Calculate the return on investment for a solar installation of a specified size on a specified property based on the current dynamic prices of all of the panels, batteries, inverter, and balance of system components, the current zoning and electrical code, the current cost of capital, the average insolation and weather taking into account likely changes in weather in the future as weather instability increases due to more global increase of temperature, the chosen installation method and angle, and the optimal angle of the solar panels if adjusted monthly or quarterly. Now do a Manual J calculation to determine the correct size of heat pump in each section of that property, taking into account number of occupants, insulation level, etc.
ChatGPT is currently the best solar calculator on the publicly accessible internet and it's not even close. It'll give you the internal rate of return, it'll ask all the relevant questions, find you all the discounts you can take in taxes and incentives, determine whether you should pay the additional permitting and inspection cost for net metering or just go local usage with batteries, size the batteries for you, and find some candidate electricians to do the actual installation once you acquire the equipment.
Edit: My guess is that it'd cost several thousand dollars to hire someone to do this for you, and it'll save you probably in the $10k-$30k range on the final outcomes, depending on the size of system.
My God, the first example is having an AI do math, then he says "Well I trust it to a standard deviation"
So it's literally the same as googling "what's the ballpark solar installation cost for X in Y area" unbelievable, and people pay $20+ per month for this
Where they agree it shows the data supports that answer - not necessarily that it is true, where they disagree it shows you need to hedge. That's useful.
I would recommend spending that "couple thousand" for quote(s). It's a second opinion from someone who hopefully has high volume in your local market. And your downside could be the entire system plus remediation, fines, etc.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to experimenting, but I wouldn't rely on this. Appreciate your comment for the discussion.
No I'm not relying on it in the sense of going out and running the entire project through it, but as an accurate screener for whether it's worth doing, there's nothing comparable available.
We have a one-way diode technology for heat, it's called "glass", and it'll bump your efficiency by about 25% versus uncovered flat plates on a still day. More in windy conditions etc, lots of hand waving assumptions about spherical cows in a vacuum etc.
Reminds me a lot of AngelList, which was initially nominally just a mailing list that connected angels and early stage startups, but eventually found that the restriction was in special purpose vehicles and automated the hard legal work of making many individual funding vehicles, and thus was behind the scenes actually a legal services company, if you squint.
I treat everything I find in code review as something to integrate into the prompts. Eventually, on a given project, you end up getting correct PRs without manual intervention. That's what they mean. You still have to review your code of course!
Your intuition is wrong here. Check out the Kelly criterion and do a little math - by my math, when you have modest personal assets <$1m, if you expect a 200x return from today, and you think there's a 1% chance that'll happen, you should sell 99% of your current stock and only hold the 1%. This maximizes the preservation of your net wealth.
VCs have MUCH larger bankrolls and so their Kelly bet is proportionately larger, but not percentage larger.
I've always been confused by the insistence on storage. Saturate 100% of the daytime loads with solar, curtail at peak, it's still cheaper than just about any other source. Save all the hydro power, gas, and other standby sources for before and after sunset.
Once you're curtailing a bunch of power during the daytime, then you can add storage as a no brainer bonus and stop curtailing.
Yes, and if peak solar generation exceeded demand, and were priced appropriately, I think we'd find that some workloads could be timeshifted (e.g. precooling homes).
Saturation of daytime loads with solar kills nuclear by lowering its capacity factor or daytime pricing, which some people object to.
It’s clearly a net win environmentally and economically, but for anyone who sees nuclear as part of a green future storage in some form is a massive requirement.
> Saturation of daytime loads with solar kills nuclear
If you exclude China, effectively no nuclear plants have been built in the last decade, and the existing fleet is aging out. "We shouldn't do this thing, because it might threaten that other thing that we don't do anymore" is a weird argument.
But yea building nuclear is all about forecasting the future so most of the damage has already occurred here, still advocates are going to advocate even if what they say doesn’t make sense.
My family is in this group. We are poor absorbers of vitamin D, some of my elder relatives need 5 times the "safe upper limit" to have healthy blood levels. As long as you're checking your blood values routinely (and for both D2 and D3, not just one or the other), it's reasonably safe. Sort of like other prescriptions in general.
I heard about a guy who ordered a bottle and ended up with vitamin D poisoning, on one of those Ira Glass style podcasts. Turns out they forgot to compound it before sending it out so he was getting “cask strength” vitamin D. Sounded very unpleasant.
The best policy is to have a lock that is resistant to cutting and destruction, with a trivial key. Nobody tries to pick a lock, and if they do, they're winning. Most or all breakins happen through brute force not technical sophistication, so a decent chunk of metal is a fine adaptation.
About the only thing I've seen that qualifies is the no-car, metal gates to walking/camping trails in State Parks (PA, anyway.) The key-lock is surrounded by a 1/2" steel can, with only the bottom open and some distance to the lock itself. Attempting to pick that would mean being upside down 2 feet off the ground. The steel shroud would thwart a casual angle-grinder for long enough not to bother.
Most other security for locks I've seen could be defeated with 60 seconds and a 3" cutoff tool that fits in a pocket.
Agreed, watching the rate of changes to timezone databases will rapidly disabuse you of the notion of any constant. It's rare that a day goes by without an update to some definition somewhere, which is astounding.
ChatGPT is currently the best solar calculator on the publicly accessible internet and it's not even close. It'll give you the internal rate of return, it'll ask all the relevant questions, find you all the discounts you can take in taxes and incentives, determine whether you should pay the additional permitting and inspection cost for net metering or just go local usage with batteries, size the batteries for you, and find some candidate electricians to do the actual installation once you acquire the equipment.
Edit: My guess is that it'd cost several thousand dollars to hire someone to do this for you, and it'll save you probably in the $10k-$30k range on the final outcomes, depending on the size of system.