When people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot.
Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.
And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar.
That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.
You would need at least 4 times that to be safe.
Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country.
That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
I did a conservative calculation if you started around 2000 in Germany and went full nuclear like France did. Not using any fancy new nuclear or anything. Literally just mass production of standard nuclear plants. Plus all the updates of the grid, including domestic fuel enrichment and 'waste' storage. Plus all the investment necessary to great a fully modern grid to electrify the economy.
We are talking in the order of 500 billion Euro and this is very conservative assumption on nuclear construction cost. Much worse cost then what France actually achieved in their build-out. Also much of that is actually the grid, grids are really expensive it turns out. But building nuclear in central location next to places where there used to be coal plants, makes grid cost much cheaper because most of the grid is already there perfectly positioned to feed the population clusters. And that accounts for actually increasing overall production of energy, not decreasing as Germany is actually doing.
On the other-hand for the renewable path that Germany is going since 2000, just the grid alone is going to cost more then 500 billion euro, some estimation suggest that 2000-2045 total gird investment requirement is above significantly above that. Sadly today where everything is in this different private organization, this information is all over the place and 'semi'-private organization doing different parts of the infrastructure.
In total, between all the renewables, the grid and the storage, we are talking 1.5 trillion euro and that still includes gas peakers. If you want to go beyond and really go all in, it would be even more then that, as you suggest.
Turns out, if you plan includes trying to gather solar energy in Greece and Spain (or even Egypt), transporting it to Germany and then storing it into batteries there, well yeah, that's going to be expensive. And the solar panels you import from China aren't the expensive part.
France did the exact right think in the 70/80s build reliable long term energy generation, sadly since the 90s the newer generation of French politicians done literally anything they can to handle the situation as a badly and as incompetently as possible but that's a different story.
The idea that its faster and cheaper to launch solar panels then get local councils to approve them is insane. The fact is those Data Center operates simply don't want to do it and instead want politicians to tax people to build the power infrastructure for them.
Yes and by default your tradeoff should be to have the correct information. And that's actually what Xerox claimed. They said this was false and it was correctly documented. They said only if you select it this would happen. Watch the CCC talk buy the person that figured this out. Turns out they were wrong.
> Watch the CCC talk buy the person that figured this out. Turns out they were wrong.
I already did, although some time ago. Kriesel also has some other interesting talks, e.g. about the German Railway company.
Like I totally think Xerox is at fault, but what they actually did wrong was using bad defaults (and lying when they got told). This can totally occur with any software. From looking at the pictures I think part of the issue was that the input resolution was lower than what the compression was tested with, not the compression part per se.
Also I think the customers are at least partially at fault for digitalizing, but not checking. Don't be stingy on important data. And who in there sane minds throws away the originals????? Like you can throw away copies all the way you like, but NEVER the original. (Except when you really want to "destroy" information.) To me that was the most ridiculous part, assuming software (being famous for bugs like no other tool) can never be wrong and throwing away physical things only relying on your random files to exist.
I haven't watched the talk since I saw it, but my memory was that they did it in a mode where they claimed it wasn't supposed to happen. So it would happen even if the costumer selected the right one. Maybe my memory is bad on that.
I mean I never watched the video (or maybe I did and I don't remember), I only 'saw' the presentation live. And I remember that room being a riot. So I might get some details wrong. Not sure this is correct english.
Letting in Steve wasn't really an issue. Lisa failed and Mac wasn't a big success until the early 90s.
And tons of other people knew what they were doing. Andy Bechtolsheim visited there too. Sun workstation basically did the same thing and were very successful.
And its really the PC that would have anyway if they let in Jobs or not.
From the Oral History of Synertek, they wanted to buy some buy some PDP-11 but they had been bought by Honeywell. Honeywell had told them they would not be controlled and have a free hand. Honeywell of course wouldn't not allow it and told them they would get a free Honeywell mainframe. And they got send a mainframe that was completely useless and didn't have any relevant software. So eventually Synertek collapsed and many of those people founded VSLI Technology.
At AT&T they bought a lot of PDP-11s, they were the biggest DEC costumer and they also moved 3B series computers because they wanted to be a computer company too. Cost them a lot of money.
I think the story of everybody wanted PDPs but cooperate didn't want.
They were pretty aggressive about pushing kernel version on 22.04, it really doesn't matter what its based on. I think they should just not use this version numbering, its more confusing then anything else.
Man I really wanted the N900 so badly, my first real smartphone. But I decided to skip N900, because I was sure that the N901 (or whatever) was going to be insane good and I wanted to not spend the money yet.
Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.
And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
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