This is such a silly little story to tell yourself, about demand being saturated, when EVs are taking an increasing market share in European markets (and others, but the story you're commenting on is about Europe). And to claim yourself as working class when you've got a nickname here of dev and you're on Slashdot is just incredibly inauthentic.

I'm sure they have smart engineers and have thought lots of this through, and have robust and well-tested systems etc. But it still seems like it's inherently hard work for not much payoff. And even the geothermal stuff seems odd; what's so much better about this solution than standard geothermal solutions.

You needed a handbook for that?

Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.

By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.

As always, framing matters hugely. And at the moment, sinij is having a lot of success in framing stories about renewables, EVs, etc as being a challenge.

You’d never know from these stories that actually, renewables and EVs continue to be booming market sectors that continue to have lots of popular and political backing, including in Europe. For example, EV sales in Europe are substantially up this year compared to last year (1.5m+ sales so far, share of new sales up by at least 3 percentage points); Spain has committed to 95% of domestic production being EVs by 2035; the UK is announcing the clear-down of its connection backlog this week which will substantially accelerate new renewables coming onto the national grid; Pakistan has gone from a standing start to a solar share greater than China’s in four years, leading to solar generation exceeding demand at points in some industrial regions for the first time ever; and on and on.

So much good stuff is happening out there.

6 countries, of which only two have a car manufacturing industry of note... if the six were France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Czechia and some rando other, than that would be a bit different. Obvs Mertz is pushing as well, but differently and less stridently.

You're looking in the wrong place. What the Chinese have that gives them unique advantages is a better battery production system. They have lower costs to scale, innovate new battery designs (eg Blade, LFP) faster, lower costs to operate (short supply chains and local sourcing), etc etc.

Relative reductions are super and all, but the fact of the matter is that you will still die in fairly short order if you're shut in your car by a villain who runs a hose from the exhaust to your window and leave the engine running, because there's still plenty of nasties left in there. And obvs, as the other poster said, no-one's scrubbed any CO2 from the tailpipe ever.

To my mind, the first and most obvious questions to ask are how this kind of system copes with the well known challenges of working with H2, such as embrittlement, leakage and a propensity to explode.

As in any subject, unless there is a mindless hype (such as "AI" currently) finding a job with a specific degree requires you to have done well. Too many just want the paper but not the qualification that should come with it and for-profit "education" makes it easy to do so. Then they are surprised they have problems finding a job ...

Obviously. But those that "can hack it" are still going into non-vacuous subjects, not into "AI". And "AI and Cybersecurity"? How utterly stupid are these people? AI helps attackers, not defenders. AI may make defense harder though, because AI generated code is riddled with vulnerabilities. (Yes, I am aware there is more AI than LLMs...)

With the other half being of negative worth? Color me non-surprised.

I will be interested when they have a working prototype that comes close to the claimed efficiency. I predict that will not happen.

For the example in TFS of 200F water and assuming room temperature exhaust, Mr. Carnot says that the max possible efficiency is less than 20%. Any real world engine, including this one, probably ends up at a low-to-mid single digit percent efficiency. IOW, the vast majority of the heat would still be wasted.

The operator of the facility generating the waste heat might get more energy savings at lower cost by tweaking their processes to be a few percent more efficient in the first place, instead of trying to recover this low-grade energy source with an elaborate engine and plumbing.

I.e. "we are better than you" crap. Because you can do all that with modern tech as well.

Indeed.