California energy production

 This is a really cool website

http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

Breaks down energy production by type. Renewables generated almost 90% of the total energy (during the day) yesterday, and Solar is doing particularly well! As I hinted here,  I am not sure that installing solar panels at home (in California) saves the earth.

Solar is shining

The Global Picture

Around 10 years ago, I was into renewable energy and was curious about energy in general (e.g. this , this). I remember being fascinated by Stanford's energy institute seminars and future projections of the cost of energy. Stanford has saved slides and videos of the weekly seminars for the past 14 years (Go Cardinal!). As an example, here is a presentation from 2009 that said solar energy cost around 30 cents / kWhr and I vaguely remember discussions that suggested that the cost could reduce by a factor of 5-10 over the next 10 years. I will admit that I was somewhat skeptical. I've not followed this evolution as closely as I should have, but I recently looked it up, and have been amazed. See the plot below

This is simply remarkable! All the curves are interesting, but let's focus on PV (i.e. Solar panels).  The associated report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) is fascinating, and has a lot of detail (see fig 1.3 for instance), but the relevant takeaway is that solar energy sold at big auctions averages around  4 cents / kWhr. Note that the range for fossil fuels is 5-15 cents/kWhr! 

The report says that this year "up to 1200 gigawatts of existing coal-fired capacity would cost more to operate than new utility-scale solar PV would cost to install". Of course, numbers are numbers and IRENA may or may not be biased in its accounting, but the conclusion is straightforward: Solar is in the same ballpark as fossil fuels and is extremely competitive.

The Local Picture

Clearly, energy generation is going to change in a big way, but I also wanted to see what Solar panels can do for me, now. I've attached the breakdown of my electricity bill at the bottom of this post, but effectively, I pay 15.5 cents / kWhr + $11/month.

Average monthly usage : 400 kWhr. Daily : 13 kWhr

Average monthly bill = $80

From the internet, I can infer that a 3 kW solar system will generate about 13 kWhr per day. Let's be conservative (Michigan!) and say that it takes a 5 kW solar system to do the job. The cost of the 5kW solar system seems to be $14,000 (with 30% federal tax credit).

For reference, here is a friend's 10kW unit which cost him only $24,000, and here is his energy production in March (March was brighter than average). He easily generated 30kW-hr/day in March! In Ann Arbor!!!

Not to belabor the point, but here is a neat NREL website that tells us what to expect in any location. I plugged in a 10kW panel for Ann Arbor, and I got the following estimate (which happens to be spot on!). 

These numbers are great : a 10kW panel gets you 1 MWhr/month in Michigan, 1.25 MWhr/month in San Francisco and 1.4 MWhr/month in Arizona. Not as big a difference as I would've imagined!

The bottomline is that we can breakeven in less than 15 years. This doesn't account for the fact that you can sell electricity to the grid (in which case, we could breakeven in say less than 10 years). I've  ignored things like financing, but the 10 year number is quite reasonable.

Let's work out some numbers on the 5kW panel:

The cost of the solar panels is about $2800/kW-installed. 

Conservatively the panels will generate about 24 MWhr/kW-installed of energy over its 25 year lifetime

Thus, conservatively, buying the panels is the equivalent of paying 11 cents / kWhr.

Note that we are currently paying 15.5 cents / kWhr.  

Our utilities provider buys back excess energy at 8 cents / kWhr.

Local vs Global question

It is obvious that solar panels make (and has made for the past 5-10 years) economic sense at a personal level. However, since utility providers themselves are going to integrate much more large scale renewables into the grid, I am not super sure whether it is going to make sense (from a tree-hugging perspective) to install solar panels @ home say 10 years from now. But that's a good problem to have. Another BIG question is how to recycle/ dispose these panels.

Interesting times. 

================================

My Electricity bill

Power Supply Capacity Charge 433 KWH @ 0.045000 $19.49 

Power Supply Non Capacity Charge 433 KWH @ 0.041760 $18.08 

Power Supply Cost Recovery 433 KWH @ 0.003220 $1.39 

Delivery Charges Service Charge $7.50 

Distribution 433 KWH @ 0.066110 $28.63

LIEAF Factor $0.91

Other Delivery Surcharges $2.56 

Residential Michigan Sales Tax $3.11 

Total Charges $81.67

Most amazing sporting achievements of the 21st century while facing adversity

India beat Australia in Brisbane to win the series in test cricket on Jan 18th 2021. This is the long form of the game - played over 5 days, and it comes down to true grit. It was shocking for many different reasons. Imagine if the Miami Heat had beat the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020 missing Butler AND Adebayo AND a few bench players while starting 2 rookies. But more explicitly,

- India was severely depleted, losing their captain (the best player in the world),  and more than half the team to injury (including the entire first string and most of the second string bowlers). They also lost players in the middle of matches (and they can't be replaced).

