210 Comments

I'm still dazzled by hearing that Musk's rocket business eventually hopes to produce a Starship rocket a day. Here I thought we'd be travelling with friends and family, not in little pods like the hero and villain babies in the beginning of my fave scifi cartoon movie, Megamind.

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Ta, Dok. I look forward to our renewable energy future, whether or not I live to see it (I believe I shall).

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Gotta say, that’s a bit of a ridiculous chart…negative “overcapacity” = positive “capacity”? Pretty sure the could have come up with a more intuitive way to express the point…

“Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

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"Too many factories" and "not enough raw materials" are diametrically opposed problems until we make different batteries.

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I have an electric boat and eventually it will run on Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, right now it has AGM.

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I'd stay away from sharks if I was you.

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Ooh! Ooh! Pick me, Pick me!

I know what to do with some of those extra batteries.

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We don’t kink shame here.

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Build a wall at sea around Mar-a-Lago to protect The Convicted Felon from sharks?

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I'd use something with less value than batteries, like riprap made from the demolished remains of Merde Lardo itself.

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This is the best news I've heard since 2015.

If the price of batteries comes down fast enough, we can easily build enough storage to ride out overnight and other outages, using only solar and wind to charge the batteries.

Grid backup batteries (commercial and residential) have been seen as too expensive to deploy at scales needed to be fossil free in time to really de-carbonize by 2030.

We might have a chance to save our asses!!!

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Well, except for Texas.

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U.S. automakers are spoiled. They are making and selling high-margin gas guzzling monstrosities and making outrageous profits. People do not want to buy high-margin, overly expensive electric cars. They want something reasonable, if not down right cheap. China is willing to provide such vehicles. Hence, tariffs afoot to "protect" the poor U.S. manufacturers.

Life is hard.

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(a) That's great for production capacity, but what about raw materials to feed them?

(b) I worked on a project that used LiFePO4 batteries to keep computer nodes alive during power-failure, over a decade ago. (We got that part working, but ultimately scrapped the larger project that it was a part of.)

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"Beyond that, we have other questions, too. The big one is pretty simple: What about batteries for grid storage, an area where demand is, at least for now, growing nigh-exponentially?"

That demand will likely be met by other battery technologies. There are better choices than environmentally problematic lithium-ion batteries for large, stationary power storage, especially when you consider their vulnerability to massive, uncontrollable fires. From a safety standpoint alone, you'd really want to avoid building a facility around hundreds of tons of a possible massive firebomb that CANNOT BE EXTINGUISHED and would require thousands of tons of water just to carry away the heat.

But battery overproduction is a good problem to have, and easily solvable. The main effect of subsidies is just removing the risk from making investments in battery manufacturing, which is why you're suddenly seeing so many factories suddenly being planned. Most won't ever be build, and the worst that'll happen is that the government wastes some money. Like that's never happened before.

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Salt water batteries show potential to be a deep cycle storage system.

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The latest Borowitz Report says that Marjorie Taylor Greene, that ever-flowing fountain of stupid, is warning that all this new windpower is going to raise the cost of wind. "Watch out! Joe Biden is coming for your wind!"

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So long as we have Donald Chump, we will have an inexhaustible supply of wind.

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Well science says if you draw energy from wind, it will reduce the energy in the wind. So…stagnancy?

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In California we managed to avoid rolling blackouts the past couple summers because of utility-scale battery storage. The figure I heard was the equivalent of 16 Hoover dams added since 2021.

Batteries are good

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Until they sink your boat in shark-infested waters.

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CHOOSE THE SHARK!!

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Won't the battery electrocute the shark as well?

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deep innovative thinking

I miss having discussions like in philosophy.

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Saw an overwrought post elsewhere about Biden's tariffs on Chinese batteries and didn't have the energy to explain that if we're making enough here tariffs are good

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Getting the cobalt out will be great.

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I'll still try to conserve as much as possible as an individual, but this has me bothered:

"On average, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search. In that difference lies a coming sea change in how the US, Europe, and the world at large will consume power — and how much that will cost.

For years, data centers displayed a remarkably stable appetite for power, even as their workloads mounted. Now, as the pace of efficiency gains in electricity use slows and the AI revolution gathers steam, Goldman Sachs Research estimates that data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030.

At present, data centers worldwide consume 1-2% of overall power, but this percentage will likely rise to 3-4% by the end of the decade. In the US and Europe, this increased demand will help drive the kind of electricity growth that hasn’t been seen in a generation. Along the way, the carbon dioxide emissions of data centers may more than double between 2022 and 2030."

https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/AI-poised-to-drive-160-increase-in-power-demand.html

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Who needs batteries? The Japanese company Toshiba has a prototype EV that runs on solar power. It only gets about 40 miles, but still, they're working on it. Imagine not having to pay anything to run your car.

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So how do you drive at night if no batteries? Does it have a massive fly-wheel?

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It's got solar panels on the roof that store up energy as with houses. As I said, it's just a prototype they're working on, and it only gets 40 miles. But who knows one day.

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Solar panels don't "store" energy....Batteries do.

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Aptera is doing it right here in USAmerica.

https://aptera.us/vehicle/

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Big business will find a way to monetize it!

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Right! Remember when the airways were free. Now you pay for everything from the cable to the individual programs.

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Why, this goes against Religion!

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What doesn't? Gotta keep the clergy sector on their toes

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