I also remember libraries having a very small limit back in the day, so I was surprised to find out that in the Bay Area libraries typically allow up to 100 books per card!
In addition to printed books, my library has audiobooks, dedicated audio players for single books, DVD movies, video games, audio books on CD that count in your rentals. For new digital releases when they see the queue get overly long, they license more copies.
During certain hours of the day in California, electricity is essentially free due to solar overproduction, which sometimes causes negative wholesale prices.
Yes. Counterintuitive, but it make sense when you take all the factors into account (such that completely shutting down and then later restarting turbines may cost a generator more than paying someone to take power off their hands).
Yup. What people have to realize is that power generation has inertia and can be painful to start/stop. But also, the power output always has to match the power demand. If you don't, you get either brown outs or over voltages.
When you add sources like solar onto the grid, you end up with times of the day where high solar production pushes base load power generators to need to slow down or shutdown.
Easiest to understand with oil. During Covid the price of oil went negative. So you’d be paid if you bought that oil.
Sounds like a great deal right? But now you’re on the hook for receiving and storing that oil. That costs money, it’s not free. That’s why the price went negative - the seller was trying to offload and there were no takers at $0.
Yep. Last August the total cost to charge my car for the month was -10SEK of about -$1.05 US, as my energy company was trying to put load into its batteries at the times when the grid most needed it.
Grid had too much production and needed somewhere to put it, so they paid the GP to put the energy into GP's car.
On an electric grid, Supply and Demand must meet. When demand is low, you either reduce supply or increase demand and sometimes it's easier to increase demand.
Also, if you're supplying electricity, you may have reason to supply it even when the wholesale cost is negative. If you have production incentives not included in the wholesale price, you can be profitable at negative wholesale prices. (Things like green incentives, or base load incentives, or long term supply price guarantees)
If significantly reducing your output takes time or causes operational difficulties, it may be sensible to deliver at negative prices as you taper off. If you have a fuel shipment inbound and nowhere to store it, the negative wholesale price may be less expensive than cost to deal with the storage logistics.
Yes, if you’re a battery in the system. Basically discourages generation because there’s too much supply. But this generally doesn’t trickle to consumers afaik.
Note that I had to switch the harness from wazero to Node (unfortunately!) when it turned out wazero doesn't support gc and other new proposals (e.g. your comment here https://github.com/wazero/wazero/issues/2483)
Thank you very much for maintaining wazero - I love that project, and am looking forward to being able to use it for this in the future.
evacchi does most of the maintaining these days, but I'll keep helping as best as I can.
Your harness looks interesting to replace wast2json with watgo in wasm2go. Though my current problem is that I should be using the JSON to decide which tests to run (manual process so far), and to generate the more complicated test files (e.g. the ones that link modules together).
Nah that would be unfair to you (you are often doing a lot of grunt maintenance work!! Plus getting me out of many tarpits when we chat) and the rest of the maintainers!
California is a great example; highest electricity prices in the US (not counting Hawaii, which makes sense) despite significant hydro and fantastic solar capacity. In the last few years California runs 100% renewable on many days (and growing) every year.
Economics 101: prices are not set by what goods cost to create + markup. Prices are set by how much people are willing to pay.
Why is it "people are willing to pay" and not "corporations are brazen enough to charge"? These utilities are necessities and relatively few people have access to cheaper alternatives to them.
Because, under usual circumstances, self-interested corporations compete against each other to get as close to what people are willing to pay for energy as possible.
There’s a reason most universities don’t hand you a bachelors degree in economics as soon as you complete EC101. You should look into EC102 and the rest of the curriculum.
I know nothing about California so please correct me if I'm wrong.
You mention significant hydro and solar capacity in California. So minimal carbon externality: lung disease and climate change. If you consider that externalised cost into the cost of electricity elsewhere, does not California and other renewable-rich electric grids fare more competitive on price?
E.g. the problem is not the expensive renewables in California, rather, the problem is that the cost of declining human and animal health and climate change is externalised for the fossil fuel.
PG&E's prices are not a function of what people will pay though, it's a function of what people expect.
CA wants green energy now (aggressive targets), needs to have fire hardened infrastructure (expensive upgrades), and wants full service to sprawling remote areas using modern infrastructure.
The combination of these is incredibly expensive.
If you don't believe me, buy PGE stock and get your dividend from their "greed". But honestly, the stock is an awful performer, because the actual problems facing them are real.
According to the official tracker (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/clean-energy-serving-... and elsewhere) there were 279 days in 2025 where California was on 100% renewable for _some_ time during the day (could be hours, could be minutes at mid-day).
In total hours equivalent of 77.3 full days over 2025.
California has high volumetric rates, but mostly that is because it has much more distributed generation than any other state, uses far less grid power, so the grid rates are dominated by fixed grid costs. Actual monthly electric bills in California are not remarkable at all. According to the EIA the typical residential electric bill in California is almost exactly the same as Texas: $174.59 vs. $173.94.
Thank you for the feedback. The idea was to first define what we want the basis functions to be (a pretty abstract definition) and then develop how to actually get that from _normal_, continuous functions.
(proof-reading through HN is a mildly embarrassing process, sorry about that! I do go over these posts and proof-read them several times myself before publishing)
