The lie made into the rule of the world

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: October 22nd, 2024

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  • In the context of this tweet most important differences are:

    SQL is a language for querying databases.

    Most common used databases are relational databases. With relational databases you can setup, well, relations and constraints.

    Imagine you have 2 tables (2 excel sheets) one with people, and one with home ownership. You can set the following constraint: (1) each person shows up only once in the people table. And the following relation: (2) every home owner must refer to an existing person in people table.

    When modifying the table contents, the system checks if no constraints or relations are violated.

    Excel, just like a badly designed relational databse, would, for example, have no problem with duplicate people, or home ownership referring to non-existant people.





  • Due to how the pricing is regulated in the market there is a perverse incentive for electricity producers to keep expensive gas plants running

    You’re probably talking about the day-ahead market (1). The price per kWh is indeed where bids and asks meet.

    Only a small portion of electricity is traded on that market. It’s a marginal factor.

    Most is traded OTC, longer term. There’s also the intraday-market. Finally, there’s the balancing price.

    That is a naive way of looking at how the electricity market currently functions and is regulated.

    I’ve worked as energy trader.

    it highly disincentivizes producers to retire their remaining expensive gas plants and invest in better transmission and energy storage.

    It is a fundamental problem of technology. Here in Belgium the government started subsidising gas plants, passing the costs on to end-consumers, as they’re necessary for balancing the grid, but unprofitable to run. (1)

    As an analogy: it’s like buying a fleet of sailboats. As long as there’s a need for cargo to travel regardless of weather, you’ll still also be maintaining a fleet of motorized boats.




  • Unreliable power generation needs on-demand backup generation, typically natural gas based. That’s the perverse effect of renewables: as grid scale seasonal storage is impossible, it increases dependence on gas. In Belgium we’ve even retrofitted jet engines to turbines as kerosine based emergency generation.

    Now we’re paying for both the renewables and fossil infrastructure, both scaled to peak power usage. During dunkleflaute, you pay an arm and a leg. When unpredicted clouds or fog appear, you pay emergency balancing prices.

    End result: Annualized price is high.