rgmerk

True, but much more of a problem for wind and transmission than solar per se.

You might not use your car on a schedule, but if you aggregate thousands of private vehicles you can build a statistical model that gives you pretty high confidence that a certain amount of charge will be available.

Yes, the fraction of total charge that you could plan on being available this way is going to be a lot smaller than the school buses, but there is a lot of electrical energy available in EVs so even a small fraction of it is a big deal to grid stability.

Furthermore, a lot of the potential for EVs as grid balancers isn't for the day-to-day variations in supply/demand - it's for those few hours a year of demand peaks, and in open electricity markets the wholesale price of electricity goes to pretty crazy levels (thousands of dollars per megawatt-hour depending on the market design). Those few hours of crazy-high prices pay the costs of peaking generation that only operates at those times.

In Australia, the market is capped at $15,000 per MWh. Say you configured your car so that it would sell back into the market only when the market was above $1000/MWh.

In one winter month I looked at, applying these rules you could make about $60 from a total discharge of about half the car's battery capacity (and not all of the high-priced period was contiguous).

That sounds like adequate compensation for fairly minimal degradation of the battery capacity.

That's very cool...but I wouldn't be trying this one rocking up in Nelson with a gravel/mountain bike and heading off.

Some of those tracks in the mountainous, forested parts of eastern Victoria are in seriously rugged and isolated country, and I'm not sure all of them are even open to the public.

There's been some research into high-temperature electrolysis.

The idea is that a lot of the energy to split the hydrogen and oxygen can be provided as heat; that means you need a lot less electrical energy. To a rough approximation, for every three units of heat energy produced by a nuclear plant, you get one unit of electricity, so the process could in theory considerably reduce the cost of zero-carbon hydrogen.

In practice, it seems like it's going to be very hard for a nuclear plant to beat an electrolyser that runs when near-free solar electricity is available.

As you say, if you get hot enough you can do away with electrolysis entirely. A little bit of casual reading suggests that the temperatures required by a naive approach are in excess of 2000 degrees Celsius, far, far beyond the point where any existing or near-term reactor design would turn into a puddle of very radioactive molten metal.

No they’re not busywork, but not all such screens are directly in the drug discovery pipeline.

Worth pointing out here that in other scientific domains, papers routinely require hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars, of resources to produce.

My wife works on high-throughout drug screens. They routinely use over $100,000 of consumables in a single screen, not counting the cost of the screening “libraries”, the cost of using some of the -$10mil of equipment in the lab for several weeks, the cost of the staff in the lab itself, and the cost of the time of the scientists who request the screens and then take the results and turn them into papers.

“The cost of gasoline is coming down to the point where gasoline-powered lanterns may become the lighting of choice for carriages”.

Corollary: energy is going to much more expensive the further you get away from the equator (in the absence of very predictable winds/lots of hydro/cheap geothermal).

The risk of dying while flying in a light plane is reasonably high.

The risk of dying from a light plane crashing into you while you are on the ground is negligible.

Sure, I get there’s only so much that get squeezed out of existing lines without any physical infrastructure changes.

But reconductoring seems like it buys you a lot of extra capacity over the existing physical right of way, and if you use advanced conductors you don’t even have to replace the towers if they’re in good condition. Yes, you have to replace a lot of equipment at substations, but my understanding is that while there is a shortage of some of this physical equipment, getting permits for new transmission lines is a far harder problem.

This seems…odd.

What’s the economic case for building a supertall building in a fourth-tier city in flat terrain like this?

When using GDP as a gauge of living standards, people usually use PPP (purchasing power parity) measures, which adjusts for the cost of goods in different places.

Any such adjustment isn’t going to be perfect, and there are other quirks (tax havens have artificially high GDP figures), but it’s a lot closer to what you want.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly mysterious here. Of the three early automotive propulsion technologies, internal combustion engines were the best compromise at the time, as it was compared to the gas turbine in the 1950s and 1960s, rotary engines in the 1960s and 1970s, and lead-acid and NiMH battery vehicles in the 1990s.

