embedded machine learning research engineer - georgist - urbanist - environmentalist

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • And things like vertical bifacial solar panels can work especially amazingly on grazing land that isn’t suitable for crops.

    Counter-intuitive as they may look, they actually have a number of benefits:

    1. The panels face east and west, meaning they generate peak power in the morning and evening, which corresponds to peak demand => less need for energy storage to bridge the gap between the mid-day peak in production from traditional PV and the aforementioned morning and evening demand peaks.
    2. The panels are vertical, which makes them easier and cheaper to maintain, as dust, snow, and rain naturally shed from their surfaces.
    3. The panels get less direct energy during mid-day, keeping their surfaces cooler. Turns out cooler solar panels are more efficient at converting light energy into electrical energy.
    4. The arrangement lends itself very naturally to agrivoltaics, which means you can derive more yields from a given piece of land and use less land overall than if you had segregated uses.
    5. The compatibility with agrivoltaics allows farmers to diversify their incomes streams and/or become energy self-sufficient.



  • Oh and bonus point for the fact that filing personal income taxes absolutely sucks and is an undue burden on the working class. With carbon (or other Pigouvian) taxes, only businesses would have to account for their carbon. With land value taxes, the government can easily calculate the value of land by similar statistical methods it uses for assessing property values for property taxes and then just tell you what you owe. With severance taxes, only businesses such as oil and mining and timber companies would have to do the accounting.