They only bill that much because they need the average amount of money collected for a procedure to pencil.
They get that cash price amount from a tiny amount of people, 70% of that price from private insurers, 30-60% from Medicare, less from Medicaid. Even then, they have to basically litigate the bills through private insurance appeals.
If they had one payer which had a single reimbursement rate, they wouldn't have to do these shenanigans.
I like this idea, but limit it to $1000. Everything in government is funded, but each person can direct $1000 to general fund, a specific department, an initiative, or a registered non-profit.
I am not seeing those numbers in the chart. For March, I see 37.6 solar, 53 wind, 26 hydro, 60.4 nuclear, 5.3 other, together for 182.3 vs 120 for gas.
Extending the life of existing power infra is low-hanging fruit for more power short term, but the economics of renewables are just unstoppable.
Article states 93% of new generation capacity was renewable which is good, but I can sense that nimbyism is growing towards wind and solar. Not to mention the animus towards China who has wisely cornered manufacturing of these.
The US has shot itself in the foot because of its energy dependence on its own energy source. The resource curse strikes again.
Some panel manufacturing has been moved to the US and is actually thriving. Qcells keeps growing, year over year and as of 2023 had expanded their US facilities to manufacture more than 5.1 GW[0] of annual production. I'm aware this is a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 339 GW[1] of annual production in China, but we're also talking about a single manufacturer operating in an actively hostile administration and yet is still managing to grow.
Given this is the top comment on the article at the moment, I thought it was worth at least pushing back on this sentiment at least a little bit.
Maybe this will help to revitalize the US solar manufacturing. In Europe there is almost no solar manufacturing, just importing solar manufactured in China.
I still don't understand the economics when it comes to power all the time, not some of the time, and I rarely see that being mentioned in this sort of gung-ho post. I want to feel how you feel - can you help with the specifics there?
> I still don't understand the economics when it comes to power all the time, not some of the time
The way a traditional grid works is that you have baseload plants (nuclear, coal) that generate all the time and peaker plants (hydro, natural gas) that make up the difference between the baseload generation and the current demand by varying the amount they generate to match demand in real time.
The higher demand periods when you're not using electricity to heat buildings are typically daytime and early evening. Solar generates power during daytime. That makes "use solar instead of natural gas during daytime" an easy win. You can also do things like "charge electric vehicles mostly during daytime" and use solar again. Then you're still using natural gas in the early evening but you save a lot of fuel (and CO2) by not having to use them during the day. Meanwhile the gas plants are still there to use in the evening and then you can use them on a day when it's cloudy.
That's still where we are in most places. There isn't enough solar in the grid yet to completely replace natural gas during most of the solar generation window, and we could add even more by electrifying transportation, so we can still add a lot more solar before we have to really deal with intermittency at all.
Optimists would then like to extrapolate the economics of doing that to doing 100% of generation from renewables, which would require actually dealing with it.
Easy. US puts panels, turbines and batteries everywhere connected in big grid. Grid is big enough that something is always generating, and batteries smooth out the curve. Power is priced dynamically. Cheap solar at noon? Do big work. High demand in evening? Discharge battery. Power is always available, but cost goes up and down. Daily, god willing.
In theory that works as long as you're willing to let the price reflect actual supply and demand even when the difference is very large, e.g. it has been cloudy and still for a couple weeks so the batteries are low and then you get a hot summer day or cold winter night with a lot of demand. No problem, we'll just set the price to "high enough to get people to stop cooling/heating their buildings" and the market will clear. But people aren't going to like that.
It’s not something that’s likely to happen at the retail level, but at the industrial level. Battery farms buying power when the price is low or negative (due to too much wind/solar) and selling when the price is higher (early evening). Aluminum smelters curtailing. Etc.
There is something interesting happening in the retail space, though, called a “virtual power plant.” Worth googling if you’re curious.
