tjo o tjim

I forget… what does “dissonance” mean again… There is clearly a gap between the caseload and Thailand’s plan to reopen. I might not be quite sure what the gap is, or what the right solution is… but I feel for the people coming in November/December/January.

You could have stopped there… but I agree. [V|U]HNW Individuals care about security, which healthcare, road safety, police, and government all compromise. Any functioning plan needs to allow for quality of life, security, and investment opportunity. One out of three is where they are shooting for.

In fairness, it is still cheaper energy than what they will get from Hinkley Point…

For the UK, and the way the project is designed, it is a great solution. For Morocco it is a great project. Some real innovations should come from this project. It will have a lower cost of energy than Hinkley Point. But, as a general solution you want to have as much generation and storage close to demand as possible. This works well because it adds geographical diversification for wind, and latitude and cloud cover based efficacy improvements for solar. Unfortunately the project is unlikely to use the solar shading to provide agricultural opportunities in the region.

Not to offend anybody, but this isn’t exactly a very high bar for “wealthy.” If you have a net worth of around $2 million (including a house in your home country) you could make it work pretty easily. At half that or less you are taking some risks, but it still isn’t out of reach. While I wouldn’t choose Thailand right now, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it two years ago. Maybe when things are a little more “normal” I would contemplate it again. The big things that make Thailand a hard sell are when the quality of life equation gets inverted— feeling like you are a walking ATM, being hassled, no smiles, things being dirty when you expect them to be spotless (last one isn’t intended to describe the streets or klongs of Bangkok). If you have an income stream of $80k/year, your money is going to go a hell of a lot farther than it might in the US, UK, Europe. If you are making $120k you can live quite well. ….now, if you start talking about the “super rich” that have ~10-100x the assets, the equation might not tilt in Thailand’s favor as a full-time residence. But, those people have multiple homes, and the novelty of having one in Thailand might make it worthwhile.

I think too many people here are advising not to try to catch a falling knife. I’m out of Thailand now, but what I see in other markets everywhere is that construction slowed down dramatically and for a prolonged time, and once people feel they can get a deal buying picks up very quickly. What is different about Thailand is there is a huge inventory of unsold properties that dates back several years. Specifically in Bangkok, that often leads to a death spiral for a building, where critical maintenance is deferred, reserves are depleted, and the property cannot keep up. After ~5 years, the amount needed to re-invest in the property is huge, and unless people are paying the maintenance fees (including unsold units), there is a huge shortfall. All that said, it sounds like you have enough money to feel like you have options… but the smart move is going to be to invest that money in something that will grow rather than focus on hedging inflation with a real-estate purchase.

Singapore has ~1/7 the infection rate of Thailand in the last 7 days; that is a pretty good attestation to the efficacy of the vaccine. Israel’s 63% vaccination rate was initially admirable, but few consider that a sufficient number today; the consensus seems to be closer to 80% with issues remaining when you get outbreaks among ineligible groups.

Physics and Chemistry both give pretty compelling reasons why it won’t be a viable solution long-term. It’s been nearly 20 years since the first hydrogen-optimized algae were created, and promised efficiency bordering on the day’s commercial PV cells “in a few years.” (That was about 11-12% efficiency.) They are still targeting about the same level of efficiency, despite PV pushing double that today. Research has not been starved of funding either. Reforming H2 from natural gas is the dominant approach for a reason, and the CO2 reduction compared to burning natural gas in a car is minimal. Specifically for aerospace, there is a possibility that it will work, but the window of competitiveness is closing.

Wrong on both counts: burning and Hydrogen. Range requirements passenger vehicles are well served by batteries, and the advantages over hydrogen to the consumer are insurmountable. The efficiency penalty of the hydrogen ecosystem makes it only potentially viable for aerospace and possibly long-haul trucking— but the window on the latter closes within 5 years. As for burning it instead of using fuel cells… well, talk about worst of both worlds!

My old office in San Francisco looked down on a set of those lines. Amazing just how often they faulted. A very high-maintenance solution to be sure.

Looks like it is working from the IoTaWatt code base (open source hardware/software), at least partially, I wish IoTaWatt had upgraded to the ESP-32 as it offers tremendous additional functionality. I haven’t integrated into HomeAssistant yet, but use InfluxDB and Grafana for a few things (that should be much easier to do). I will try to get it working one of these days, but my current challenge is getting HomeAssistant to use multiple network interfaces properly (hass os).

The upshot is damage was limited to two packs, and repairs were prompt. For residential I would much rather go with a LFP chemistry than NMC, but at utility scale you need to pick lowest cost and design around it. Ironically NMC is low cost for Tesla.

It’s funny, living in another tourism-dependent location at the moment that is also trying to shift to high-value tourists. The tourists that are out there now are of two types: value tourists that spend almost zero, and very wealthy tourists that spend money in very concentrated ways. (The wealthy do things like rent a house with chef and associated charter sailboat; the value are hard pressed to spend on anything but deals on accommodation and airfare.) While I am still “connected” to Thailand, going there as a vacation is done for me. It is just a trip to see friends and visit some old haunts at this point… if the option ever returns. Other people seem to have found other destinations to shift their energy to.

Just a realistic question… how many of those hotels will actually open in the next year or two? It is a huge amount of work to open a hotel from when construction finishes, especially 5-star properies. So many people to hire and train, and usually foreigners for some key positions. The logistics of spending that type of money when demand is sure to lag seems tricky.

It is a good application for when you have a critical load that you want to run off solar as much as possible, but use the grid as a backup. Speaking to your broader issues, I wonder why they never put solar panels on the water tank, at least to try to offset some of the diesel use. By far, that is the best place for solar on that system. A battery would need to be down by the generators because of how it was set up.

I’m in Hawaii now, at least until the madness subsides in a year or so… We have a little bit bigger place here than in Thailand; the people that built it didn’t do it for energy efficency. I’ve had to do a lot of driving this week, needed 30kWh yesterday and ~80kWh for the week. That said, 3kWh/day is impressive! Just our internet and TV use more than that…

That is my electric utility. I am net-metered, so when it is negative I have a credit for the day. Load was much higher in that graph than normal, ran an air conditioner all day and charged the car. (5kW off the laundry sub-panel) PV output was down in the afternoon due to cloud cover as well.

I’ll describe my home system if you are interested. I have an Intel NUC running Proxmox Virtual Environment with virtual machines for InfluxDB and HomeAssistant (among others). I have several IoTaWatt energy meters that report data to Influx, and Grafana in HomeAssistant to present the dashboards. The Influx/Grafana is still a work in progress, but the IoTaWatts give me several nice consumption graphs.