Brian Potter

4 weeks ago | construction-physics.com | Brian Potter

The most prestigious scientific achievement is likely the Nobel Prize, which is awarded every year to “those who confer the greatest benefit to mankind” in the fields of physics, medicine, and chemistry (of course, there are also Nobel Prizes for literature and peace, as well as a Nobel Prize for economics which was added much later).

1 month ago | lesswrong.com | Brian Potter |Casey Handmer

Solar has an average capacity factor in the US of about 25%. Naively, you might think that to turn this into a highly-available power source, you just need to have 4x the solar panels, plus enough batteries to store 75% of a day’s worth of power. E.g., for each continuous megawatt you want to supply, you need 4 MW of solar panels, and 18 MWh of batteries. During the day, you supply 1 MW from the panels and use the other 3 MW to charge the batteries.

1 month ago | newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford |Brian Potter |Casey Handmer

Solar has an average capacity factor in the US of about 25%. Naively, you might think that to turn this into a highly-available power source, you just need to have 4x the solar panels, plus enough batteries to store 75% of a day’s worth of power. E.g., for each continuous megawatt you want to supply, you need 4 MW of solar panels, and 18 MWh of batteries. During the day, you supply 1 MW from the panels and use the other 3 MW to charge the batteries.

1 month ago | construction-physics.com | Brian Potter

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Google’s answer to Starlink, US food imports, an enormous BYD factory, DeepSeek adoption, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. For this week’s newsletter, Understanding Solar Energy, several folks asked about the code I used to run the various simulations.

1 month ago | construction-physics.com | Brian Potter

The biggest energy story of the last fifteen years is the rise of solar photovoltaics, also known as solar PV or simply solar panels. Solar PV was invented in the 1950s, and began to be used in appreciable volumes for utility-scale electricity generation in the US in the early 2000s, but only around the 2010s did it start to become a large share of planned generation projects worldwide. Since then, solar generation capacity has grown incredibly quickly.