In practice, storing energy for a longer period of time is basically never done, with the only real exception I can think of being space travel. And it's not how long the storage period is that matters. It's how quickly you need to get the energy when you're done. Sure, if you store a year worth of energy in a day and dribble it out over a year, a tiny fuel cell and a huge tank is great for cost. But literally space travel is the only practical application of that. For every real-world application other than space travel, you need to be able to dump the entire contents of the fuel cell in at most maybe five to ten times the period of time over which it was built up, if not less. That means either big fuel cells or a lot of fuel cells.

See above. And to that, I would add that converting electricity to hydrogen with electrolysis of water and back is likely to result in a loss of somewhere around 60% to 70% of the energy that you put in. So even if you somehow manage to find some rare edge case (e.g. trying to do solar in Alaska or something similarly nuts) where you really do want to store power long-term and spread it out over a long period of time, the loss of energy is still going to be around 5x as high from fuel cells as lithium ion batteries even factoring in the self-discharge rate over several months.

And that's before you factor in the additional losses from having to pressurize the hydrogen, which adds further the losses. In fact, you'd actually be better off building air tanks and pressurizing them and using the air pressure to turn turbines than doing electrolysis, pressurizing hydrogen, and dumping it into a fuel cell. That will give you a loss of only 25% to 50% of the energy that goes in. Sure, it will take up more space, but you won't have hydrogen making the metal brittle after a few years, requiring you to replace the whole system over and over again, so it makes *way* more sense.

When I say that IMO, there is literally no case where hydrogen fuel cells make sense other than space travel, I mean that. It is utterly terrible efficiency-wise, so much so that almost anything is better, including things that are way simpler and cheaper than hydrogen, like a giant air tank and an air turbine.

I would still expect it to be less efficient than electric arc furnaces, but maybe not, so I'll grant you that this might be a very narrow use case, solely because burning the fuel source is actually important for that. :-)

Fuel cell efficiency is at best about 60%. So no, you do NOT have 80% round-trip efficiency, unless you've found a way to violate the first law of thermodynamics.

60% efficiency times 68% is 40.8% efficiency. Yeah, that's slightly better than 34%, but in much the same way that a s**t sandwich is slightly better than s**t. :-)

And this will still be capable of running on natural gas, which probably means it won't be optimal efficiency-wise for either fuel.

The losses from electrolysis alone make it a bad idea, even if the next step were 100% efficient. It just gets worse from there.

You forgot that this is about gas turbines. They're going to BURN the hydrogen. Divide that 68% number by two, and that's still probably wildly optimistic. More realistic numbers are probably more like 20%.

Not really, no.

If you're rolling it around on wheels, maybe. For a fixed installation, weight has exactly zero relevance. You're putting it on top of a concrete slab on top of dirt. Who cares how much it weighs?

Volumetric density might matter sometimes. Typical density for hydrogen peaks at about 40 kg per cubic meter (assuming Google search isn't lying to me). With a fuel cell, this will maybe give you 1320 kWh. But then you need additional space for the fuel cell itself, plus compressors to compress the hydrogen on the way in.

Batteries give you half the energy density, but that's all you have to have. Electricity in, electricity out.

Which one is more dense depends entirely on A. how quickly you need to store the incoming hydrogen (size/number of compressors) and B. how quickly you need to be able to turn the hydrogen in your tanks into electricity. Because the batteries will be instant. The power is just there. Whereas with fuel cells you need more/bigger fuel cells depending on how high your kW output needs to be. So storing huge amounts of power is more dense with hydrogen if you only need to dribble it out, but massively less dense if you need to dump all of the stored energy in an hour or two.

And realistically, for grid-tied energy storage, that second case is more common than the first. You aren't going to store energy for a year unless you're in Alaska had have all-day twilight for several months. No, you're going to store the energy during the day and use the vast majority of it between the middle of the afternoon to the early evening. It's probably a three or four hour window in which you will be dumping all the energy that you stored, give or take.

But to make matters worse for hydrogen, they're talking about burning it, not using it in a fuel cell. The efficiency there is maybe half the efficiency of a fuel cell. So when used in that way, batteries are more efficient in terms of volumetric density than hydrogen even BEFORE you factor in all the space for the turbines to burn it and turn it into electricity! This is absolutely *insanely* space-inefficient.

Add to that the problem of hydrogen embrittlement, where you have to keep replacing those storage tanks every few years, not to mention the pipes, turbines, etc., and it quickly becomes obvious that this project is a giant money pit in which Southern California will burn dollars and turn them into a negligible amount of temporary power storage.