- Australia has the best bowling attack in the world, and all 5 of India's bowlers were debutants

- Australia is close to unbeatable in a series at home, and also hadn't lost a game at Brisbane in 33 years. India is no slouch (both countries are comfortably in the top 3 in world cricket), but unlike in any other sport, the home country has a big advantage because of the playing surface (India is close to unbeatable in India, and the difference between the surfaces is like the difference between the French and US Opens in tennis).

- India had been embarrassed in Game 1 and were bowled out for their lowest score ever (Imagine the Heat scoring 50 points in a game), came back and won Game 2 and looked like they were going to lose Game 3, but held on for a draw. TV networks showed India had about a 1% chance of winning Game 4 on the last day.

There are many other subtleties, but I will not go into it. Perhaps this gives some insight (for higher level, here is the New York Times highlight!). So given all that, I was thinking of comparable sporting achievements in the face of adversity in the 21st century. I had to set some rules:

- Individual games don't count. I am sure we can all find thrilling individual games and comebacks (Tom Brady's Superbowl 51 comeback, for instance). Has to be a championship or a very important series of games (e.g. Sox vs Yankees)

- It has to be somewhat significant in the global scale (or at least matter to 10s of millions).. that rules out US college sports. But even if we keep college sports, nothing measures up in College Football (big guys always win the championship,) and the closest in college basketball is if George Mason had won the NCAAT or if Butler had beaten Duke without Gordon Hayward (but they didn't and had Hayward). 

So there are 4 categories. Talent differential between teams, Adversity faced (i.e. how close were they to losing, injuries, etc), Achievement relative to the biggest prize in that sport, and  Shock value of the result (i.e. how surprising the result is, independent of other factors)

Here is an unranked list of similar events with scores out of 10 in each category.

Team                                          Year     Talent  / Adversity  /Achievement/  Shock

                                                                 Diff    /    faced       /(in that sport)/  Value             

Leicester city wins the EPL        2016       10                 3                   8                   10

Redsox beat the Yankees            2004        3                 10                  8                     4

Cavaliers beat Warriors              2016        6                  8                  10                    8

Greece wins the Euro                 2004       10                 3                    9                   10

India beats Australia                   2021        7                  9                    8                    8

Liverpool wins the Champs L.   2005        6                  9                    8                    8

Giants win the Superbowl          2008        6                  4                   10                   8

 I am sure I am missing some obvious ones (in Rugby and NHL, for instance, so this will be updated...)

Hot takes from the election

We didn't learn anything new about America : 

        And we never had a chance to learn anything new.  People who thought it would be a landslide for Biden were always going to be wrong. There was never going to be a repudiation or a blue (or a red) wave. There is no silent majority, nor are Trump supporters just a vocal minority.

Caveat: You could argue that the extent (post-election) to which Trump's base and some republicans sank to has been surprising, and I'll give you that. 

Hard to say whether Trump hurt or helped the republican party at the polls :

      Looking at - for instance - Pennsylvania numbers and the fact that Republican congressmen got a lot more votes than Trump, it is easy to lay a hot take that there were many more negative Republican votes for Trump. However, it is not that simple. We don't know how many congressmen actually got votes because of Trump. Overall, the numbers show that Trump underperformed with relation to the GOP, but that doesn't tell a complete story.

Caveat: Trump clearly hurt the party in suburbia, but made gains among non-white voters, but it is hard to disambiguate, especially because of the incumbency effect.

The polls were "accurate" (again) : 

         Whatever your hot take is, I think that the polls (I mean, high quality aggregates like NYT and 538) were pretty good (especially, but not only because of all the pandemic/turnout/mail-in uncertainties). Every single state and every single senate seat that was supposed to go red or blue went red or blue. See the attached pictures from NYT

There were also exactly ZERO big upsets (and 7 mild upsets) out of 535 house seats.   Perhaps if you just follow American politics, you're used to 98% certainty, but if you step out of the red, white and blue sphere, it is pretty remarkable how predictable American elections are (goes for 2016 and 2018 also.)

Caveats: You could argue there was a 3-4% red shift in the tossups, and I'd give you that (though I was sure that it would happen). But really? a 3-4% shift in such a complex system is a big deal?

There was a tiny blue shift (overall) in the presidential election

            In 38 states, Biden's margin was +2% or higher than Clinton's. Only in -2- states did Trump have a +1% or higher margin compared to 2016. This was evenly distributed over battleground and safe states. Geographically, the only major surprise was a big red swing in south Texas. See pic below from Nate Cohn.

