Comment Re:Back of envelope says batteriesnuclear ? (Score 1) 135
Not to mention that Ontario's plan is project to cost $20B / GW before the inevitable cost overruns.
Not to mention that Ontario's plan is project to cost $20B / GW before the inevitable cost overruns.
Indian firms failed because they were further from the customer than incumbents.
AI will succeed because it's closer to the customer than incumbents.
Joe in accounting has a spreadsheet that the whole company depends on. He can tell the AI what the company needs, and more critically can iterate very quickly to tweak it so it is exactly what they need; no more, no less.
The incumbents have an advantage over the Indians because they have better access to Joe, but it's only imperfect one way information flow. The key problem is that it's difficult for Joe to articulate exactly what he needs. He'll tell you what he thinks he wants, but it's imperfect communication. If you do agile/sprint, he gets to see how what he communicated ends up, and gets to adjust accordingly every 2 weeks. With AI he can do that in 5 minutes.
In Denmark it's easy to fire people. "Flexicurity" means that it's easy to fire somebody in Denmark but generous employment insurance and retraining programs means it's a much lower burden on employees if they are fired.
> The OEMs should fill that area with either more battery or... empty volume.
That would make the thickness of your phone + case even thicker. Right now the width of your phone + case is the minimum width of your phone + the width of the case. If you increase the minimum width, you increase the total thickness.
And now you'd have an annoying camera hole. Stuff would get stuck in the hole and scratch your lens.
This will have approximately 0 impact on California electricity bills. They already buy power for 4 cents and sell it for 65. If they buy for 3 cents instead, it won't make a real difference. All of the cost is in local distribution and paying off the consequences of boneheaded decisions around local distribution -- aka the wildfires, etc.
That's the standard playbook. America, Japan, Korea and China all widely copied technologies from the previously dominant countries before they became innovative themselves. India is now doing step 1 in this process. It's not guaranteed they will get beyond the first step, but they've taken the correct first step.
Power is a very important unit in grid batteries, and in some rare cases is the more important unit. It doesn't matter how much energy is stored in a battery if you can't pull it out as quickly as you need it.
They should provide both numbers, but power is not an incorrect unit.
It's a mutual dependence, though. Denmark exports a lot of wind power. Trading Danish wind for Norwegian hydro, French nuclear and Spanish solar is how we get a reliable carbon free grid.
They're not shutting down their coal plants, they're reducing the duty cycle of their coal plants. They have more coal capacity in 2025 than they did in 2024; they're just using them less. So they're not going to have base load and reliability problems.
They can continue on this path forever. One can certainly imagine a scenario where they maintain a coal plant for emergency purposes but never hit the emergency situation that needs the plant. They can have 0% coal usage yet still have significant coal capacity and no base load / reliability problems.
Right now the coal plants run at night. They're adding batteries that will take over those duties, so the coal plants will eventually just run when they have N days without sun & wind, with that N increasing over time until N hits a number that is highly statistically unlikely.
It takes China about a decade to build one, if you include the planning process. That's still a long time. They're slowing their nuclear builds because it's too slow and too expensive.
The averages are comparable, but the variances are wildly different, so the two numbers aren't comparable.
Pretty much everybody who kept their job has a roughly equivalent salary this year as last.
OTOH, many of the people who switched jobs have a very different salary. Some people doubled their salary. Some people who lost a high paying job are flipping burgers to keep food on the table.
People *voluntarily* switching jobs got a good pay jump. People *involuntarily* switching jobs didn't.
They did a lot more than double their initial shipments. AMD claims that demand is 10X previous launches yet there is still availability if you look hard or pay a premium. They didn't 10X their shipments like they could have, but it's certainly a lot more than 2X.
Cars suck for disabled people. The disabled people I know use a mobility scooter instead of a car. They drive the scooter into the apartment and into stores. They've got more than a dozen miles of range. They also work much better in car-free zones than they do on the street.
That is no different from a modern internal combustion car. A gasoline car has ~10X the number of moving parts. Yours is an argument for buying a car from last century, not against electric cars.
There are battery cars from 2008 running on the road today with ~70% of their original battery life. If they can last 17 years, I'm sure they can last 20.
"For a male and female to live continuously together is... biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition." -- Robert Briffault