Jesse

15 Nov 2024

How do we make nuclear the anchor for flexibility and firm capacity? Here is my basic proposal. Let’s start with a 350MW Gen IV reactor. This is basically the Natrium in round numbers, but we could use others, and we can adjust the ratios of turbine / core etc to suit the system. *ANY* ~500C+ works

ici.radio-canada.caUne nouvelle exigence d’Ottawa coûtera cher à Hydro-QuébecDes nouvelles exigences d'Ottawa pour protéger les poissons risquent de coûter des milliards de dollars à Hydro-Québec et aux opérateurs de barrages du Canada.

Whelp, that won't help with integrating wind to use as a 'resevoir extender'... ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/229... (Translated) "The new applicable standards include, for example, requirements to *limit variations in reservoir flow*, ...". Those flow variations need to increase, a lot... 🔌💡

Jesse reposted

Kathryn Harrison

@profkharrison.bsky.social

cbc.caFULL SPEECH | Carney explains why Canada suspended trade talks with U.S.Prime Minister Mark Carney explained why the government chose not to sign a trade deal with American counterparts as U.S. President Donald Trump's 50 per cent tariffs on almost $30 billion of Canadian...

American friends, watch this if you want to understand the depth of Canadians’ anger about this trade war. And our determination. We will not be broken. www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

Modify that. 1hr before markets close this coming Friday announce 50 Grippens, and technology selection of our next large nuclear of CANDUs.

Jesse@ember42.bsky.social

Today would be a great day to announce the procurement of 60-90 Grippens...

Today would be a great day to announce the procurement of 60-90 Grippens...

Make that 50. Leave one more tranche of jets to be announced later.

Friday fun: Electoral reform My theory is the root of our current dysfunction is the misalignment of authority and accountability we have between voters, party members, candidates, caucus, and leadership. How do we fix this along with the other big issues with FPTP? (🇨🇦)

With this system, the leader is accountable to caucus, and caucus is accountable to the party membership in their district. Caucus is filtered by the reality check of an election. Results are more proportional, but emphasis is kept on regional representation and voter selection

Oh, and the senate should be selected by the provincial legislatures as they open up, with number of seats proportional to sqrt(# population in province). What are your thoughts?

Since the party membership is not selecting the leader directly, where they have authority is in selecting candidates. The leader may nominate 1 candidate in each district directly. The party can decide whether incumbent members of caucus get an automatic nomination.

The party may nominate up to as many candidates as there are seats. The remainder shall be nominated via approval vote of the party members in the district. But with the open list, there is no guarantee the leaders pick or incumbents will be the ones elected.

As an example, Alberta could be divided up into greater Calgary, Greater Edmonton, and the rest into A north and a South district. That way candidates from the big city won't dominate the results for the rural region. (they have to be resident in the region)

Candidates are grouped by party, and each voter selects only one candidate. The list for each party are sorted by the number of votes each individual candidate gets. The winning party seats are selected by the largest remainder method.

Next, how do we add an element of proportionality to representation? Canada is very regional, so a straight PR will tend to end out with certain regions dominating the positions. We want to avoid that and ensure both regional and ideological representation.

I propose using multi-member regional districts with open lists. The districts would be 4 to ~10 max seats. In smaller provinces, it would be the whole province (no overlap). In larger provinces regions should be grouped to have similar areas together. I.e. urban vs rural.

My proposal, each party leader is elected by the party caucus, and an automatic fresh election after every general election. They are the ones who know the potential options, and have the incentive to pick someone effective, and most likely to help them win re-election next time.

Non-official parties, election is by candidates. Caucus can also force a fresh leadership election with a certain % of caucus requesting it. TBD how much to be effective.

The first step is to align the leader and caucus. Currently, with direct party member selection of the leadership, the leader can be hugely out of step with the caucus. When caucus is supposed to exercise accountability over the leader, but have no useful mechanisms, it fails.

