Michigan unfortunately represents a mismatch of when you need power vs when power is generated. Arizona, Texas, New Mexico are sweet spots. High power demand in the summer (A/C), relatively high proportion of sunny days.
Michigan is just like the south: highest electricity consumption is during summer.
This may change with increased use of heat pumps for heating, but it’s still a while out before seasonal electricity consumption patterns invert.
+/- on what effect electric cars will have: people drive more in summer but efficiency goes down in winter.
Arizona, Florida, etc are not really in a sweet spot we all think it is because PV efficiency/output goes marginally down when it’s really hot (ie: when A/C demand peaks). Unless you install the panels at high altitude.
Interesting that PV efficiency is impacted by peak heat. Why are there so many solar farms in the desert near Las Vegas and in West Texas then? Serious question, would love to know the answer. Are these inefficiencies just now coming to light?
It loses about 0.29% of (relative) power output for every degree Celsius of temperature increase. If the module is operating at its maximum rated temperature of 85 degrees C, it's still about 83% as efficient as it would be under standard test conditions (25 degrees C).
Solar farms in sunny, hot regions generate more energy per year than identical installations in cooler, less sunny regions. The benefit of extra light dominates over the efficiency loss from higher temperatures. A location with as much sunlight as Las Vegas but the temperatures of Anchorage would be ideal, but there are few if any locations with those characteristics. That's why Las Vegas is still a good location for solar farms despite the heat.
That’s why you want high altitude to get the sun without the heat. I carefully left New Mexico out of my list of “not seeet spots” for that reason.
I did see some citizen science that showed a cooling fan added more power overall to panels, but I guess that’s another moving part and the way the subsidies work… who cares about increasing panel life.
Ontario, just to the north of Michigan, already has a winter peak very close to the summer peak. The provinces subsidises heat pumps. Ontario will be a winter peaking region in a couple of years.
The amount of battery capacity required to sustain power demand for this to be scaled to a meaningful population is high (PR average daily power demand is ~50 GWh per day). Most power outages in PR take 48 to 72 hours to fix. You would need batteries that can store 150 GWh of power. That’s a LOT of money to install.
Even this assumes that you wouldn’t want any breathing room on battery capacity (i.e., every power outage will be fixed in under 72 hours).
> Who owns MSFT? You, probably, through your 401k.
All or nothing fallacy. People have VASTLY different degrees of ownership, and this is reflected in their degree of control.
> Nobody is stopping you from creating a coalition of similarly minded shareholders
Such coalitions already exist. They have names like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity Investments [1]. Good luck competing with them. Especially if you abdicate your role in democracy, don't agitate for legal change, and restrict yourself to only market-based means of change (not BlackRock and ilk though - they use every lever available to them, they don't handicap themselves).
This isn’t a false dichotomy because I’m not even representing two separate choices.
I get that you alone have probably an insignificant amount of control, but forming a coalition would allow you to make change.
I’m aware that there are asset managers. Whose assets do you think they’re managing? Yours!
Do you own VOO? Awesome, that’s why Vanguard owns 10% of almost every large cap company.
Take control of those shares and go make change.
Look up John Chevedden. He owns a minimal amount of shares in companies where he causes huge changes. They call him the “corporate gadfly” [1]
Don’t be lured into thinking that you have to invest your money into a predesigned portfolio because it maximizes returns. If you care about control then maximize control. You already have the power!
Where I am, the ag exemption barely blunts the taxes. You can claim the exemption on the land on which your house does not sit, but the house itself and the 1 acre around it is not exempt. Anywhere near a major population center, a house + 1 acre can be thousands, if not tens of thousands, per year in property taxes.
Ag exemptions vary, but it usually ends up that you still owe a significant amount. Usually it's something like you get a break on the tax on the land/barn/etc,but still owe all or most of the amount on the house.
Unrelated to tech, but I wonder if this is why so many people seek the IB to PE to HF route that seems so well trod. They just need rails that point them to the next stop.
Agree that housing was a missed bubble, but disagree that fracking shouldn’t be considered a bubble.
Fracking certainly is a technology, but the author is using the word to describe the very real market bubble that popped in 2016-2017. It wasn’t as apparent in the public markets (and it is no surprise why you may not have noticed it) but several private operators spent far in excess of generated cash flow, ran out of cash and defaulted. In turn, many of their private equity sponsors blew up or left the space.
