Zane Selvans

@zaneselvans.org

261

Posts

Data Liberation Engineer @catalyst.coop providing open data to researchers, climate advocates, & policymakers accelerating the energy transition.

"You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."

🇺🇸/🇲🇽 he/él

Posts Replies Media

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Zane Selvans

I would like to remind everyone that Sesame Street has been mocking Donald Trump since the 1980s with a character depicted as a villainous, trash-loving real estate developer. An earlier version was played by Joe Pesci, but he’s also been parodied as a muppet with orange hair.

After the Revolution, comrade. jwmason.substack.com/p/did-it-mat...

Did It Matter?jwmason.substack.com Classes finished up last week.

Very weird to see someone try and engage earnestly with this. Someone he probably knows IRL.

Getting back to Moby Dick after a while away and man, the contrast between what folks had to do to get a reading light in 1850 vs. what we have to do now with electricity and LEDs is pretty stark.

The US has like 330M people and 1100GW of electricity generating capacity. Pakistan has 240M people and... 28GW. Bangladesh has 170M people and 26GW. Nigeria has 230M people and 11GW. Later this century, a lot of countries will use 10 or 20 or 30 times as much electricity as they do today.

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Zane Selvans

A sticker seen in Brussels. @thewaroncars.bsky.social

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Zane Selvans

Reply to

Zane Selvans

Man, what a ride. 34, head of a country and suddenly: a global pandemic. Also your neighbor starts a land war in Europe. Plus you just had a kid, and a breakup, and married a new person, and your opponents keep whining about how you're hot and partying. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanna_M...

Sanna Marin - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Lol, why is this so funny?

Reposted by

Zane Selvans

I am hoping for a full-scale, George C. Scott at the end of "Dr. Strangelove" level, public meltdown. And every time the Harris/Walz team posts pictures of their rally crowds, I feel the probability of that increases.

Yeah he’s not going to make it to November without saying some super wild shit in public. www.axios.com/2024/08/10/t...

Report: Trump calls Harris a "bitch"www.axios.com Trump advisers privately concede his misogynistic language is deeply problematic.

A great conversation between Mission Data and @volts.wtf about the games utilities play with demand-side data from the smart meters they've been paid handsomely to install, and how it's holding back the development of a vibrant DER / VPP ecosystem. 🔌💡 www.volts.wtf/p/free-the-s...

Free the smart-meter data!www.volts.wtf Most ratepayers in the US have a smart meter generating real-time data about their power usage, which could theoretically be used to reduce consumption and save money, but in most cases, utilities hav...

14 mind-melting hours of right-wing training videos for the next Republican administration, released by @propublica.bsky.social I'm a subscriber, and I can't bring myself to read every email they send, but I've never considered unsubscribing. www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Project 2025 Private Training Videoswww.youtube.com ProPublica and Documented obtained more than 14 hours of never-before-published videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy, which are int...

Once again, I ❤️ Lina Khan. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjAw...

Why isn't This Illegal?www.youtube.com YouTube video by vlogbrothers

Nothing quite says "richest country on Earth" like this.

U.S. Olympians are using their trip to the Olympics to get the basic preventative healthcare they can’t afford to get in the U.S. We should be embarrassed that we’re the only industrialized country without universal healthcare — all because lobbyists pay off our politicians.

U.S. Athletes Are Taking Full Advantage of Free Healthcare in Olympic Villagewww.si.com Women’s rugby player Ariana Ramsey’s videos showcasing her appointments have gone viral, and now many others are making good use of Paris's medical services.

So glad the US isn't going to have yet another presidential election that's just wall-to-wall dread.

This feels very related to the pricing issues that are highlighted in The Price Is Wrong. 🔌💡

This paper from @nworbmot.bsky.social looks interesting. Can we get reasonable prices in merit-order wholesale markets when there's lots of zero-marginal-cost generation? With storage & some demand elasticity, it seems like the answer is yes. h/t @jessejenkins.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2407.21409

Price formation without fuel costs: the interaction of elastic...arxiv.org Studies looking at electricity market designs for very high shares of wind and solar often conclude that the energy-only market will break down. Without fuel costs, it is said that there is...

If California is running out of water, why don't we just grow tomatoes in Indiana? A multi-decade political battle between CA's produce growers and folks in the Midwest who grow heavily subsidized grain & oilseed crops (~80% of which aren't consumed by humans).

