Doug Ridgway
dougridgway.bsky.social
Doug Ridgway
@dougridgway.bsky.social
Physics, climate, energy.
Should Alberta remain in Canada? Here's your chance to have a say. www.forevercanadianpetitionevents.com
Forever Canadian Petition Events
Calendar of Forever Canadian petition signing opportunities
www.forevercanadianpetitionevents.com
August 18, 2025 at 2:30 AM
Over on Threads I suggested that the dominant language of the Americas be renamed American. Americans were just confused, befitting every stereotype. Spanish speakers got the joke, but thought their language already had a lovely name. A truly unpopular idea across the board.
April 25, 2025 at 8:53 PM
An Alberta company is proposing a 4.8 GW CANDU nuclear plant for the Peace region. Comments are open for the next 30 days: iaac-aeic.gc.ca/050/evaluati...
Peace River Nuclear Power Project
Home page for the impact assessment of the project - Peace River Nuclear Power Project
iaac-aeic.gc.ca
April 15, 2025 at 1:56 PM
Saw an interesting talk on geothermal. A project here in a depleted gas field ran into an issue: there was more gas left in the field than they expected, and it came out with the hot water. Three problems:
January 25, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Dumb question: how do immigrants do it? I’ve been putting a fair effort into Duolingo recently, and I think I would have trouble ordering a glass of agua.
January 15, 2025 at 5:16 PM
I’ve seen a number of complaints about Landman in #climatesky, because a character spouts wind energy misinformation. Honestly, characters spouting misinformation is accurate for the O&G industry. People in the industry have other complaints, eg www.reddit.com/r/oil/s/IMW6...
From the oil community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the oil community
www.reddit.com
January 7, 2025 at 3:51 PM
New (to me) idea: Direct Contact Steam Generation. Rather than a conventional boiler to make steam for SAGD, just spray water into the flames. Then put all of the flue gases, CO2, and steam directly into the oil sands. Saves 80% of GHG emissions. natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-...
Frequently Asked Questions about Direct Contact Steam Generation
1) Why is Canadian oil so popular/important?
natural-resources.canada.ca
January 5, 2025 at 8:10 PM
I was recently introduced to the concept of intransitive dice, where die A on average beats die B, die B beats die C, and die C beats die A. Because of how I am, I wrote a program to find the optimum set of average advantage:

Die A: 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 5
Die B: 1, 1, 4, 4, 4, 4
Die C: 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3
January 3, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Time for my occasional update on my EV’s energy consumption. It was a little cooler on average, and consumption was up a bit. Not quite as high as November when there was a lot of sub -20 days. Pretty much all city driving.
January 1, 2025 at 8:49 PM
I wonder if there are cheaper ways to support our beloved tweaker population than by giving them EV charger cables to cut.
December 29, 2024 at 9:41 PM
If battery prices were really $50-100/kWh, we would see small cheap EVs flooding the world’s most important markets... right? electrek.co/2024/12/16/b...
BYD's $10,000 Seagull EV outsold all cars in China (even gas models) again in November
BYD’s cheapest EV model, the Seagull, outsold every car in China last month, even gas-powered models. Starting at around $10,000,...
electrek.co
December 18, 2024 at 1:30 AM
An occasional update on my EV (Mini Cooper SE) performance in a winter city. It's not very exciting: when it gets colder, I use more power on cabin heating, and the efficiency goes down. All city driving, no long road trips.
December 16, 2024 at 12:08 AM
Had an interesting discussion over on 🧵 about quantum machine learning. Consensus seems to be it’s not 100% BS, but awfully close, at least if it’s applications you care about.
December 14, 2024 at 7:07 PM
One of the Ukrainians we hosted suffered a major brain injury. She’s doing great, all things considered, but there’s a GoFundMe to help her family through this time. Even small numbers of dollars or small amounts of visibility help.
gofund.me/15040d92
Donate to Support Kseniia & Mom With Recovery Post Brain Aneurysm, organized by Cherilyn Michaels
Hello Everyone, My name is Cherilyn Michaels, and I am a … Cherilyn Michaels needs your support for Support Kseniia & Mom With Recovery Post Brain Aneurysm
gofund.me
December 13, 2024 at 4:28 AM
Scott Aaronson on the Google quantum computing announcement. Very cool science. scottaaronson.blog?p=8525
The Google Willow thing
Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should…
scottaaronson.blog
December 12, 2024 at 5:04 PM
Looks like Alberta is restructuring power again. I don’t know enough about transmission lines to have any useful opinions. The demand is in the industrial north, and I understand there’s lots of capacity on existing lines to get clean solar and wind from the south. www.alberta.ca/release.cfm?...
Rewiring Alberta’s electricity market
Alberta’s government is making changes to the province’s electricity market rules to restore the balance between affordability, reliability and sustainability.
www.alberta.ca
December 12, 2024 at 1:36 AM
Batteries are now $115/kWh, or less on the spot market, and going lower. This is around parity relative to a gas engine. There will still be gas engines in some new products, because gas is better on some axes, but most of the km driven will be electric. Because cheaper.
December 11, 2024 at 1:46 AM
Sometimes people propose that Alberta should have an electricity capacity market. But stories like this show that running a market is not so easy. Those providing capacity won’t have to deliver anything physical, 99.9% of the time.
www.utilitydive.com/news/ferc-ke...
FERC orders Ketchup Caddy to pay $27M for MISO demand response fraud
FERC staff estimated that Ketchup Caddy’s bogus capacity offers caused $17.6 million in losses over three years through reduced capacity prices.
www.utilitydive.com
December 9, 2024 at 4:14 PM
Someone (maybe @karpathy.bsky.social) commented that LLM performance reflects not the average quality of the training set, which might be terrible, but rather the average opinion of the human raters of responses during RLHF. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
December 6, 2024 at 6:55 PM
I’m not mad that Gingko lost 99% of my investment, I’m mad they haven’t made any dinosaurs yet. @jasonrkelly.bsky.social, what’s up with that?
December 3, 2024 at 4:41 PM
Here’s what an Alberta drilling rig looks like.
November 17, 2024 at 3:48 AM
Alberta rig counts, past decade. Utilization goes up and down with prices and supply/demand balance. The fleet size, though, reflects the market’s long term view of the demand for fossil drilling.
November 17, 2024 at 3:36 AM