Compare that to the 2012-2016 shift, and that's all we need to know.

If that's not very clear, take a look at this (from Cook political report).. 

Trump never had a plan :

           The defining characteristics of Trump : make shit up, survive news cycle to news cycle and bully/fire people to get his way. All those who credited him as an evil genius were always wrong. He is certainly as much a moron as he is evil, and he is certainly not a genius. He has lost 34 out of 36 post-election lawsuits so far, and the two that he won are insignificant. We all know this is just a ploy to create more doubt and stall  certification, but even then it has been an absolute shit-show. 

American institutions are neither strong nor weak :

          But they are getting dangerously weaker by the day. Well.. this one is obvious and doesn't need qualifiers

I was wrong about one thing :

        I thought Americans hated "Losers" more and thought people would jump ship sooner. It could still turn out that Trump will be cast into the rubbish dump of history soon, but as of November 19, I am certainly wrong.

          

Homestretch in PA, GA & AZ

OK.. There seems to be a lot of confusion about how many votes are left and such. One thing we know for real, however, are the margins. So what I will do below is to plot the real margin vs assumed number of votes left. 

The narrowing of the lead has been remarkably linear in PA (I went in to the reasons why in the previous post), and piecewise linear (it transitioned to a slightly smaller slope on Thursday and back on track on Friday) in GA.

Pennsylvania

Assuming 340375 votes were left when the margin was 97900 

Thursday

10:50 pm Biden is down by 26132 votes and needs to win 57.0 percent of the remaining 185551 votes.

Friday

8:22 am Biden is down by 18049 votes and needs to win 55.3 percent of the remaining 169238 votes

8:57 am Biden leads by   5587 votes and needs to win 48.0 percent of the remaining 138082 votes

6:00 pm Biden leads by 14541 votes and needs to win 43.2 percent of the remaining 106154 votes

9:50 pm Biden leads by 27130 votes and needs to win 33.3 percent of the remaining 81331 votes

Georgia

Assuming 14097 votes were left when the margin was 1775 votes (confirmed by SOS) . Note: In addition to the below, there appear to be about 8000 military/overseas ballots. While I don't think Trump will win those by a lot, Biden coming out with a 2k-3k vote lead out of this lot will guarantee that he gets GA (and he is well on track)

Thursday

11:12 pm Biden is down by 1805 votes and needs to win 57.1 percent of the remaining 12781 votes

Friday

08:22 am Biden leads by 1097 votes and needs to win 43.9 percent of the remaining 8941 votes

03:30 pm Biden leads by 1590 votes and needs to win 39.8 percent of the remaining 7816 votes

Saturday

07:00 pm Biden leads by 9160 votes (** MY FINAL UPDATE **)

Arizona

Arizona has been up and down a bit, but Trump has been consistently underperforming by 5 percent and seems set to run out of votes. I used a few different models (including Gaussian process-based ones with uncertainty, but I will keep it simple and real here).

Friday

10:00 pm Biden leads by 29861 votes and Trump needs to win 58.6 percent of the remaining 172944 votes

State of the races in PA, GA and AZ

8am Thursday:  Biden looks in a terrific position (I would say > 95%) to win Pennsylvania, and in a reasonable position to win Georgia (I would say about 60%). Again, these are for insurance if AZ or NV flips to Trump (and I would give a 30% chance of that happening). OK.. I made up all the numbers above, but you can make your inferences based on the below. 

Pennsylvania:   

89% has been counted and Trump's lead has been steadily declining as seen in the plot below. The decline has been remarkably linear. The reason is that almost all of the votes are coming from mailed-in ballots in very heavily democratic counties (Mainly in Philadelphia where Biden has been winning 80-20). Also, in PA, Biden is crushing Trump 80-20 on the early vote. According to the plot, Biden will cross Trump when approximately 95% of the vote is counted and will win by about 200k.  If the first or second derivatives show a change, I will spot it an update the prediction. 

The main uncertainty is with regard to how many votes are left to count. If Biden maintains his current rate, he'd win with 350k votes left. Looks like there may be at least 650k votes left to count. So even if the rate of winning flattens out, he should be in a good position.

1:20pm:  Biden down 114011 with 550k votes left. This means he has to win 60% of the remaining votes. More importantly, the % counted number in the graph above is correct. 

5:05pm: Biden down 90542 with 493k votes left. Of the 56k votes counted since 1:20pm, Biden has won 70%. 

Georgia:

Georgia officials say that 61000 absentee ballots are left, and they are most highly concentrated in Fulton (Atlanta) and Chatham (Savannah). Biden is behind by 18500, meaning he'd need to win 68% of the remaining votes. He has been doing better than that over the past many hundred thousand votes. 

