Every thinking person cares.
Wasting the wealth on being nonproductive means we'll become poor again in a generation or two, having wasted our wealth by being prodigal spendthrifts.
That would be sad.
The "to poor to rapidly invest themselves" is simply false.
Egypt has a GDP of $396B . Morocco has a GDP of $144B.
To buy 1GW of Solar panels clocks in at $100M . A 10GW solar farm could be had for about $1B. ROI for such an investment is in low single digit number of years. Of course, there would be extra infrastructure investments in addition.
You're entirely right that Desertec et.al smelled of green imperialism, but implemented from the African side there's an incredible export profit to be made, and later on developed into more and larger solar farms to export even more - and also provide power for more local industry and infrastructure.
If we have a look at solar influx maps, or just have general geography knowledge, it's pretty obvious that Northern Africa has enormous available areas that can be used for large scale solar plants. And lots of them at that. They can use solar towers for nighttime generation, and large areas filled with solar panels for daytime peak generation.
North Africa can, by investing on their own, become entirely energy independent. If they buy up some of the Chinese panel overproduction, and then generate their own expertise in installing large solar parks, they can easily supply domestic needs - and with cables, they can sell a heck of a lot of energy to an energy hungry Europe.
This again can be supplemented in both Europe and Northern Africa with grid scale battery storage, for nighttime usage. Northern Africa should of course invest in solar towers too - to ensure nighttime generation is also existent.
There's more than enough available space. The enormous untapped solar energy resources can be used for both export and for large domstic benefits such as water desalination etc.
> Fast chargers are not the issue. Norway has some 30,000 L2 chargers as well
You need both fast chargers, and slower chargers for whenever you reach your destination. I've got a nice home charger which I use for 98% of my charging needs. Whenever I go on a trip to visit family, or longer road trips, I really do like that I can pop by a supercharger along the way.
So, I'll claim that both are important. The superchargers are of outside importance as people *expect* to be able to use their electric car on the occasions where they drive farther. For me, that's 5-6 times a year. The rest of the time - I charge at home.
> Same as using seconds since 1970 is the most robust time keeping solution (except we don't, as Unix time follows UTC, not TAC.)
I'm afraid Unix time is an abomination. It's one of those things that really can't be defended. The fact that we 27 seconds, so far, that we can't reference properly is terrible. The fact that 54 seconds are impacted by this is horrible.
And we're only about 5.5M people. That is one fast charger per 580 person or somesuch.
The US has quite a bit more population, but you only have one fast charger per ~6200 person.
We're spoilt when it comes to charging infrastructure for our electric cars. Given that most folks charge at home, I think we've pretty much saturated our need for more at this point.
I have to admit that I upgraded from 4G -> 32G of RAM, and from spinning rust to NVME for my
Firefox had been getting slower and slower and more and more memory hungry for years. Now it's lean and mean again.
A heat pump isn't more than â1500-â2000 for a good air-to-air one here in Norway.
I suspect people are being 'oversold'. That they think they need a full HVAC system, while they only need it in the main room - and the heat will seep through the rest of the house easily enough. Unless they have an asbolutely huge home. Then maybe they'll need two of them.
Installing vast amounts of ducting etc. is entirely unnecessary.
AI certainly have a LOT of substance, and the hype around it is awesome for the development of it. It means lots and lots of investment and new tech is being invented. It means things are getting cheaper and cheaper. It means things are getting more and more efficient.
It might not seem that way, as it requires more and more GPU power, more and more electricity etc
The thing that *does not* make sense to me is how there will be a large ROI for those who develop and research it. It will benefit the industry as a whole.
As an example, many smaller IT companies, not in AI, now have their own internal LLM running on their own servers. With the models that are available for free download. No need to pay for tokens. It's a one-time investment in a pretty good GPU, but then it's just "use it as much as you want". Employees are delighted to be playing around with LLMs - and the company gets "free" internal LLM.
Been using Ubuntu since 6.06. I'm growing tired of it. Snap is annoying me no end.
It might be time to give SuSE a spin again. Left SuSE for Ubuntu back in the day. Or maybe go back to Debian, although I'm still sore about the deprecation of security updates for 2.0 (slink) a very, very short time after potato came out.
When I search for things, I search for all web pages containing the words I search for. On the entire interwebs.
I *abhor* your way of searching. Of second guessing what I'm searching for.
I live in the EU.
Given that we've been moving to electric vehicles for over a decade, most of us have quite some experience with them already. I bought my first electric car in 2018, and got a second one for my wife last year.
They just work.
One interesting thing here is that China is the country building out renewables the fastest. By far. Their emissions kept increasing last year, but it'll be quite interesting to see the 2024 results. Even more interesting to see the 2025 results.
They are installing silly amounts of both wind and solar. They're now also looking into grid scale batteries. Their carbon footprint is going to change radically over the next few years - they'll be trending so fast downwards the world will go "wtf just happened?!"
See my main post on this:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
It is not super slow at all. See wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The growth is absolutely astounding. Both production rates and installation rates of solar panels are increasing at a rapid clip, and if the growth in yearly installed new capacity just keeps going for a year or two, and then keeps steady - we'll be in pretty good shape LONG before 2040.
Solar alone has far superceded what we expected the total installed base to be in 2040 back in 2016. A significant amount of the required energy production to replace fossil has *already been solved* by Solar - but - it's a gift that keeps on giving (in a good way). The "remaining" problem is largely grid scale storage (or maybe even "per house storage").
Both China and India is adding *astounding* amounts of Solar every year. They will probably end up polluting way less than expected towards 2040. Large part of Africa will probably invest in Solar directly, which will also solve big problems.
As the subject says, The Economist had an excellent review of Solar a few issues back:
https://www.economist.com/week...
Most of it is paywalled, however, the gist is that Solar has been growing exponentially worldwide the last 10 years or so. Newly installed capacity is growing by about 50% year over year IIRC. We cannot expect this rapid growth to continue as fast as now for many years - but that has been said every year.
Ever year new projections have been released about where we'll be in 10 years. Every year it's taken less than a year to beat the 10 year projections (IIRC).
Greenpeace estimates of where we would be in 2030 in the "best case scenario", released in 2016 (I think?) was beaten last year.
In short: The growth of solar is absolutely exceeding all expectations by orders of magnitude. The challenge will be grid scale battery storage. Solar is on path to produce abundant electricity "in total", but there's an urgent need for battery storage for evening/nighttime/morning use.
If you fail to plan, plan to fail.
