ziga

Unless you add battery storage, which is increasingly the case:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/25/solar-and-storage-to-...

Oh, and also batteries such as the tesla power wall can only be charged and discharged about 1000 times before they have lost a lot of capacity.

Powerwall's cycle life is much better than 1000. The Powerwall warranty guarantees 70% capacity after 10 years of daily cycles (i.e. 3650 cycles). This means they expect the capacity to be substantially above 70%.

We posted an analysis of Powerwall capacity retention: https://www.netzero.energy/content/2025-02/powerwall-analysi...

Ah, those are wholesale prices. And the form factor will increasingly be prismatic LFP packs, not cylindrical cells.

For buying LFP cells, I would start here: https://diysolarforum.com/

Grid-scale storage (and increasingly EVs) use lithium-iron-phosphate battery cells, which don't require cobalt/nickel/manganese.

https://about.bnef.com/insights/commodities/lithium-ion-batt...

I think 12 years is an underestimate. Lithium-ion batteries will degrade, but they still have usable capacity. There are Tesla Roadsters still going strong, 15 years in. And the battery cell chemistry has since shifted to LFP, which has longer cycle life.

You can't really generalize cycles based on chemistry alone. Battery management and usage matters. But two examples with NCA/NMC chemistry:

- The Tesla Powerwall 2 battery warranty[1] is for effectively 3650 cycles (daily cycle for 10 years).

- Many cases of Tesla cars at 200k mileage (~1000 cycles, depends on battery size) with less than 15% capacity loss[2].

And these batteries didn't die after reaching the high number of cycles, they just retained less capacity.

[1] https://energylibrary.tesla.com/docs/Public/EnergyStorage/Po...

[2] https://insideevs.com/news/723734/tesla-model-3y-battery-cap...

It accounts for 20% of California’s renewable energy.

That doesn't sound right. It seems to come from Wikipedia with a 2019 date, but even then:

The Geysers produced 5,543 GWh in 2022 [1].

California generation from renewables:

2019: 64,336 GWh [2]

2023: 76,153 GWh [3]

[1] https://geysers.com/The-Geysers/Geysers-By-The-Numbers

[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

[3] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

We need all the renewables we can get, and I think you can have both -- utility-scale and rooftop. Rooftop solar (and battery storage) just needs to be cost efficient to offset the rising cost of electricity and make it a good return on investment.

The "attacks on net metering" are merely acknowledging that the proportion of renewables on the grid is high enough that balancing grid supply and demand is becoming an issue. I'm a big proponent of rooftop solar, but the reality is that 1:1 net metering just doesn't make sense once there's a critical mass of solar installed (the duck curve problem). This is not a problem unique to California or the US. If you look at other places with high solar adoption (Australia, EU), you'll find even stricter policies like negative feed-in tariffs: the utility will charge you for exporting solar to the grid.

Battery storage is a solution to that problem, but that's where prices are still too high. I'm actually surprised that battery storage is not mentioned in the article, because that's a critical component of allowing solar/wind to grow further.

I agree about home batteries being too expensive, hopefully prices will come down with scale.

But the part about battery degradation is not true. Tesla Powerwall has a 10 year warranty[1] with 70% capacity retention. This means that Tesla has data showing that the battery will have higher capacity than 70% after those years. That's a lot of cycles and a lot of renewable energy that the battery will provide in its lifetime.

[1] https://energylibrary.tesla.com/docs/Public/EnergyStorage/Po...

Dynamic tariffs (aka real-time or wholesale plans) are becoming more common in the UK an EU. These are usually priced by 30-min periods and announced 24h in advance. More modern utilities will offer apps that control when your car is charged (in exchange for cheaper rates). But I agree, optimizing this is fun too. I'm building support for configuring Tesla Powerwall systems based on dynamic tariffs.

If you have the option, the best time to charge your car would be during the day when there is abundant solar.

I wanted a better dashboard for my Tesla solar/battery system: https://www.netzeroapp.io/

PVWatts is a good resource to estimate solar production based on location, system size, roof orientation, etc:

https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php

Tesla Powerwall is probably the most commercially successful home battery. It comes with a warranty guaranteeing 70% capacity after 10 years, which is not to say it has a 10 year lifetime. It's still early to determine its actual lifetime, but the battery technology is also rapidly improving due to the EV transition.

Lots of variables in sizing a battery system:

- Is your goal battery backup or load shifting?

- How much backup do you need?

- What is your energy usage and peak demand during that time?

Peak demand is a big factor: a single Tesla Powerwall 2 for example has 13.5 kWh of capacity but only 5kW of continuous power. A heat pump or AC can exceed that, which is why many people stack multiple batteries to be able to power their homes. (The new Powerwall 3 can supply more power.)

In case your system is from Tesla: I wrote an app that you can load on a tablet and stare at that energy flow all day :)

https://www.netzeroapp.io

The dbt community will frequently run Snowflake, and its SQL engine is very good.

https://medium.com/@jthandy/how-compatible-are-redshift-and-...

I had the same problem and built this: https://zigam.github.io/ginkgo/

Also did something similar and generalized it across languages by using Metaphone phonetic encoding (which is biased towards English pronunciation however):

https://github.com/zigam/ginkgo/blob/gh-pages/README.md

43% according to NYT (includes residents and workers): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-nurs...

55k+ deaths, 296k+ cases, staggering numbers. Out of a 1.3M nursing home population (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursing-home-care.htm), which makes you wonder if the recent decrease in deaths is driven by the fact that the majority of the susceptible nursing home population has already been affected.

Less than 1% of the US population is confirmed to have contracted the virus

CDC estimates based on seroprevalence data that for every case reported there are actually 10 other infections: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/comm...

Imperial College report showing mobility trends explain over 80% of observed variations in transmission:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...

Geeky entrepreneur https://www.linkedin.com/in/bert-hubert-b05452/

https://www.firecalc.com/ is a good retirement calculator.

In this study they tracked 104 patients from the cruise ship, from Feb 11 to Feb 25. Started with 43 asymptomatic (41%), went down to 33 asymptomatic (32%).

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.18.20038125v...

Here’s a paper from the Broad Institute: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.06.025635v1

More than 50% of the people infected with SARS-CoV-19 are asymptomatic (i.e. they have no illness).

Note: asymptomatic at the time of testing. They may still develop symptoms over time.

https://www.icelandreview.com/sci-tech/is-icelands-coronavir...

https://twitter.com/cmyeaton/status/1246196001775460358

I'd second Bogleheads (both wiki and forums) as a great resource for personal finance and investing. This is a good starting point:

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_personal_fi...

The article mentioned storing data for a decades, which implies a backup use-case with infrequent access (of course, data only would be deposited in Glacier after the initial analysis is performed). If you expect to retrieve the data frequently, that's clearly not the right storage tier to use. S3 Infrequent Access tier is ~3x the cost, which still supports my point about the relative cost compared to total cost of sequencing.

To address some of your other points: the 40TB limit per archive is not a limit on the amount of data your can store in Glacier. And assuming 100MBps throughput is implying you'd use a single node to analyze the data, which does not make sense at this scale.

Typically, a DNA sequencing machine that’s processing the entire genome of a human will generate tens to hundreds of gigabytes of data. When stored, the cumulative data of millions of genomes will occupy dozens of exabytes.

100GB * 1M = 100 petabytes, not exabytes.

It's also worth quantifying the cost of storing this data. Storing 100GB on Amazon Glacier costs ~$5/year, which is still a small fraction of the total cost of whole genome sequencing.