Because they think they can build a cheaper car that way.

Same reason they haven’t even offered an instrument display in front of the driver as an option, and replaced the indicator stalks with buttons (which from reports works acceptably well in California, not so much in, say, the UK).

Underlying it all is Tesla’s belief that the driver is a legacy feature that is going away Real Soon Now. Frankly, it seems like they’re 90% of the way there (with all that implies about how long it will take to get the rest of the way).

True.

And domestic abusers do install such tools, by the way.

Not taking sides on this one because I don’t live in San Francisco and haven’t had the chance to look into these claims.

But on the issue of domestic and family violence, where I live in Australia it has become a major political issue, and there have been significant changes to law and policy to try and reduce the risks.

In this case, we are dealing with a relatively small number of people selling a product intended to facilitate what is recognised in most jurisdictions as a serious crime. As such, putting more effort into finding and prosecuting (or suing) these people seems like a worthwhile investment - but because it’s a global market there needs to be global cooperation to achieve much.

Doesn't matter as a tool of domestic abuse, as the attacker almost certainly has local access to the device concerned.

The howls of outrage when Microsoft announced this are such that they may well have gotten the message on this one. But somebody else lower-profile will have the same bright idea.

This kind of thing has happened repeatedly, but kinda misses the point.

Stalkerware is designed and built as a tool of abuse. The people who create it are looking to profit off that abuse.

More effort should be devoted to prosecuting these bottom-feeders.

A lot of American steel mills have houses literally right next door to them, in part because many of them were built before the widespread availability of cars.

There's no way in the world you're putting a nuclear plant on site.

Some may be plumbed in, but there are also models where you have to empty the reservoir after drying.

Residential energy use (excluding transportation) is a bit over 20% of total US energy use [1]. Industrial use is about 32%.

Of the transportation sector, about 25% is "cars and motorcycles" and 32% is light trucks; however, a lot of that light truck usage includes pickup trucks for private use. [2]

I can't prove it without more Googling but when you put the two of those together energy use of the direct control of consumers likely exceeds that in the industrial sector.

So while this is small beer, switching out your gas heating and hot water for electric heat pumps, insulating your house better, and switching to EVs are a big deal in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention the almost forgotten but huge benefits of reducing local and especially indoor air pollution.

[1] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener... [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transporta...

“There are hundreds of local municipalities and elected authorities.”

That’s the root of your problem. Too many governments, not enough attention available to keep them accountable.

War in East Asia, were it to happen, will be nothing like war in Europe - as was the case in WWII.

What an asshole.

I mean, the article describes a guy who isn't just an asshole on occasion, it describes a man who has devoted over a decade of his life to acts of assholery grand and petty.

Undoing dumb rules that favour existing vested interests is hard everywhere.

I mean, the US doesn't exactly cover itself in glory in its own utility regulations. "cost-of-service" regulation means that monopoly utilities are allowed to charge such that they make a regulated rate of return on the cost of providing the service. So the more they increase their costs, the more money they are permitted to make!

If you’re postulating unbounded growth, seems pretty arbitrary to not postulate engineering solutions to this problem (eg shift the energy intensive industry off-Earth).

Growing up in a small town, I could see thousands of stars on a clear night. In a major metropolitan area where I live now, it’s hundreds. When I visited Beijing for three weeks, I think there was one night where the pollution cleared sufficiently to see any stars at all; I think I saw three or four.

Apparently part of the issue is that the Chinese grid is very badly managed.

They can build physical grid connections much more easily than we can manage (for the usual values of “we”), but they manage interprovincial transmission according to fixed schedules rather than responding to demand.

I used Blackboard for a decade. Trust me, it's awful.

This is less impressive than it sounds. Real (inflation adjusted) US GDP is almost nine times higher than it was in 1945.