Sorry, I read too fast and got that wrong -- it was 31 pedestrian deaths due to e-scooters and the like in 2022, compared to 43 pedestrian deaths in classic traffic accidents (i.e., involving a motor vehicle).

Been awhile since I posted anything here, is there no longer a way to edit a comment?

In the Paris area, at least, that's not even close to true. According to the Paris police, the Paris area saw 8 rider deaths versus 43 pedestrian deaths in 2022 related to e-scooters, hoverboards, monowheels, and gyropods (and those last three are always privately owned and therefore usually more responsibly piloted and relatively uncommon, especially in comparison to e-scooters that could be rented on demand). That is up from 4 rider deaths and 31 pedestrian deaths in 2021. Those ratios were a huge factor in the vote to ban e-scooters -- if they were not perceived as a menace to pedestrians, I don't think the vote would ever even have happened.

Anecdotally, I have personally seen the aftermath of a scooter-pedestrian collision on more than one occasion. It has always been the pedestrian bleeding in the crosswalk while bystanders block traffic until medical help arrives.

I am about as tired of apps for every little activity as I am of store loyalty cards. I love podcasts, I listen to a lot of them, I support some of them financially. But I have one app where I queue and listen to my podcasts. I already have more podcasts in my queue than I have time. If I can't listen to your podcast in my app of choice, I'm not going to listen to it. Period.

Case in point: I loved listening to the Friday Night Comedy podcast from BBC. Then sometime last year they announced new podcasts would be released exclusively on the BBC Sounds app, and through other sources with a four-week delay. With a lot of podcasts, the delay would be fine with me, but most of their comedy is topical and if I can't listen to it until four weeks later, I'm not interested. So instead of downloading BBC Sounds and switching between apps, I simply filled the hole with another podcast and stopped listening to Friday Night Comedy altogether.

If a store requires me to download their app to be part of their loyalty program, I won't be part of their loyalty program. If a broadcaster requires me to download their app to listen to their broadcasts, I won't listen to their broadcasts. It's not like I don't have plenty of alternatives.

Per the link I provided previously, France began construction on its first reactor in November 1972. Fifteen years later, in November 1987, it had 42 reactors connected to the grid. Two reactors didn't even begin construction after that date. I like PBS just fine, which is the source your Wikipedia link took me to, but I think the World Nuclear Association is probably more reliable on this topic.

I take your point about comparing consumer prices for electricity. All I will say in response is that I work for a company that is very open to nuclear, but nobody has been able to present us a profitable business case for new reactors at current electricity prices.

I count 57 reactors in 27 years, but whatever. Also, I live in France and I pay 4X per kWh what I did when I lived in Atlanta.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) is widely considered the authority on this, but all of their stuff is behind a rather expensive paywall. Figures for 2021 are still preliminary, but here's an article that talks about BNEF's figures for 2020 and what they expect for 2021. When I said "40 nuclear reactors worth of solar" I just pulled figures from memory and assumed 200 GW of solar installations, that nuclear has an average capacity factor about 5X that of solar, and that the typical nuclear reactor is 1 GW. If I take a minute to look a couple of things up, I get an average capacity factor of 82.5% for nuclear and 16.1% for solar, which is roughly 5X in favor of nuclear. And the US Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy confirms my assumption of 1 GW average reactor size, though I am well aware that bigger and smaller reactors exist. So if you want to nitpick, I guess you can say that 2020 saw more like 32 nuclear reactors worth of solar and 2021 was probably more like 38, but I don't think that has any material impact on the conclusion.

You might also be interested to know that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that solar generated 994 TWh in 2021, compared to 2789 TWh for nuclear in 2019 (the most recent year for which they have data, apparently) -- and the IEA is not exactly known for its friendliness to solar. At the pace solar is being installed, it will likely be only a few more years before it is generating more electricity than nuclear.

