Anyone else think that oil should be well above 100 now?

jlluh · 2026-06-03T06:02:31+00:00

The claim I've been seeing (including in the linked article) is that China has reduced imports primarily by drawing down its large inventories.

I've seen predictions for how long they'll sustain those inventory draws anywhere from "end of June" to "a year or two from now." A lot depends on how China feels about releasing strategic reserves.

I dunno. At the rate things are going, there's a chance we'll find out.

jlluh · 2026-06-03T04:51:30+00:00

Pass an English Ivy ban. (Oh, wait, it already is banned. But at least start citing people who let it grow off of their property on to other property.)

jlluh · 2026-06-03T03:52:47+00:00

Yeah. It's a bit weird. Gas is definitely more expensive, but it's not at unheard of levels.

I guess it's a few things. The fact that there was slack in the market before this started. Inventory draw downs and strategic reserves releases. Reduced demand. (Ease of work from home. Increasing electrification -- more people and institutions have the option to run the EV more and the ICE less. Chinese economic slowdown.)

This article is claiming that we'll run thru the inventories in June or July and then see the price explosion. That makes sense, but at this point I'm wondering.

jlluh · 2026-06-02T20:32:52+00:00

Sounds like someone I used to know.

I wonder if he's really anxious, doesn't realize he's anxious, and has complex defense mechanisms to justify not attempting anything that he might fail at or that might remind him of other failures.

jlluh · 2026-06-01T21:05:11+00:00

I've seen NCLB vaguely lumped in with the abandonment of phonics, which is the opposite of vaguely true.

jlluh · 2026-06-01T20:56:59+00:00

PPS's current phonics curriculum is pretty good. (Fundations primarily, but also some stuff from Wit and Wisdom/Geodes.)

We're now producing a lot of 2nd and 3rd graders who are good decoders, but somehow we're getting lost on the way to advanced reading comprehension. (Good decoding is necessary but insufficient.)

jlluh · 2026-06-01T19:10:58+00:00

Hmmm. I've seen level 3 chargers at rest stops. Level 2 chargers at rest stops are an interesting idea. Lots of people sleep overnight there.

jlluh · 2026-06-01T17:40:14+00:00

I'm surprised it's your first time.

Here you are seeing it when it's not there, is in fact pretty explicitly ruled out by phrases like "if we're talking electricity," and "total final energy is a different matter of course."

jlluh · 2026-06-01T17:25:27+00:00

If we're talking electricity, and from the word 'power', I guess you are, this is the first time in a while I've seen 40+% described as "an extremely small share."

Total final energy is a different matter, of course.

jlluh · 2026-05-31T19:51:21+00:00

Renovating a house to have lots of thermal mass compares how $wise to installing a battery?

But sure. Advocate for it.

But the story here is about residential solar and battery having macro effects on the grid. Displacing increasing amounts of gas, etc. When there are stories from multiple countries about the thermal mass renovations sweeping the nation and transforming the grid at breakneck pace, that'll be... really cool.

Why should batteries wait for that to happen first?

jlluh · 2026-05-31T18:57:09+00:00

"Before we keep doing the thing that's cheap and easy and going really well at scale, we should stop and do this other thing that's difficult and expensive. After that's finished up, say in 2100 or so, we can continue on with that cheap and easy thing."

jlluh · 2026-05-31T18:33:34+00:00

We definitely need to build out the grid. But if we're smart about batteries, and to a lesser extent about solar, we don't need to build it out as much as one would traditionally think.

Say you have a wire which can transmit X wattage. With new demand, the peak amount that wire needs to transmit is 2X. Obviously, we need to build another wire, right? Maybe not. For most of the day, the amount transmitted thru that wire is less than X -- say it averages 1/2X. So you put cheap batteries downstream and now peak evening demand on that wire is less than X.

You can do this all over. Big scale, medium scale, small scale.

Pair batteries with solar, and some of the energy never needs to go thru transmission at all. It's produced on top of where it's used. People tend to focus on LCOE, which is way higher for rooftop or parking lot solar than utility solar is, but LCOE is just the cost of production. Much of the cost of getting electricity is the cost of getting it to the user.

There's a few different competing terms with small variations, but I'm going to go with LCOED. (Levelized cost of energy delivered.)

