Can Dell produce somethinbg that doesn’t *feel* cheap, though? Low cost laptops aren’t new news. But low cost laptops that don’t feel like flimsy crappy plasticky things are, hence why the Neo drew attention. Will be interesting to see if Dell tackled this or not.
This poster is just confidently wrong about everything they post on the topic of renewables. They had a hilarious exchange with them recently where they suggested “ I'm fairly certain "4.086 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity" is gonna need more than just the SW deserts-worth of solar panels to run crap, not even getting into how many more, and power storage, and all that.”
I pointed out you could supply that much electricity with panels covering only 8% of the Mojave desert, and that if you covered the entire SW desert with solar, you’d produce enough electricity to supply the world’s *primary* energy needs three times over.
So of course, they gracefully conceded that their intuition had led them astray, and took the learning moment to reflect on what else they may have not known about renewables, and have since posted with great caution and in a spirit of constructive learning and dialogue sigh, of course not. That would be nice, but no.
Sure, but the point is that at least one silver lining on not having had reliable grid supplied electricity for every household is that it’s now possible for African countries to have a distribution-first approach to electricity that will be more equitable and cleaner than the alternative, and potentially much faster too.
Why is location the single variable you think needs weighting like this, of all conceivable variables?
They need more of everything! More SHS, more community systems, more industrial scale systems, etc.
But one thing this article doesn’t really capture is how dramatic the surge has been in the last few weeks, sparked by Trump & Hormuz. It’s at least double the monthly import rate of last year.
So the pace of change is increasing
The estimate is that about 300m people in Africa now have access to more (and more reliable) electricity thanks to the adoption of solar home systems (typically a panel, integrated battery, LED, phone charge, and outlet for a small appliance). Community power systems are providing transport as well. It’s going to be transformative. As I’ve mentioned here before, it means kids can do their homework at night, food stays fresh for longer thanks to being able to run a fridge, and respiratory health improves without kerosene and generators running. People pay with microloans and the costs of paying off the loans is a heckuva lot lower than paying for fuel, and doesn’t have volatility either.
I think you're thinking of CATL's Freevoy battery: https://www.catl.com/en/news/6...
"Sodium-LFP Dual-Power Battery - It combines Naxtra with a LFP self-forming anode battery, fully utilizing the low-temperature performance of sodium-ion technology to provide users with an exceptional experience that excels in cold conditions while delivering extended range"
NB, the Li isn't there for speed, it's for range.
Although Gotion's new Gnascent chemistry may mean this is already out of date
https://cleantechnica.com/2026...
None of this is in a production EV yet, so far as I know
The rare earths are the 15 lanthanides, scandium and yttrium. Some are rare, some are abundant.
Other chemistries are not "cheaper" than lithium. They're cheaper without the quote marks. Sodium is 300x cheaper than lithium, because it's vastly more abundant (neither are rare, but abundance matters), cheap and easy to extract and obtain at gigantic commodity scales, and can be purified to the requisite standards for EV chemistries more easily. It's the frickin salt industry! Humanity has been trading it for thousands of years.
Sodium chemistries also have their own benefits over lithium for EVs beyond cost: cold weather performance, cycle life, and ability to discharge to zero. Lithium will continue to be wildly important for decades, but the advent of new chemistries is wonderful news.
You might sound like less of a dick if you knew that lithium isn't a rare earth
The thing is, your first post made a wildly wrong claim, didn't it? And I showed you how you were wrong with some very basic facts and maths.
So here's a new word for you: introspection.
The correct response to finding that you have a made a big claim and got it completely wrong is to introspect. It should lead to such questions as "why was I so confident in my belief?"; "how did I get it so wrong?"; "were my priors getting in the way of correct thinking?"; "does my education on this topic lack substance"; and of course, the biggie, "if I was so badly wrong on this argument, which of my other arguments on this topic are also wrong?".
I know this feels uncomfortable to confront, but it's such a better use of your time than immediately writing up nine further arguments for your position. All nine of your next arguments are equally as poorly conceived as the first one you made, and that's because you've not done the introspective work you need to. One time-honoured way of doing that is through playing devil's advocate, testing the strength of your own arguments by arguing against them; another is the socratic method, discussing them with an interlocutor, which can help you stimulate your critical thinking, uncover your hidden beliefs, and draw out the internal contradictions in your arguments. You can ask an AI to act as the interlocutor; they have endless patience.
Why not pop off and do that, and we can come back to this when you've constructed a slightly more sophisticated approach to your analysis than "what do ya do at night with solar, when there's no wind?"
My top suggestion for you, before anything else, is to reflect on why you don't understand a basic word like "falsified". I am referring to the technical sense, in that you're incapable of using the correct term in your sentence to describe what you're trying to describe. Because if you're so poorly educated that you can't use find the correct terms to use in your writing, then it's unlikely you can understand the things you read properly either. And if you can't read well, and you can't write well, then you are cut off from being able to think well. And if your education lacks these basics, there's no way you are sufficiently well educated to come to the correct conclusions on anything that requires critical thinking... such as the topic of renewables, although I do mean *anything* that requires critical thinking. The appropriate response, were I in your shoes, and discovered myself to be lacking these basic functional skills, would be to get off Slashdot and take some basic adult education classes and fix these issues. You have a pressing need, more important than attempting to argue about renewables here, where you will only get yourself in a pickle.
He’ll never know. He’s pig ignorant and ignores almost everything, certainly including anything that goes against his desires
It would have taken you a matter of minutes to check your intuition and find that it’s possible to generate 4 trillion kWh annually from 4000 square miles of SW American desert, ie 8% of the Mojave. That is a small slice of one existing desert with no competing land use. in total, there’s 1.3 *million* square miles of SW American desert. If you covered the whole thing with solar panels, it would generate 510,000 TWh annually, which is three times more than humanity’s annual primary energy output and 8 to 10 times the annual consumption of energy for real work (vs waste).
Workings for the first calculation:
Annual solar energy per metre squared in the SW American desert is 6kWh/m2/day * 365 = 2190kWh, giving 394kWh annual solar output from a panel per metre squared allowing for 18% efficiency.
4.1 * 10 to the 12 divided by 394 kWh / m2 = 10.4 * 10 to the 10 = 4015 square miles.
Your main problem is that your analysis is trite. You talk about primary energy, for example. Ember have written an entire report about why primary energy is weak way to understand energy systems. Its excellent, you should go read it:
https://ember-energy.org/lates...
It is also really time to stop worrying about cropland lost to renewables production if you’re not going to acknowledge that cropland (and actual ecosystems) are being lost at a way higher rate to climate change. It’s like idiots blathering on about birds and turbines while ignoring cats and climate change.
The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
