turn off your main breaker because the price went too high, then your pipes freeze and damage neighbouring properties or even worse, you freeze to death or die from carbon monoxide poisoning.
No man is truly an island.
I think there's definitely a "responsible consumer product marketing" angle to this. Companies shouldn't be able to market products deceptively, and some products are too risky to be offered to the general public rather than qualified professionals.
But it seems that in the United States as long as the only thing you are harming is your own bank account you can take on as much risk as you want? I mean people are trading options on Robinhood with their last $500.
FTA:
Exacerbating and prolonging this sticker shock is a decision on Tuesday by the state’s Power Utility Commission, which regulates the nonprofit ERCOT’s operations. The order from the gubernatorially appointed PUC asserted that, even with a hike coinciding with cold weather and increased heating use, ERCOT had been undercharging consumers for the cost of energy and directed it to raise its rates.
Not really, ERCOT does not have anything to do with consumer energy rates, only the wholesale market. The vast majority of consumers buy energy through retail providers that in some way isolate them from spikes in wholesale pricing. A handful willingly decided to buy at spot prices through providers like Griddy, and they are feeling the consequences.
I don't know what to say, really. If you decide to play at being an electricity trader with your home energy bill, there is no way you are going to win in the long term.
You can't contract to buy a commodity at the spot price then ask to be bailed out when you end up on the wrong side of the trade.
As a Canadian power systems engineer who lives and breathes NERC compliance standards every day (something I'd never ever thought I'd see discussed by the broader public) I find it bizarre that everyone is staking out their position on this based on political allegiances rather than focusing on analyzing the event.
There are also extremely broad misconceptions that Texas is somehow exempt from all federal regulation that are fueling people's motivated reasoning on this topic. NERC reliability standards are enforceable in Texas! [1] All existing and future NERC winterization rules apply just as much in Texas as anywhere else.
Yes, ERCOT messed up. Yes, there are big issues to be resolved here. Some of those issues are national in scope and some are Texas specific. But drawing a direct line from Texas being its own interconnection to this failure simply doesn't follow the facts for me.
Wasn't Microsoft widely regarded as a bit of a meat grinder in the Ballmer days due to stack ranking?
I haven't heard of that here in North America, but I'll add that I'm not up to speed on global developments.
In general, wind turbine foundations are considered to have a fixed lifespan of 25-30 years. If re-powering occurs at end of life, it may be with a larger turbine that requires a new foundation anyway, so not much thought is given to foundation re-use.