Aluminum smelters are something like 4% of global electricity consumption and 60% of them are in China. In general industrial is less than a third of electricity consumption in the US, not even all of that can be curtailed, and that number is only going to go down if we electrify heating and transportation. It's pretty hard to curtail heating and cooling by more than a minor amount. It's easy to do with transportation over the course of hours or days, but not weeks or months.
Batteries work great to let you generate power at noon and use it at dusk. They're not so great at letting you generate power on days with a surplus and then use it later in the year when there is a multi-week or seasonal shortfall.
The demand can be more elastic than you envision. If power is expensive on a given day, electric cars can wait to charge, or even discharge if they aren't going to be used. People can wait to run laundry dryers.
The market will incentivize actors to smooth out before those kinds of restrictions are necessary.
People might not like changing their habits to follow the energy, but they'll probably be pretty happy when the end result is both good for the environment and cheaper overall. At least in my corner of the Midwest, either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and often both.
> If power is expensive on a given day, electric cars can wait to charge, or even discharge if they aren't going to be used. People can wait to run laundry dryers.
That buys you days, not weeks.
The smoothing out things also have kind of an ugly failure mode. People set their cars to sell power into the grid if the price is X% above normal, but that prevents it from getting to be 2X% above normal on the first day, and then fewer people choose not to run their dryers. The batteries get exhausted sooner because their own existence prevented the price from going up very much at first, but that's the profit-maximizing strategy because nobody knows exactly how long the shortfall is going to be and the shorter ones are more common. Then the batteries get depleted quickly and when the shortfall lasts for more than a couple of days, you're not only low on battery storage, you now have more people whose cars have a charge gauge pointing to E and they need to get to work in the morning.
> The market will incentivize actors to smooth out before those kinds of restrictions are necessary.
It isn't a regulatory restriction. It's, where are you setting your thermostat if electricity hits $5/kWh today?
> At least in my corner of the Midwest, either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and often both.
The problem is that it's occasionally neither and that doesn't have to happen very often to cause a lot of trouble.
> The problem is that it's occasionally neither and that doesn't have to happen very often to cause a lot of trouble.
The odds of it being neither everywhere (grid) for an extended period of time (storage) is astronomically low. You don't build solar plants and windfarms where prolonged periods of non-production are to be expected.
The once in a century black swan event where distributed power production across a continent all goes down at the same time is basically the same as a blackout from damage to the power grid, which you need to be ready to deal with on those timescales anyways.
> The odds of it being neither everywhere (grid) for an extended period of time (storage) is astronomically low.
The problem isn't that production is literally zero, it's that production is non-trivially below average for an extended period of time.
Continent-spanning grids mitigate that to a certain extent, but they're also a) expensive (purposely-idle high capacity very long distance transmission lines), and b) are essentially a scheme to trade frequent localized shortages for less frequent continent-spanning ones.
Making the grid larger to make it more reliable is also inconsistent with incentives. You install the long-distance transmission line because you're supposed to be using it to get power from far away in an emergency but then it turns out that one end of the transmission line has power which is less expensive, e.g. it gets more sunlight or has more favorable regulations or subsidies. Soon your generation is concentrated in the place where it's cheaper to build and the line gets used to average out long-term prices instead of short-term prices, leaving you with the short-term volatility but now it will affect even more people.
Then you're in more trouble. You get a month of unfavorable weather in the place where generation was concentrated, or an extended period of elevated demand at the same time as total supply is on the low side of average, and instead of a shortfall in Massachusetts you now have one in the Eastern Grid containing everything on the New York side of the Mississippi river.
And the US is one of only a few countries that spans something on the scale of a continent to begin with. Is the UK inclined to be reliant on power from the EU? Is Japan supposed to rely on China? How about India and Pakistan or Israel and any of its neighbors?
> You don't build solar plants and windfarms where prolonged periods of non-production are to be expected.
Prolonged periods of low production happen as a result of weather, e.g. Florida is suitable for solar because it's at a favorable latitude, but it also gets a lot of rain, and sometimes the rain continues for several weeks at a time.