And new nuclear has virtually zero to contribute between now and 2030-2035 simply because it will take that long to permit, build, and commission any meaningful new capacity. But let's say we go ahead and build new nuclear. What else should we do in the meantime to ensure we hit 2030-2035 emissions targets and stay on track for 2050? And how do we de-risk those new nuclear plants so they don't end up becoming stranded assets before they're even operational?

Well, last year alone about 40 nuclear reactors worth of solar was deployed, and similar the year before that -- and that's after accounting for the difference in capacity factor. Solar farms go up fast, solar rooftops even faster.

Yeah, sure, been hearing that since I was a child and the Bilibino plant was commissioned. Still, maybe you're right, but that's certainly not the basket where I would choose to put all of my eggs.

Nonsense. The average vehicle stays on the road for something like eight years. A decade or two simply the amount of time it takes for the vehicle fleet to naturally turn over, no incentives or extra costs required.

It's quite simple: Renunciations began skyrocketing in 2013 after FATCA came into effect in 2010. FATCA places a pretty heavy reporting burden about foreign bank accounts on US citizens and banks who have US citizens as customers. This, in turn, made it difficult for US citizens to get or keep bank and brokerage accounts outside of the US. There was a three-year lag time because US citizens overseas first had to figure all of this out, then had to go through all of the paperwork to renounce, and renunciations are reported when they are completed, not when they are requested.

To stem the tide, in 2015 the Obama administration increased the fee to renounce from $450 (if memory serves) to $2350. There was a rush to renounce under the lower fee, resulting in a surge in renunciations in 2016, and renunciations declined -- meaning that applications were down in 2016, before Trump even became president. Then they skyrocketed to record levels in 2020, despite the high fee, meaning that a record number of applications to renounce were submitted while Trump was in office.

As for skyrocketing under Biden, there is no evidence of that. The latest statistics are from 2020, before Biden became president, and TFA notes that renunciations are expected to be down in 2021 because of COVID-related embassy and consulate closures. This could mean a huge spike in 2022 as the backlog of applications is cleared.

General Fusion

So Mister Fusion is a General now?

I didn't even know the first thing about iMessage until I crossed an international border and suddenly only got text messages from certain people when I was not connected to a wifi network. Not everybody, only certain people. I eventually figured out that those certain people were other people with iPhones, which led me to discover iMessage. Once I figured that out, I turned off iMessage and their texts started to get through even when I was off wifi and roaming. That was all I needed to know -- each time my employer issues me a new iPhone, turning off iMessage is the first thing I do.

That was years and many iOS versions ago. Maybe it works differently now, but I don't care. I need SMS to work reliably wherever I am, and Apple has very effectively trained me that having them in the messaging loop means messages won't be delivered in a timely manner. If anything, for me iMessage is a reason to abandon Apple.

Thanks! I just took a really quick look and it looks like it might be just what I need. I also like that it is available for Linux and is open source. I wasn't aware of it before, so I will add it to my list of tools to take a closer look at.

I was a big fan of Crashplan for exactly this reason. I had encrypted backups going to their servers, but then also had backups going to other network-connected drives that I controlled. Then Crashplan ditched their home users and I was forced to move to cloud-only backup. I'll be having another look soon, though, as I am no longer happy with my chosen solution. I'm leaning toward something that will back up to an OwnCloud instance, but I haven't really done my homework yet....

I admit it's been awhile since I priced linear fresnel lenses, but I seem to recall they were substantially more expensive than $25/square meter, which is about what you'll pay for a mainstream high-efficiency silicon solar cell nowadays. Could be less for the fresnel lens nowadays -- like I said, it's been awhile -- but solar cells have gotten so cheap that the sum total cost of the extra hardware associated with CPV is looking pretty high in comparison to simply adding more flat-plate solar modules.

