Chunks of NZ are becoming very expensive to uninsurable, and extreme impact weather events are getting more frequent.
It would be fair say a good portion of the population don't understand the maths of a weather event just how astronomically expensive a sudden flood is.
In our small town in the last 5 years, we've had 2-3 different "1 in 100 year" floods within 30km of each other (highly localised dramatic flooding and slips). To the point "1 in 100 year" is now a standing joke.
When did the council last revise your flood models? Up here in Queensland, it caused a real stir when the council released updated flood models and lots of "1/1000" year flood houses turned into "1/10"
I don't know. Certainly the frequency and severity is just eye opening. We had 2 1 in 50's with 1 in 100 in 3 weeks (!!!).
I know you guys have also had it bad over there.
I expect the insurance companies will start removing flood cover soon. Which then becomes a bit of a shit show with mortgages. Or will raise the premiums so high that they're effectively uninsurable.
In New Zealand we have an absolutely shit employment law process where the company has to 'propose' a restructure (in a formal fashion). Then 'consult' with employees for feedback. Then 'consider' the feedback. And then 99% of the time it's all just the same and people get made redundant.
It is absolutely brutal as it invites the chance of hope during the downsizing - and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas.
It's enshrined in law and if you don't follow the process as an employer you can get taken to task by the governing body around it.
It's just far easier, and less harmful emotionally, to rip the band aid and provide a good package.
> ...and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas.
Why is that bananas?
When covid hit my country, the national airline fired ~90% of flight attendants. They had been willing to be put on leave with 0 pay until the airline needed them again, but the airline wasn't interested in that. They were very happy to have an excuse to get rid of these long-serving employees and hire fresh-faced 18-25yr olds on starter salaries in their stead.
Having a mandated process like you mentioned (maybe for companies with more than 50 employees) could have made a massive difference in an instance like this.
The flight attendants in my example eventually all got their jobs back, but only after a years-long legal battle during which some lost their homes and most had a very tough time.
The biggest problem for new EV drivers, in my view, is that EVs generally have extremely good traction control systems that prevent chirping due to the ability to cut back power to the motors much more quickly than you can with a gas engine.
What this means is that you can push tires to the absolute limit and not chirp them (which, is best for traction anyways) which absolutely roasts them. Most people associate chirp = too fast, but with EVs you can never hear a chirp even when you stomp on the accelerator so they might think everything is ok.
Nobody should be shredding a set of tires in 10k miles in any EV unless they’re super low tread wear (poor tire choice, hard to do that bad), there’s an issue with the car suspension, or they’re just being idiots.
You can absolutely get them to chirp, you just have to be, uh, brave. Or stupid. I deposited my tyres along my daily commute over four months - it’s like having one of those racing line markers in a game.
Although I may drive a bit more sensibly for now as €4K a year on tyres wasn’t in my budget.
> Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it.
Sample size of 1
- Side hustle #1 funded my toy habit for a long time and gave me the confidence "I can build & support something from start to finish".
- Got to C Level working for 'the man' (aka the board). But regardless of level you're never in control of your destiny, especially with the eventuality of PE. For some that's okay, for others that's not...
- Which lead to Side Hustle #2.
Left my day job 3 years ago....
Now have some of the best in our wee niche using our product, a number of team members, gradually growing it in bootstrapped fashion.
No investors, no funding rounds, no chasing growth targets. As "pure" as it can get - adding features, capturing more market, getting positive word of mouth, picking up new countries, finding new edge cases, adding new package upgrades. I think we're around 40% of new clients are referrals/word of mouth.....
In the first 6 months of turning billing on you're going "what the heck am I doing...." now I'm "oh I wouldn't give this up..." immensely rewarding bringing other new people into the business, and seeing that flow through to the finished product for our clients.
At least in NZ, side hustles are the genesis of a lot of tech companies.
Fascinating. I'm wondering how the app manages to control notification behaviour & gatekeeps other apps. Obviously the APIs to do it must be there, just surprised Apple (of all ...) let's a 3rd party app do that..
In New Zealand we're very much natural disaster prone. I run a SaaS working out of home - we wired the house for generator backup and have a starlink unit that sits in a box exactly for this reason, even if the proverbial hits the fan for a week I can still keep on top of the business.
Every couple of months the geny gets sparked up and everything tested. For a very small investment it's very comforting to know we've always got power/internet, regardless of what happens.
If I fully decked my roof out I can generate a good 20kWp
I'm assuming OP isn't actually serving out of home (starlink won't help with it's CG-Nat), so it's not like they're running 5kW of servers. 10kWh a day seems perfectly reasonable amount to keep going.
Given just running a generator it going to eat 20 litres a day on lowest load, over 3 weeks that's 400 litres you'd need to store.
With a battery setup even if you had to charge from a generator you'd be able to run it more efficiently for a shorter period.
So having spend 10 minutes I reckon the answer is "yes, OP should certainly get a solar/battery system set up"
That's crazy. There are huge differences is costs and use cases.A generator is $500, and mine can run for 24hrs on 5 gallons of gas. A 5kw solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.
Solar is far cheaper than that in my location - especially if you put the panels up yourself, and storing 100 gallons of gas (400 litres) to run for 3 weeks is far more expensive.