Moreover, suppose there are places that are expected to experience prolonged periods of non-production from solar and wind. What are they supposed to do for power?
> The once in a century black swan event where distributed power production across a continent all goes down at the same time is basically the same as a blackout from damage to the power grid, which you need to be ready to deal with on those timescales anyways.
Having the same weather system affect most of a continent at the same time isn't really that uncommon. You also get nasty correlations like cloudy and still weather in the heart of the summer, causing simultaneous low generation and high electricity demand for air conditioning over wide areas.
Compare the likelihood of a prolonged period of low production versus our current system, with a prolonged period of low oil/gas availability.
We already experience exactly the same shortages. Look at how countries are responding to the oil shock right now.
You indicate the problem with localized generation, but the extraction and refinement of our current energy system is far more concentrated than renewables already. Look at https://openinframap.org/#5.62/28.611/114.086/A,B,L,P,S
Solar is being generated all over the world, and your concern is that it's production will be concentrated and subject to supply shocks?
Yes, intermittency will always be a problem, but that is true of all energy systems. Wind/solar/batteries has BETTER intermittency than oil/gas, and the added benefit of not cooking our entire biosphere.
> The problem isn't that production is literally zero, it's that production is non-trivially below average for an extended period of time.
That isn't a problem though for precisely the same reason.
> Continent-spanning grids mitigate that to a certain extent, but they're also a) expensive (purposely-idle high capacity very long distance transmission lines), and b) are essentially a scheme to trade frequent localized shortages for less frequent continent-spanning ones.
We already have the grid. And again continent spanning shortages don't happen.
> Prolonged periods of low production happen as a result of weather, e.g. Florida is suitable for solar because it's at a favorable latitude, but it also gets a lot of rain, and sometimes the rain continues for several weeks at a time.
Suitable means satisfies all requirements, not favorable conditions for some of them. If you're building solar in Florida it is with the expectation that there will be some rainy days.
> Moreover, suppose there are places that are expected to experience prolonged periods of non-production from solar and wind. What are they supposed to do for power?
GRID
> Having the same weather system affect most of a continent at the same time isn't really that uncommon. You also get nasty correlations like cloudy and still weather in the heart of the summer, causing simultaneous low generation and high electricity demand for air conditioning over wide areas.
It is extremely uncommon. There's a difference between a low pressure front moving across a few states and "the wind has stopped everywhere." You might get cloudy conditions in summer, Phoenix doesn't.
Which is why we have ancillary markets. For all parts of the grid that the energy only market does not solve well enough, but we as a society deem necessary to solve.
When these edge cases are found, if they even exist, design a technology neutral market solving it and let companies bid.
It's economical to build a small amount of battery storage, enough for a few hours. For longer term issues, when things are dark and not windy for a long time, I'm not aware of any long-term plan. States like California are handling it by keeping old fossil fuel plants going for longer, and importing power from neighboring states.
That may be the case, though from a US perspective, in terms of "unilaterally acting to gain control of other markets" being bad, we aren't a position to criticize.
What's even more important is how solar, and to a lesser extent other tech, served as a gateway for China to accumulate electrical engineering, physics, and chemistry talent the US seems committed to offshoring by incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China). We are training them and not our own.
Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Trump and team are trying to insert via executive order, strategic defunding, and all the other mob/shakedown behavior.
>GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here.
I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against their homeland. And there are a lot of them. Plus the student is still contributing to American research efforts as a grad student here. It isn't all unilateral effort unilateral benefit. They are advancing their PIs grant effort. They are probably teaching and mentoring.
Even without internet, many of the scientists of Eastern European extraction were able to share secrets to the Soviets. I don't believe any Operation Paperclip scientists were directly implicated as atomic spies (and there may be some reasons the US wouldn't want to bring attention to that), but plenty of other operations occurred, and plenty of other scientists did in fact share secrets with the Soviets.