There's no way in this world that burning hydrogen from electrolysis at somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% round-trip efficiency makes sense. This is quite possibly the single most clueless idea ever to come out of California's government in the history of California's government. The only people this makes sense for are the ones who are bilking the taxpayers by building out this infrastructure. Because it will never be useful. It will always be more efficient to use the incoming energy to charge batteries, or to do something else. Even when you're talking about things like nuclear power and using waste heat to crack water into hydrogen, you'd still be more efficient with any number of other thermoelectric energy capture systems going straight to electricity and storing it in a battery.

Hydrogen is not the answer. Hydrogen is the question. No is the answer. Always. For literally any purpose you could possibly come up with other than fusion.

Fuel cell efficiency sucks, too. Sure, maybe it's half again more efficient or even twice as efficient, but a battery would be more like 5x as efficient.

Your first mistake was buying a sh*tty front-loading washing machine in the first place. I dealt with those in the laundromat in our dorms at grad school. Never again.

Front loaders mean that you can't add clothes when you realize "Oh, s**t, I forgot the towels upstairs." And now you're running entire extra wash loads because your washing machine is designed to lock the door and prevent you from opening it.

Add to that the increased risk of flooding, increased mold problems, etc., and you couldn't *pay* me to take a front-loading washing machine unless you let me cannibalize the motor and then haul the rest of it to the junkyard afterwards. It's a fundamentally bad design.

If you can't hear your dryer buzzer, get a louder buzzer, or add a remote buzzer. That's the nice thing about non-digital hardware. You can just replace parts. It just applies a voltage across some kind of buzzer. Measure the voltage with the buzzer removed or look in the wiring diagram. Add a relay with an appropriate switching voltage in parallel across the buzzer. Use your old telephone line that you're not using because nobody has land lines anymore, and wire up a pair from the dryer to a location upstairs. Use low voltage DC through the switched side of the relay, and add a piezo buzzer and a 12V power supply upstairs. Add some connectors to make it look neat, and you're done.

Your attack surface is lower if you only have one system that has your password, instead of two dozen. It reduces password fatigue and increases the chances that users will use a single strong password instead of creating dozens of weak ones. Or worst (and commonly) one shared password across all sites. There are plenty of other benefits, the these arguments aren't the best reason to do it.

The best reason is there have been numerous studies showing that companies that enact broad SSO use see significant drops in identity-related breaches. 2023 Forrester report showed a 60% drop in these breaches.

I don't know exactly where you're getting the content, so I can't be completely certain, but when you pull network feeds off satellite, there's often a period of time allocated for local commercial insertion by affiliates. I'm not sure what they put in during that period these days, but that might be what you're seeing. If the downstream affiliate isn't injecting ads correctly (or at all), then you'd have whatever placeholder content filled the gap, which might be national ads for other shows on the network (preemptible spots) or might be nothing at all.

Same. I can't imagine paying $50 a month for any service. I'm currently an extra member on my mom's Netflix account because Netflix decided they didn't want my $11.99 and I wasn't willing to pay them $17.99 a month or endure ads. And that's where 90% of my viewing comes from.

So maybe buck or two a month is about all I'd be willing to spend for the very limited amount of viewing that something like YouTube TV would provide, assuming I could even deal with the commercials from live TV enough to watch it at all, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't, which makes the whole question moot.

Live TV is dead. And streaming live TV won't save it.

It's worse than that. ESPN has massive revenue, but also massive costs. Contrast with Disney, where the cost of production is dirt cheap by comparison, and what you conclude is that Disney/ABC is basically taking advantage of knowing that a lot of folks want sports to force mandated bundling so that all those people who don't watch ESPN end up helping pay for the ones who do, both by paying for the ESPN part and the Disney part, which ends up subsidizing the ESPN part.

The worst thing that can happen to a streaming service is getting sports. We need to keep streaming sports on their own a la carte services. As soon as you start bundling it in, the cost of the service skyrockets while the quality of the content plummets, because sports is such a huge fiscal black hole.

The courts have been pretty mixed about Guantanamo. They agreed with me in Boumediene v. Bush. But then, the farther the court swung to the right, the more bats**t the rulings became, and the more they buried their heads in the sand to avoid following the law.

Anyway, I think the correct argument to make would be that if they are not guaranteed due process, then they must not be criminals subject to prosecution, and must instead be P.O.W.s, which means they are subject to release at the end of the hostilities pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, and the government owes them a lot of money for unlawful detention since 2021.

Surely you're joking. Nixon had his election staffers break into the competing party headquarters.

Under Biden, the FBI, as part of an active criminal investigation into an attempted coup, looked at the phone records of sitting members of the government to see who they called and who called them and when.

No, Nixon did not get impeached for "much less".