the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.

And what does the company's name mean? ;) (Hint: it's Greek)

It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.

I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.

Also:

The average American drives 37 miles per day.

1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.

2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.

3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.

4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).

5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).

But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.

Let's ask Michael Hastings. Oh, wait.

Just joking. Of course it's only a joke, but it's the obvious one I was looking for when the topic came up. I'm sure Obama's deep state never would have done such an unethical thing and you'd have to be a real conspiracy nut to blame someone left over from Dubya's time.

Oh, and I'm also sure that this is one of those problems that will just go away if we wait a bit longer. That's the other low-hanging joke I was looking for.

Probably a PROFIT! joke hanging around somewhere, too.

Not disagreeing, but on this line of approach, it seems better to just put the data centers in the dessert rather than transmit the power. I'm even trying to imagine a design where the solar panels are providing shade to help keep the data centers cool... What kind of air gap would you need to make that work? Kind of a jungle high canopy design?

Another option might be burying the computers, but I think that would lose out because of the cooling problems... But possibly convection powered cooling could be made to work?

So can I. The next supermarket is right across the street. The next one right beside the first one, and a third across the next street. Still, I like the cargo trike, because I don't need to carry stuff.

For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.

I think you're oversimplifying because the supply pattern for the renewable energy isn't that complicated. Depending on various factors, I'm thinking you could get relatively high usage numbers with relatively low expenditures on storage, but part of that optimization would involve idling some of the servers some of the time. However even in that case you would want to tweak the system to keep the best servers doing as much of the work as possible.

Eh? Now the spelling check has decided that videocide is problematic after all? Were my eyes napping before? Eh and double eh?

Me.

I solved this problem by a) riding an incumbent cargo trike for grocery shopping and b) not liking ice cream.

This branch confused me. Not the kind of efficiency that I was asking about. This would actually be an advantage for countries that have a lot of hydropower. I think the advantage on this one would be for America (and perhaps Japan or some other places?) over China.

However the efficiency question I was asking about was the cost of building computing capacity that sometimes waits idly for the wind to blow versus the cost of batteries to keep the computers running. But on reflection I think the calculation is more complicated than I was thinking. There is also a savings from the idle time in that the servers are not wearing themselves out when they are just waiting. Also need to consider the cost of adding new servers over time. In general the CPUs are getting less expensive, but then you need to consider the value of getting the answers faster, and then you need to consider the possible advantages of thinking more carefully about which questions to ask in the first place...

Just think how much control we'll have over what gets taught.

Accidentally I found myself reflecting on some parts of this topic as America and Israel start another round of war crimes. If there are any historians in the future, and I'm increasingly skeptical there will be, I think they will probably say that the high point of America, at least in moral terms, was probably when the nation accepted the reality of Vietnam and took the loss for higher morality...

Appealing to the YOB's sense of morality will be the joke, perhaps the terminal joke, in referring to America's current situation. But the teaching bots will be able to say whatever with a straight face. And the kids will never know any better. If there are any kids?

Your math is wrong. Not the actual numbers, but the way you apply them. Your idea is to build big power plants rivaling what you know from steam turbine powered based power plants (how the steam is heated, coal or nuclear or fusion or whatever the heat source du jour might be, is completely irrelevant). But that's not how Wind and Solar work. If you just cover the public parking spaces of Houston, TX with solar panels, you would not take a single farmer's land, and still, you would be able to power the whole city of Houston. It begs the question though why Houston needs that much parking, and if that's not the real waste of space. By the way, that's what Portugal does with parking spaces in the country - cover them with solar panels. It cools the tarmac below, improves the ambient temperature in the towns, and generates energy. And you can build glass houses with solar panels instead of pure glass sheets. There are solar panels which have 50% transparency. They provide enough light for the plants in the glass house, and still generate surplus electric energy.

Denmark started with wind turbines 40 years ago, and now, Wind accounts for more than 50% of Denmark's electricity generation. In Germany, Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricity (the high prices for electricity in Germany have very bureaucratic, and quintessentially German reasons with braindead legislation, but that's another chapter). Ah yes, biogas currently generates the same amount of electricity in Germany as Nuclear did the last year before it was switched off. And then there is balcony power - a concept completely alien to the U.S., but widespread in Europe. For about 300 EUR, you can get a small do-it-yourself solar power plant, and legally assemble it yourself and plug it into your wall socket (any wall socket will do). No licensed electrician required. It's limited to 800 Wp - but hey, free energy for everyone. In a town with 10,000 apartments, this would be akin to a 8 MWp power plant for the price of 3 million bucks - without any tax payer money. If you want to pay an electrician, buy 10 of them. Or 30. And he will do the connection to the grid. For 10,000 EUR, you get 25 kWp solar power, which should cover most of your electric energy needs. If the 20,000 households in a medium sized town would do it, we are talking 500 MWp. That's the usual size of a nuclear reactor.

I acknowledge that batteries exist and are significant, but the efficiency is significantly lower. I don't think it makes that much sense to do low priority stuff off of batteries and I regard most of the AI training as relatively low priority. However I have to acknowledge the other side of the inefficiency of building extra computing capacity that spends a lot of time waiting for the power...

Hmm... I just thought of a retired CPA who worked with this kind of stuff. Maybe he could work up the numbers? Or should I run it past a couple of AIs to see what they say? Bit of a funny story there. The flakiness of Gemini has been driving me to Bing these days. In one recent "incident", Bing decided to challenge my humanity and asked if I wanted to use a particular account or continue without logging in. So for grins and in hope of a less biased answer I selected the option of not logging in. Bing then continued by greeting me by my name. So much for opting out for privacy, eh?