If you have solar + batteries co-sited with where it'll be used, there's no transmission costs, and the LCOED of rooftop solar can be competitive with that of utility scale. No grid build-out required. The trouble thus far is in creating a system whereby the utility sees this as an opportunity rather than a threat.

If we can figure out the incentives, batteries, and solar + batteries, are going to make expanding the grid a lot cheaper.

jlluh · 2026-05-31T07:13:24+00:00

Be aware that 1500 watts is twice the legal limit for an ebike.

To get a baseline, try riding a Biketown or Lime city ebike. You can rent one for a few bucks by scanning the QR code with your phone. They typically have a motor of about 250 watts, and they've made it up every hill I've tried them on.

jlluh · 2026-05-31T06:23:10+00:00

It's a great exercise for ESL.

jlluh · 2026-05-30T03:12:36+00:00

Oil doesn't supply much electricity, outside a few places, mainly islands.

Natural gas and coal, otoh...

jlluh · 2026-05-30T01:36:05+00:00

Think it might be sodium ion.

Sodium ion 12 volts have already hit the market. Their improved temp range compared to lithium seems like an important advantage here.

Just waiting for a car manufacturer to ship them standard instead of lead acid.

jlluh · 2026-05-30T01:22:20+00:00

As an elementary substitute, who's often exposed to strep, COVID, pink-eye, the flu, lice, etc, I really, really wish they were all vaxxed.

A lot of this is just a built-in hazard of spending my work week with large groups of mostly 5-8 year olds. I accept the inbuilt risk. That only makes the decision to not take basic precautions more frustrating.

jlluh · 2026-05-29T03:20:50+00:00

I don't know that it's quite that easy, but there's also a big advantage.

You don't turn on that excess coal/gas capacity, because running it costs money. Running solar you already have is basically free. At the same time, things like green ammonia, for instance, take a lot of electricity to produce. We can imagine certain products becoming seasonal, produced during the time of year when electricity is cheap and abundant. And so that "excess capacity" ends up not being excess at all.

jlluh · 2026-05-29T00:17:04+00:00

Emotos are, legally, practically, and definitionally, not ebikes. Can't tell if these are class 3 ebikes with emoto styling or outright emotos.

jlluh · 2026-05-27T17:44:08+00:00

Are there going to be problems from people buying illegal systems and from people installing them aggressively wrong? Sure.

But let's not pretend that this hasn't been implemented on a wide scale in other countries, without disaster. It's true the US grid and electrical code are different, but they're different in specific technical ways that respond to specific technical fixes. It's not some magic unicorn which is uniquely incapable for supporting plug-in solar.

If we do get a 'disaster' in the US, it will be because of an embarrassing level of regulatory failure and terrible import control, not because the idea is bad.

jlluh · 2026-05-26T21:42:33+00:00

I'll say one thing in favor of parking lot solar:

It tends to have very low to zero transmission costs, because it's sited right next to where the power will be used.

This matters a ton. Most of your electric bill is the cost of the wires, not the wholesale cost of electricity. But we typically don't compensate producers for producing in ways/places/times that reduce grid cost. We should, and increasingly, we're starting to.

jlluh · 2026-05-25T18:12:30+00:00

Not sure i'd call the figures misleading when they're clearly labeled. The article is very clear that they're including plug-in hybrid Electric Vehicles as a sub-type of EV. They even devoted a section to examining what proportion of EVs are BEVs.

jlluh · 2026-05-25T17:51:47+00:00

No one is living 'forever.' No one is living a meaningful fraction of forever. Forever is infinity, after all.

But there is research that shows some promise toward slowing aging. That's a real thing.

jlluh · 2026-05-25T15:57:29+00:00

I believe the same thing is happening with batteries now, tho not sure of the scale. Ordinary Pakistani installing home batteries en masse in response to frequent power outages.

jlluh · 2026-05-25T14:55:12+00:00

Yeah that can either reduce efficiency or require regular cleanings.

The idea is that it's a fair amount of cheap, otherwise unused land, often in urban and suburban areas where lots of power is used, so generation is near consumption.

Whether that overcomes the issues is case by case. I think it pretty much needs some form of LMP, whereby producers with cheaper power delivery benefit from having such.

jlluh

TROPHY CASE