The hot word in the power grid these days is ‘dispatchability’. The ability to adjust power output, or on the other end, adjust power consumption on demand is vital to balancing the grid¹. Dispatchable generation and dispatchable loads will become increasingly valuable with heavier penetration of non-dispatchable renewable generation, such as wind and solar.

The favorable economics of renewables and zero marginal cost of production mean that in many cases, it will make economic sense to overbuild generation capacity and simply curtail production when it isn’t needed. An even more economically sensible option is for large consumers with load flexibility to perform demand response, turning up their consumption when electricity is plentiful and turning down or even idling when generation is low.

To a rough approximation, the process of humanity’s material enrichment is the large-scale solution of separation problems. A disproportionate amount of a substance’s usefulness is derived from the absence of other substances. Water, to take an obvious example, would be a virtually inexhaustible and abundant resource if we didn’t care about the presence of salt in it.

Mastering the separation of a substance—removing undesirable impurities or extracting it from some larger amalgam—is a necessary first step towards commoditization: the process by which production is massively scaled up and costs plummet. It is commoditization that ultimately allows for materials—and the downstream products that require them—to become accessible to the masses.

The modern world is built on open-source software. It powers critical functionality in our digital and physical infrastructure. Linux is the operating system of choice for a variety of professional applications ranging from web servers to microprocessors. The internet is built on top of open-source tools such as BIND9, OpenSSL, iptables, nginx, and much, much more. It’s what makes it so easy and inexpensive for anyone to set up a website nowadays—imagine if your options were between writing your own networking stack for scratch or paying some company $500 for a “basic” license¹.

On June 21, 1961, in a dusty small town in Texas, about 60 miles south of Houston, President John F. Kennedy stepped up to the podium to make a speech before the assembled throngs of people below. Or rather, his aides did. The ongoing Cuban missile crisis demanded his presence in Washington, so he instead gave the speech through a telephone call. The event, however, was deemed of sufficient importance that Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was in attendance.

During my time in undergrad, I spent a year as a design team captain. Specifically, running a team that builds and flies rockets. I also spent several years trying (and failing) to get another design team off the ground¹.

I think this was quite possibly one of the most valuable experiences I could have had as a nerdy, young, somewhat immature soon-to-be-professional with questionable social skills and very little idea of what it’s like to be on the managerial side of things. It’s a big reason why I am the person I am today.

Anyone who’s somewhat interested in mass transportation systems is bound to have looked into the Hyperloop concept at one point or another. One of the things that came up during my research was something called the ‘Kantrowitz limit’.

What is the Kantrowitz limit? I admittedly had never heard of it before, but it seemed like something very important that fortunately had technological solutions. Yet there was something unsatisfying about all the popular resources I could find about it. They all seemed to be very surface level, and when I started looking into it the rabbit hole ended up going a lot deeper than I expected, so I am writing this in the hopes that it might be useful to someone else one day.