They talk about updating this whenever the Farm Bill comes up for renewal but... it never seems to happen. www.everycrsreport.com/files/200901... www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publ... fruitgrowersnews.com/article/usda... www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/fair... www.americanactionforum.org/research/pri...

www.everycrsreport.com

In the US $172 BILLION in retirement investment returns are lost every year because people rolled their 401(k) into an IRA and then forgot to invest the money in anything. It's totally insane that we expect people to manage this stuff on their own. (PDF) digital-assets.vanguard.com/corp/public-...

digital-assets.vanguard.com

Reposted by

Zane Selvans

For the next 2 weeks we'll be working on getting a versioned quarterly data release out, based on the raw data archives created on August 1st and posted to Zenodo. This release will include 2023 FERC Form 1 data, and EIA-923 early release data. 🔌💡 🧵 zenodo.org/communities/...

Search Catalyst Cooperativezenodo.org

We love seeing our data flow downstream into other projects! Please let us know if you've ever got a use case to share. 🔌💡

A cool new dashboard looking at emissions intensity in MISO, based on Singularity Energy's Open Grid Emissions dataset, which PUDL feeds into: 🔌💡 miso.singularity.energy

Grid Emissions Map | Singularitymiso.singularity.energy

In merit-order dispatch markets where solar can sometimes satisfy all demand, why don't generators try to restrict output so that a *little* gas comes online, and all the solar generators make a bunch of money? Especially if they also have storage and can sell the excess generation later. 🔌💡

My first job out of college was at The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), a pre-Linux commercial Unix company. There was a team of people already working on Y2K when I arrived in 1998! Will we ever have that kind of clarity around climate? Or does it require having a nice hard deadline?

Having been one little pair of hands among thousands on that second one, you can tell him for me: there were no big silver bullet a-has in Y2K, no wild genius trick to it, just took meticulous unexciting work done step-wise for a few years by people willing to do it. Sometimes that what magic is.

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Zane Selvans

Perfection

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Zane Selvans

Reply to

David Weiskopf

Here’s a high-key one: a $100/ton carbon tax would basically add $1/gal at the pump, if the entire impact of the tax was borne by consumers. We’ve seen market price of gas fluctuations around that amount, sometimes briefly but sometimes longer. Preferences for new gas guzzler cars remains high.

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Zane Selvans

Hey @sevier.io (and other public power advocates) @aripeskoe.bsky.social is looking for examples of arguments in favor of public or cooperative power system ownership. 🔌💡

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Zane Selvans

CA's ag water use: 1. Livestock feed (alfalfa, some of which exported) 2. Almonds/pistachios 3. Livestock feed (irrigated pasture) 4. Rice 5-end. Lots of other stuff humans eat, including produce but also grains & wine Americans should eat more fruits and veg, not less. pacinst.org/wp-content/u...

We can't grow produce because there isn't enough water in California. Or alternatively, we're trying to grow produce on irrigated near-desert while our best agricultural land goes into the tank of a car or the belly of a cow. "Don't eat a carrot because climate change" is a bad take. 🎁 Link

Opinion | Fine Dining Can’t Go On Like Thiswww.nytimes.com The days of growing thirsty crops in a dry land may be coming to an end.

I'm worried that the CCS (45Q) and Clean Hydrogen (45V) tax credits are going to end up like the corn ethanol blending credit. Damaging, expensive, and politically durable. Via @amywestervelt.bsky.social & @vox.com 🔌💡 drilled.media/news/ccs

Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solutiondrilled.media The fossil fuel industry’s carbon capture bamboozle, explained.

It feels like corruption and industrial policy are both a kind of intentional reshaping of the economic fitness landscape. Corruption is much more localized. I guess that makes it cheaper and simpler to implement. www.salon.com/2023/05/26/a...

Trump and the Saudis: Is Jack Smith finally looking at this clear-cut corruption?www.salon.com Trump's links to the Saudi regime and its LIV Golf tour reek of obvious corruption. Maybe Jack Smith has noticed

Are there open source tools like like MkDocs or Sphinx AutoAPI but for databases? Where I can give it a database connection or #SQLAlchemy metadata object, and have it build a beautiful, searchable, easy to navigate site documenting a database with 100s of tables and 1000s of columns? #WriteTheDocs

I've never been able to name an FTC chair before this one. Lina Khan is worth so much more than $7M to the public.

The reason the press kept pushing BROKERED CONVENTION and BLITZ PRIMARY is because the donors wanted to be able to make these sorts of demands and roll back Biden's progressive accomplishments www.cnn.com/2024/07/26/b...

LinkedIn billionaire is going all-in on Kamala Harris. But he wants her to make a big change | CNN Businesswww.cnn.com LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is throwing his financial firepower behind Vice President Kamala Harris.