Dirty production initiates based on demand. So-called “peaker plants” start up under high demand when cost per megawatt rises. They typically start early in the day as most people wake up and cook breakfast and get ready for work and then shut down after people get home and wind down for bed. More extreme versions of this only fire up for more extreme weather events or when other plants trip offline unexpectedly. If demand is normalized, so too is production, which would phase out dirtier power production like coal and natural gas. As an operator at a combined cycle natural gas power plant, this would force me to find a new job. Which is fine by me. The system needs to be changed to be fixed, even if it causes a little pain for me.

Think of the grid as a pressurized system. To maintain consistent pressure, demand and supply need to be approximately equivalent. When use is high, the pressure drops so demand goes up to maintain that pressure, so prices per megawatt rise to incentivize power plants to step on the gas pedal to produce more. When use drops off, that production needs to reduce to prevent over pressurization of the grid. With battery storage, that pressure swing diminishes. It’s effectively a pressure regulator.

Additionally, the home power management system via UPS and inverters does exactly what you’re saying in terms of using it when it’s available. At times of high demand and high cost and low supply, your home could seamlessly switch over to your home battery supply for your energy needs to remove strain on the grid, and this would be attractive to set up through things like proposed tax credits and generally reducing your home energy bill. So at 3pm in an August heat wave, your AC could be battery powered from when you charged while you slept the night before. And you’ll recharge tonight when everybody’s AC has switched off for the most part. All this to say: you’re absolutely right and we already agree, but also we can use emerging tech and legislation to vastly expedite this badly-needed transition.

there’s not enough lithium

I am hopeful that developments in sodium ion battery tech will yield different strategies. The weight and energy densities vs cost and abundance mean that it makes more sense (at this time at least) to reserve lithium ion battery tech for more mobile use cases like handheld devices and EVs, but use sodium ion battery tech for things like grid storage or home energy management solutions. I dream of a day in the next decade or two in which virtually nobody bothers to have a generator for emergency home power and instead opts for a UPS with inverters and chargers hooked up to a home battery, allowing not only emergency power, but a “smart” system to power the home via battery during high grid demand and charge during low demand, normalizing grid supply curves and making power bills cheaper for all. The path to this starts with big scale early adopters like hotels and apartment buildings, which could easily supplement energy needs through solar panels on their large roofs at the same time.

For all the enshittification we’re seeing across most industries, I am cautiously optimistic that we might be living at the edge of an energy revolution. We may see fucking huge fundamental changes to our energy infrastructure within our lifetimes, and that’s one of the few things I’m excited about for the near future. It’s unfortunate that it’s taking a crisis to force these changes, but it would be a great pivot nonetheless.

It’s barely more work than just clicking “Not interested.” though. Just click “tell us why” and “I’ve already watched this video” and it knows that you didn’t dislike it. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for a while now and it still properly recommends videos. It just cleans up your recommended queue because it knows that you’ve already watched those ones in particular. I’ve watched a lot of music deep dive content this way because the ads stupidly will interrupt at the worst moments and ruin the flow, but that kind of content still shows up on my feed all the time.

I’m not tempted to sign up for something if I don’t even know what the features are. Maybe some of their dumbass ads should be for their own fucking product lol. I assumed that it was free from ads, and I think you can download videos and play with your screen off on your phone? Idk, Vanced has been great for me on my phone. And I wouldn’t have bothered to get that set up in the first place if the ads and lack of features weren’t so disruptively intrusive. If they find a way to shut down every way of getting around their overreaching bullshit, I’ll opt to fund a few respectable creators directly rather than pay for the platform.

And I wouldn’t want to bother building a queue in the first place unless it were in order to manage ad breaks. Putting that behind a paywall defeats the purpose of what I’m proposing. You can already build playlists all day long.

After watching, click do not recommend and say that it’s because you’ve already watched it. Problem solved.

Pro tip: open YouTube in Chrome, signed into your YouTube account. Allow the algorithm and your subs to continue recommending videos. Find one you wanna see. Copy link address. Paste it into Firefox with adblock, not signed into Google/YouTube. Prosper.

Just watched a YouTube video on my PS5 earlier today while cooking a food and saw for the first time that they will shoot an ad with a “next” button that skips to another ad, and then there’s a “skip” button countdown. Ridiculous. I wouldn’t bother with adblock if the ads were reasonable.

Here’s a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue and then only put ads in at the very start or very end of videos so they aren’t intrusive.