20 Aug

I’m now convinced that a buildout of AP1000’s in Canada would represent an unacceptable risk of being “Gordie Howed” via export controls or direct USG stake in WEC by the time the project would be nearing completion. Act accordingly. 🔌💡

Here is an interesting wat to visualize how well Wind and Solar can cover for each other. This is often pointed to as a reason they can be for almost all base supply. Data is For Ontario, and plots the daily average CF of each against each other across 2 years. 🔌💡

Sure, we can build fossil fuel fired plants to cover that lower period, and they would have quite low usage, but we have already given away the cost advantage by the overproduction of VRE, and we need to pay for the backup cost on top of that, and fuel delivery.

We have only reduced the needed firm capacity by ~8-16% (depending on the storage scale beyond diurnal). To actually cover this period we would need ~2X overgeneration, of mostly wind, and 100 hours of storage. bsky.app/profile/embe...

Jesse@ember42.bsky.social

I have been playing around with an interesting concept here - the tradeoff curves of capacity vs storage. First for a completely clean + storage system. This is what we need for Ontario for a no FF system with current demand profile, assuming starting from scratch for clarity. 🔌💡

If we instead build 2X as much, then the red line becomes the 'enough' line. Of course this also means on average 50% of the output is curtailed, and the effective cost per unit of useful power is doubled. The regions are shifted as below.

The deeply problematic region is the 5 red dots in the purple region. These are 5 consecutive days where the output averages 1/6th the 'average', and the lowest day is 1/12th. This is the design basis event that also defines the join capacity value of wind and solar here.

The diagonal lines are represent the tradeoff needed to have an 'average' daily output with a 1:1 energy basis install ratio. I.e. if PV output is 2X 'average' and wind is zero, the PV has covered the wind to maintain average. Note this assumes enough storage for diurnal shifts!

If they were perfectly anticorrelated, all the points would be along the green line. And this would be fine. The points in the yellow region have energy curtailed, and in the red region, there is a shortfall. In purple, the shortfall is more than 50%! (Uri was <30% shortfall!)

18 July

The outright threats coming from a broad swath of prominent US politicians over forest fire smoke are the most blunt evidence of how the US is not going back to what it was post Trump. This is *not* temporary, the character of the country has changed, and not for the better!

Proportional Representation: I have my misgivings about further centralization of power in the leadership, loss of local representation, and tendency towards extreemism. I think I found a version I can get behind!

- Single vote avoids complexity -Counting method is straight forward with no massive revisions on recounts (generally will only impact the final seat / final list member)

For single member districts and for by-elections voting should be via approval voting (for simplicity) or via ranked ballot. As an alternative, could do approval voting within a list, but only vote for one list.

Features: -Representation is a little less local, but still from the same city or rural region as it would have been. -The list order reflects the desire of the general votes, not the leadership. They can parachute candidates in, but they still have to win on their own merit.

Representation is semi-proportional. -There is still a slight bias towards majoritarianism, and very small niche parties have an inherent threshold to get a seat (>1/2 the % as each seat represents). -But avoids winner take all -Individual members still were actively selected

During the election the candidates are organized by party list (random party order). Each elector votes for a single candidate. Within each party, the list is sorted by the number of votes each candidate gets. They get selected in this order.

The total votes for each list (party) get added up, and a normal multi-member algorithm to assign seats is used. i.e. assign a seat to the list with the most votes for ANY candidate. Subtract the #votes equal to total votes / seats, from that list. Repeat until all are assigned.

Regional multi-member district with open lists. Each province is divided up into multi-member districts (min of 4 per), with a focus on keeping major cities as a district, and areas outside those as separate districts to preserve type of location representation.

No district can span provinces. Each party can nominate as many candidates as there are seats within the district. If they have more than that, a primary is required. The leader can select a certain number of candidates directly, but no more than half. The rest must be primary.

10 Mar

In the wake of this energy crisis, everyone 'energy secuity' minded should add a sliding imports tarriff from any energy outside the 'reliable' supply zone. Something like ($100-purchase price)*25% for oil. This would push towards more resiliant energy supply chains. 🔌💡