u/holmess2013

I was looking into the rural/urban political divide and wanted to visualize the actual geographical realities of living in sparsely populated areas.

I used the NHTSA FARS database (fatal accident reporting) as a proxy for general emergency response times (EMS, police), plotted against US Census population density estimates.

As you might expect, the time it takes for an ambulance (and by extension police) to arrive blows up as population density decreases, which can help explain the conservative lean of rural voters.

I did a much deeper dive on how this geographical isolation ties into the Electoral College and national politics here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/abandoning-the-electoral-college

For a while it's seemed like Blue states, mainly California, are leading the charge in solar energy. I was curious if this was just partisan noise, and fortunately the Energy Information Administration hosts a database containing utility-scale solar output for every state for the last several years.

I did some analytics and I was pretty shocked to see that Texas has nearly caught up with California over the last decade, despite Texas Republicans constantly bashing solar for being unreliable and a needless tax burden.

I also built a custom growth metric to map out which states have the highest momentum in transitioning to a solar grid.

Full article here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/dont-say-climate-change

For a while it's seemed like Blue states, mainly California, are leading the charge in wind and solar energy. I was curious if this was just partisan noise, and fortunately the Energy Information Administration hosts a database containing utility-scale solar output for every state for the last several years.

I did some analytics and I was pretty shocked to see that Texas has nearly caught up with California over the last decade, despite Texas Republicans constantly bashing wind and solar for being unreliable and a needless tax burden.

I also built a custom growth metric to map out which states have the highest momentum in transitioning to a solar grid.

Full article here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/dont-say-climate-change

Super stoked at the speed that solar is being implemented, due to both market and recently political forces (the Iran war launched by one particular orange imbecile).

However, I think it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve hit a wall with silicon tech. We’ve pushed it to the absolute breaking point. On the other hand, perovskites are just getting started, and are developing at breakneck speed to overcome their final development hurdles.

The immediate advantage I can see is that because their absorption coefficient is so much higher than silicon, they can be made super thin, such that they can bend over curved surfaces and flexible plastics. They can also be made into semi-transparent windows for huge buildings. Fascinating stuff. Full breakdown here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/perovskites-are-the-future-of-solar