Here is the clearest picture on how many are left, and where

https://www.ajc.com/politics/about-200000-absentee-ballots-still-need-to-be-counted-in-georgia/BYGJAXV5FRBGBAMA6JPIC7ZL34/?D

25000 left in Fulton, where Biden has been winning by 47% = 11700

7000 left in Clayton, where Biden has been winning by 70% = 4900

So Biden needs to gain roughly 3000 votes out of the remaining 29000. If these were general votes, that'd be more uncertain, but since this is absentee, he has a very good shot.

1:20pm Update. With 50401 votes left, Biden is behind by 13540. As reliable as it gets (from GA SOS). So he needs to win 63% of the remaining votes. Doable. 

Arizona:

About 470k ballots are left and Trump is trailing by about 68k. If Trump wins by the same rate as he won last night (18%), he could come out front by about 10k. But there is no reason to assume linearity as in Pennsylvania for the following reasons:

- PA early votes have been 80-20 for Biden over the past two days CONSISTENTLY and what is left is from that pool. In AZ, there are different types of ballots left to be counted (drop-offs, mail-in, etc). No reason to assume they will all be the same... in fact, the remaining type seems to be less favorable for Trump compared to last night's batch.

- We just don't have enough data points (PA is based on the last 10 updates on nearly 2 M votes, and AZ is based on 2 updates on 50k votes)

- In AZ, ballots are mainly left in blue areas in which Biden has been winning 

Election night updates

11 pm

AZ and NV are in. So the math is for Biden to win two out of MI/PA/GA/WI. It is certainly not over because Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit have been undercounted (heavily), and so is the early vote (heavily)

12 am 

I started tracking and projecting MI and PA. The simple math is that Biden is winning a higher fraction of the early vote than Trump is winning election day votes... and there are more Early votes than election day votes. When X% of the total vote has been counted, I compare it to the total early vote (from electproject.github.io) and the fraction of the early vote counted thus far, and I ran the numbers assuming the % early and % election day numbers hold up for each candidate. This is assuming that reporting is accurate (and it ignores 3rd party candidates, so there will be +/- 2% error, but that's the margin anyway)

2 am

MI: 64% done ; Projection: Biden +311k

PA: 69% done : Projection; Biden +178k

2:25 am

MI: 66 % done ; Projection: Biden + 355k

PA: 72 % done ; Lead: Trump: + 696k ; Projection: Biden + 250k

3:07 am

MI: 71% done ; Lead: Trump + 295k; Projection: Biden + 400k

PA: 74% done ; Lead: Trump +673k ; Projection: Biden +300k

7:07 am

MI: 84% done ; Lead: Trump + 57k; Projection: Biden +690k

PA: 75% done ; Lead: Trump + 620k ; Projection: Biden +378k

9:12 am

MI: 89% done: Lead: Biden + 7k; Projection: Biden +738k

10:57 am

PA: 78% done: Lead: Trump +542k; Projection: Biden + 400k

11:20 am

MI: 92% done: Lead: Biden + 33k; Projection: Biden + 720k

4:30 pm

MI: 97% done: Lead: Biden + 61k; Projection: Biden + 760k

PA: 84% done: Lead: Trump + 320k; Projection: Biden + 720k

Note: As we get closer to the end, my numbers will be inaccurate because I am rounding out noise, ignoring third party candidates, etc.. and assuming whatever the number of votes NYT says is left is actually left. Also, neither PA nor MI seem to be reporting absentee ballots accurately. This will be fixed when we get actual numbers from the SOS

What is most important, however, is to see how Trump's lead is shrinking. When PA was 72% done, he had a 696k lead. When PA is 84% done, he had a 320k lead. Linear extrapolation tells us that Biden will come out on top. While there is no strict reason for this to hold, we know for sure that first and second derivatives don't lie, and that's why continuous monitoring is important. Besides, most of the remaining votes are left in predictable places.

============================

Predictions going into Election Day :

Nate Silver has the blue wall (MN/MI/WI) @ 96%/95%/94% for Biden respectively. That gets Biden to 253.

He needs 17 from the following

----small lead----

NV 6   (87% by Nate Silver,  +6 ahead in polls)

PA 20 (87%, +5)

-----borderline------

AZ 11  (70%,  + 3)

------polling margin-----

FL 29 (68%)

NC 15 (65%)

In my opinion, Biden only has as much of a shot at winning GA as he has of losing WI, so let's not worry about the likes of GA, IA, etc..

I have no confidence for Biden in FL, and i think Trump will win NC. PA will not finish counting until Friday. So the path to victory is NV+AZ = 17.  Corrected for my gut, I'll give Biden a 70% chance of winning tomorrow.

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