Hacker News: thelastgallon

New comment by thelastgallon in "Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter"

thelastgallon — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:09:23 +0000

Is US the biggest customer?

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 23:38:55 +0000

Indeed. Solar overcapacity can be used to produce green hydrogen for industrial uses (high heat), green ammonia (fertilizer), etc. Ammonia has supply chains and is known quantity to ship and store. Could be used in fuel cells. Of course, the efficiency is low, but thats a necessary cost for seasonal storage.

Australia has so much land. And sunny everywhere. I'm sure Europe will buy green ammonia or fertilizer to meet their carbon goals. And green mining/metals/refining using hydrogen.

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:33:32 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk6aTKV-des

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:38:06 +0000

A distributed grid is a resilient grid. Legacy grid needs massive transmission infrastructure. Solar + batteries at home have zero real estate costs, zero transmission infrastructure costs. Keeps a lot of people employed.

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:34:16 +0000

Australia is also 4,000km wide. A time difference of 2 - 3 hours. This adds a few more hours of Solar with long distance transmission.

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:30:54 +0000

Absolutely. Energy has to be baked into every structural element. Either producing energy, or storing energy, or providing insulation, or acting as a transfer medium (heat pump).

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:26:59 +0000

You have 25 - 50 years. Put your STE people to work. CSIRO is probably a decent org, give them a Manhattan project?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:24:38 +0000

Australia is now ready for vertical solar, add a few more hours of production in the morning and evening. Panels are dirt cheap anyway, use them as fences, put them on high rise buildings. Change the building to require structural elements to hold the panels and build new homes with vertical + rooftop. The electric code should be updated to allow v2g.

With BESS (home, grid) and EVs (always plugged in, parked 95% of the time), there may be enough storage to start replacing baseload. This will take decades, but can be done. We gotta start somewhere.

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:38:34 +0000

That's why paying EV owners is th right incentive. All new cars will be EVs. In 20 years, all cars are EVs.

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:37:08 +0000

EVs are parked 95% of the time. If it's parked, it can be charged. Work places also have electricity.

New comment by thelastgallon in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:30:56 +0000

Use EVs as energy storage. Millions of EVs form an energy reservoir. 20% of solar is curtailed now and q lot more in future, instead charge EVs. Pay the EV owners because they are creating a storage layer with their capital and power prices go negative hundreds of millions of times every year. No need of home batteries.

New comment by thelastgallon in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:08:24 +0000

2 bare-metals with Linux, Postgres, HAProxy and PHP (or Python/Django) work perfectly fine for 99% of apps that businesses need. This will run with 99.99% uptime, 4-hour warranty from Dell/HPE (failover to the other server). Is also somewhat vertically scalable (upgrade RAM/SSD). Kids who finish high school can be taught to own and run this.

But .... if you run a multi cloud hybrid setup with kubernetes, service mesh, data [lake|pond|ocean] and millions of other fancy words in tech at each and every layer, you resume would look so awesome and you sound wicked smart. And the VP gets 600M budget for AWS and 600 developers, SREs, DevOps, PMO. It is not that things won't run, humans have perverse incentives.

I'm certain a lot of porn/adult industry run their setup like I mentioned with a Romanian dude running the entire infrastructure for $15K - $20K.

New comment by thelastgallon in "I’m a very slow thinker (2016)"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:49:39 +0000

Slow thinking leads to deliberate deep thinking about something instead of repeating nonsense factoids.

Compounding over time, this kind of thinking develops expertise from first principles thinking and you can talk extempore about most things.

New comment by thelastgallon in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:18:34 +0000

But you can get soft power by being humanitarian.

China delivers a second donation of 5,000 photovoltaic systems to Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrvjyZ76Z5w

Panels cost nothing, the balance of system costs and labor will be borne by the recipient. People will remember for 25 years.

New comment by thelastgallon in "Cory Doctorow on Why AI Won't Replace Workers, but Will Crash the Economy [video]"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:13:52 +0000

AI will solve everything is the mantra.

What I'd like to see is autonomous vehicles and autonomous solar deployments: do vertical panels on high rise and rooftop without labor. Autonomous vehicles will have millions of lives and tens of millions of accidents per year. Solar is already dirt cheap, flattening the labor cost will be the biggest gamechanger.

Take this challenge AI folks before making claims of AI can solve everything!

New comment by thelastgallon in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

thelastgallon — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:08:12 +0000

What this means is China can flatten the demand much faster as they have a way to create synthetic oil. They may continue to buy oil as long as prices are reasonable.

This reminds me of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power Book by Daniel Yergin. Germany created synthetic oil but it was too expensive, resource-intensive, they couldn't make enough of it economically at the scale they needed. They had no choice but to go to war for fossil fuels which they don't have access to.

I wonder how the unit economics are working out for China.

New comment by thelastgallon in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

thelastgallon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:06:55 +0000

Indeed. Electricity will be the only abstraction layer of energy, all end uses (transportation, cooking, heating, cooling, appliances) will switch to electricity.

Electricity can be generated from any source (dirty + clean), but the abstraction layer of electricity will allow the grid to continuously increase the clean fuels. It helps that the cleanest is also the cheapest. Solar panels are cheap as dirt. In 1975, a solar PV module cost $128.27 per watt. In 2026 it costs $0.1 - $0.2 per watt, a thousand times cheaper. In 1975, only satellites could afford solar. Today, its the cheapest source of energy.

China will be an electrostate. Are there any other electrostates? Maybe Bhutan, Costa Rica, but they are too small.

New comment by thelastgallon in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

thelastgallon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:59:38 +0000

Yes, buy crude on the black market and build your own refinery. Or you can run your own DIY fracking rig in your backyard. There must be some yt videos.

New comment by thelastgallon in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

thelastgallon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:58:15 +0000

Thats personal vehicles. But if China is going full speed with electric trucks, that will be the fastest gamechanger. Diesel trucks run 300K miles, under 5mpg, consume a gazillion gallons. Electric truck fuel costs are probably 10%.

Its really sad that India is pro fossil fuel, it has an opportunity to follow China's strategy.

New comment by thelastgallon in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

thelastgallon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:52:12 +0000

There is no need of large powerplants. Thats the legacy grid, only to make Warren Buffet rich. New grid (that needs to be built) will have solar panels, BESS + EVs for storage, either off-grid or a small community grid. The new grid is distributed and indestructible.