Sunpower spent quite a lot on it in the early '90s -- in fact, it was their entire business model back then. Then they did it again starting around 2012, sinking a rather large sum into a low-cost 7X concentrator. Amonix blew through many hundreds of millions of dollars trying to develop a cheap commercial concentrating system over a couple of decades (they raised $200 million in their last 2-3 years of existence alone) and went through about a half-dozen iterations of their technology. SolFocus spent a couple hundred million as well. And when Soitec gave up on concentrating PV in 2015, it claimed to have already invested $200 million in a factory to produce CPV systems. And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

No solar cells do. That's not unique to silicon. Some lose efficiency more slowly than silicon as temperature rises, but when you're talking high concentration, all cells require active cooling.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but the way I read this, I think you're saying that a 1X solar cell with, say, 250 cm^2 costs the same per cell as a 10X solar cell with 25 cm^2 area. If that were the case, there would be absolutely zero reason to pursue concentrators at all. The whole rationale for concentrators is that you can use cheap inactive materials to focus sunlight on a much smaller amount of expensive active material than in a traditional flat-plate system. In fact, there are some slight differences in doping and contact design between concentrator and 1X cells, but that's about it. In a silicon concentrator, you'll use a bit more metal -- you need a larger cross-section to handle the higher currents -- but that's the main additional material cost. There are a few process tweaks, and you'll generally produce multiple solar cells on a single wafer that you then cut into pieces. Many of those things add a little cost, but not nearly 10X. And aside from the extra metal, those would mostly disappear with sufficient scale.

But then, CPV has some serious geographic limitations -- it's pretty useless in cloudy weather -- so it would likely never reach the scale that flat-plate PV has already reached. In terms of cost, that lack of scalability poses even more serious problems for balance-of-systems than for cells. Considering that CPV shifts cost from the cell to the BOS by design, that's really bad news for CPV.

They were, in fact, the first to cross the $1/W threshold, and they stayed ahead of silicon for a little while. And then they got stuck, and silicon zoomed past them. Much of it appears to be related to the difficulty of depositing a uniform, high-quality thin film over a large area, so First Solar was limited for awhile in how large it could make its modules. They found a solution and converted their manufacturing lines to a larger size a few years ago, but they still seem to be behind silicon on cost and price. Another facet is that First Solar is pretty much the only game in town when it comes to thin film, so they develop all of their own processes and manufacturing equipment. Their competitors, on the other hand, source similar equipment to one another from a small range of equipment vendors, so there is common learning and knowledge diffusion between companies, allowing them to scale and reduce costs much faster than First Solar.

As for your other point, the reason their capacity was purchased by utility companies is that consumers heard "cadmium telluride" and thought, "I don't want cadmium on my roof!" There is a lot of misinformation about the safety of First Solar panels simply because they contain a cadmium compound (which, I should mention, is not the same thing as if it contained elemental cadmium, though it's often difficult to convince people of that). Some countries also restricted how CdTe modules could be deployed. First Solar initially tried to address this by instituting a recycling program -- to this day, they take back all of their modules for recycling -- but eventually made a strategic decision that the consumer market was a waste of time. They started to develop their own solar farms, which they would build using their own panels, and then sell to utilities and IPPs. This was their principal business model for years. More recently, they have shed the solar farm business and I understand that they are now trying to sell their modules into all markets. They're struggling to compete against cheap silicon modules in the utility business, where module prices are lowest, and therefore trying to get back into the rooftop market where margins are higher.

Oh, and by the way, they have expanded production by quite a lot over the years, including a 1.2 GW factory that opened in Ohio last year. If I recall correctly, between Malaysia and the US their production capacity has roughly doubled since 2015 and they're currently around 5-6 GW total, but I could be off by a bit. Still, that makes them pretty small compared to the largest manufacturers of silicon panels.

Concentrated solar is only a potential cost-saver when the cells themselves are expensive, and the whole value proposition around perovskites is that with sufficient manufacturing scale they should be dirt-cheap. And even when the cells are expensive, the potential has never managed to manifest itself in reality. Finally, the cheaper and more efficient silicon solar cells become, the smaller and more exotic the window of opportunity becomes for concentrators: A silicon solar cell that costs $0.18/W now has the same efficiency as a low-end GaAs cell that costs 500X more.