14/02/23 15:16:02
@energy
Feeling a bit flat today and I think generally disenchanted with Energy Science. I’m losing sight of the overarching issue at hand, maybe I never had it in the first place.
All the optimization problems just don’t seem that interesting or meaningful, I don’t know why I feel that way.
I’m thinking to about being an ‘Energy Scientist’ which, as we were taught operate in this intersection of concerns. The job being to not take anything for granted, analyse data properly etc. What does that actually mean as a career though?
What questions am I trying to answer?
Started by reading https://austinvernon.site/blog/decentralizeatoms.html
-
Decentralizing electricity production has the power to increase competition and overcome woeful state capacity in a way few other energy technologies can.
- The main arguments seems to be that lowering the costs of transport is beneficial for people.
- Looking at costs and reducing price per energy unit. In general, also trying to rely on competition to spur things on.
-
Increasing competition across the entire value chain by increasing ship count and improving small port utilization would greatly benefit the US and global economies.
- There’s a metric there I suppose in determining even software related improvements. You can say that the price per unit energy is going down. Not necessarily predict what that means, just that it’s beneficial to people and hopefully they use that benefit well.
- This is probably why most of the time it feels like an engineering or optimization problem, you’re trying to squeeze more juice from the lemon.
Where do I fit in?
- https://hannahritchie.substack.com/about
- I read a bit on Hannah Ritchie’s bio, about making decisions based on data.
- Is there two roles, the decision makers and the data/context providers for those decisions?
- Ritchie also states that her PhD was focused on how to feed everyone a nutritious diet without ruining the planet. This notion of an overarching cause too.
- Fundamentally, I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed, that I won’t like what I work on, what would be so mad about that though? Plenty of people do that.
What have I learned across the first semester?
- The energy system is a behemoth.
- The underlying demand for energy is driven by people and growth.
- The supply of energy often relies on non-deterministic people (wars) but in general infrastructure plays a major role in what is common.
- Optimization. The fundamental scientific concept of any energy source is not the issue, engineering becomes the primary driver, optimising, squeezing juice out of the lemon.