I realize this isn't the case for everyone, but I already have a large propane tank that supplies the house. My generator is tied in to that. So I'm not storing fuel specifically for the generator, but if it came down to it I could probably power the house for a couple months at least. And our geography and flora are pretty unfavorable for solar. So as with most things, it just depends.
> A 5kW solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.
Do you live on the moon?
Earlier this year I installed a 7.8kW system in Canada for $13k CAD all in, inc the inverter and labor. (Then I got a $5k subsidy to bring it to $8k out of pocket.)
> California - the moon might be cheaper. The whole system here is corrupt due to regulatory capture
I'm always amazed at how for regular life things it seems you guys has less "freedom" than we do.
It's my house, so I got up on the roof and installed the panels myself (with a friend). I did pay for a licensed electrician to wire the inverter into the main house breaker and double check everything, and he did get a permit for that work (which was $150, IIRC). Then I emailed the electric company, three days later they came out and installed a bi-directional meter for $32 and I'm good to go.
Depends on the price of batteries, which are rapidly declining. Within the next few years the numbers will change in favor of batteries. Though it also depends on the load and having enough space/sunlight for the solar array
I can buy a used diesel/propane/gas/pick your fuel generator today for a few hundred bucks that could power most of the essentials in my house. I bought a brand new one during an extended power outage due to storms last year for $500 CAD. That and 80L of gas (~$120 CAD) can run my sump pumps, fridge, freezer, the electronic side of my furnace, my homelab server rack (including 6 PoE access points), my workstation, and key lighting - for 5 days. If I cut that back to essentials, closer to 3 weeks. That’s roughly 200kWh for $120, plus $500 up front.
Currently, the absolute cheapest I can find lithium batteries (I am planning a solar+grid load-balancing setup) is about $160CAD/kwh. To prepare for the worst case (i.e. minimal solar generation during and following the storm - say, middle of winter/happens to be cloudy/panels are damaged/etc) I’d need to spend over $30,000 in batteries alone to have the same capacity as $120 of gas. Not to mention the sheer amount of space that would take. And the cost of solar panels (10kW actual generation capacity, minimum, to keep essentials running), at roughly $1/W in Canada, adds another $10,000 to that estimate. And that’s not including the cost of installation, which based on what I’ve heard, probably adds another $10-20k.
While there are some interesting advances being made, I do not believe that battery capacity costs will decrease by 3-4 orders of magnitude “within the next few years,” unless you anticipate gasoline/diesel/etc prices to go parabolic. It’s very obvious why people would much rather have a generator and some Jerry cans for a few hundred bucks than a solar + battery setup that costs more than their car.
> I do not believe that battery capacity costs will decrease by 3-4 orders of magnitude “within the next few years,”
Fair call for lithium chemistries, which will probably drop closer to one order of magnitude within 2-3 years (if the trend from the last year-to-date holds). But if we're talking about sodium ion, I wouldn't be surprised if that did drop by a couple of orders of magnitude, which is already sitting about ~140USD/kwh for consumer packs (but before shipping from China). It has a weird discharge voltage curve and needs a more capable inverter to handle it though, but at the prices I'm seeing, overcapacity is plenty affordable.
The solar and batteries have much lower emissions, and can be used as all times (not just during power outages) to lower the cost of electricity. Anyway it doesn't have to be generator or solar + batteries... Why not both? Have the solar, reduce emissions and utility bills. Have the generator as a backup if power is out and batteries are empty.
That's what I'm currently in the planning phases for. Break-even is still the better part of a decade on parts alone, unless you get very creative (for instance, where I live, I can choose to have a special time-of-use electrical billing program where overnight electricity is ~60% cheaper than usual; you can make use of this to charge batteries overnight, rely on solar when it's sunny, and batteries during the more expensive times-of-use).
The overall point though, is that solar and/or batteries are not a viable alternative for emergency backup power, nor will they be "within the next few years." Within the next few decades, maybe.
My quick math came up short on batteries. But as you say, it's worth running those numbers every year. I can't imagine I'll be sitting here in 2030 saying "batteries aren't there yet".
> I can't imagine I'll be sitting here in 2030 saying "batteries aren't there yet".
Or if you're looking now at sodium ion. It's only just hitting the consumer market, but it's already cheap enough for energy storage at the scale GP is talking about. Might take a few years for cell quality, inverter, and charging technology to improve, but by 2030 it will be so dirt cheap to the point that it would be economically sensible for any household.
Last year, when I did the math, batteries still had a 15 year payoff time. I'm not going to be in this house in 15 years. If the state subsidized it more (it is kind of a public good imo), or I could easily roll it into house value, I'd do it.
I'm trying to move to a nicer house. When I do that, I'll almost certainly just go for it.
I'm not sure whether you read my comment, but I was specifically talking about sodium ion which are absurdly cheap even before efficiencies of scale enter the equation. I don't think many are doing the math on that because it's only just become available on Alibaba. BMSes and chargers don't really exist for it yet, but there are whole battery packs for sale.
No, I read your comment. I was just thinking about 2030.
Also, no offense, but I'm not trusting a brand new energy storage technology bolted to the wall of my house. I'll businesses trial it out first for a few years.
It would be fair say a good portion of the population don't understand the maths of a weather event just how astronomically expensive a sudden flood is.
In our small town in the last 5 years, we've had 2-3 different "1 in 100 year" floods within 30km of each other (highly localised dramatic flooding and slips). To the point "1 in 100 year" is now a standing joke.