Now, with the Internet and strong crypto, it's trivial for Chinese professors to send IP back to collaborators in China. That is the basis of the 1000 Talents Plan (1), one of 200 Chinese "talent recruitment" plans.
This is not at all hypothetical. I used to swim with Kang Zhang, who has done amazing work to cure chlamydial blindness, but also took that IP from the US to China (2). Another ophthalmologist would drive all the way from UCLA (the north end of LA) to San Diego to swim with us. I asked him why. He said it was to keep an eye on Kang: he had more macaques in China to run experiments on than anyone in the US could possibly access.
I like the idea, but even with better funding availability, "missing middle" projects will struggle to get built. Accessibility requirements for elevators mean that the most profitable projects will be either single-family homes or 5-3 over 1 boxes. This isn't even to mention the local zoning and regulatory hurdles. Why go through the regulatory legwork for less than ten units if you could build a hundred?
I'm not very well informed, but couldn't we figure out how to improve loan availability for condos in 5-3 over 1's? I think that would make a much bigger impact.
I think these ads were to bait Meta into banning them (which they've done) and now the firm will follow up with a lawsuit because Meta suddenly is able to very rapidly decide what ads get shown if it's going to hurt their bottom line.
A sidenote about unhomogenized milk, it's delicious. I don't know if it actually tastes any different, but something about shaking it up before using it just makes it feel different.
Half and Half is too much cream for most people. I've met someone who drank it constantly, but she was a former New York City Ballet dancer, with a very high metabolic rate, struggling to keep her weight up.
Milk mixes from all-cream to no-cream are available, after all.
It may have a higher % of fat. Have you tried to compare it with 95% milk and 5% dairy cream? (I'm not sure about the proportions.) Also, the pasteurization for long term unrefrigerated storage change the taste, so you can try with milk pasteurized for short term storage under refrigeration.
I'm in the US, so I'm speaking only about pasteurized for short term refrigeration. There are places that produce that, just without the homogenization.
I think it is still the same percentage of fat, but I just like shaking it up.
Hi from Argentina! Here in Buenos Aires, we have "fresh" milk that must be refrigerated, and also milk in plastic bottles tat last 1 month and in tetrabriks that last 6 months.
In all of the presentations we used to have 3.3% and 1.5% fat content, but since a few years we have 3%, 2%, 1% and if you are very unlucky 0% that taste like water with watercolor. I'm not sure why we changed, probably some weird Big Cow conspiracy :)
All of that is pasteurized and homogenized.
Anyway, 3% is more tasty than 1%. I'm not sure about the difference with 3.3%. But the low fat one is recommended for diets.
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When I was young, my grandfather has a small summer house like 1 mile away from a town that is like 10 miles away from the capital city of one of the provinces in the northwest of Argentina. We use to bought raw unpasteurized unhomogenized milk from someone that had cows nearby. But we obliviously had to boil it and then remove the big layer of cream at the top, that we used for cooking (as a replacement of butter).
The problem of boiling milk at home is that it must boil for 10 minutes or something and that changes the flavor. In a factory, they can boil milt at ~150°C (300°F) for 1 second instead, that kills the bacterias but does not change the flavor.
I grew up with homogenized milk, and the mere smell of unhomogenized milk makes me want to vomit. Even boiled milk is awful. Unhomogenized cow milk was slightly more tolerable than unhomogenized ox milk.
Incredibly confused by this comment. Does homogenization alter the smell?
>Even boiled milk is awful
What does this have to do with homogenization? I wouldn't want boiled milk either unless it was to be used in a soup or something.
Are you confusing homogenization with pasteurization?
They get that cash price amount from a tiny amount of people, 70% of that price from private insurers, 30-60% from Medicare, less from Medicaid. Even then, they have to basically litigate the bills through private insurance appeals.
If they had one payer which had a single reimbursement rate, they wouldn't have to do these shenanigans.
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