The renewable energy changes and policy

[DIY-HP-LED]

It's interesting that the threat and eventual destruction of the oil economy should so rapidly come out of China, a country in dire need of such things with a vast competitive internal market. They appear to be ready to manufacture outside of China to the extent they have to in order to break into some protected markets. Dunno if they can compete on price outside of China, but they sure can for EVs made in China. I figure solar panels and batteries are strategic energy resources now though and along with wind turbines and an evolving grid, this IS now our power system or will be over the next decade or so because of economic reasons alone.

If the current rate of adoption for renewables, EVs and batteries go up, the oil industry is headed for collapse in a decade. We will be using oil for some time but there will be a lot of sellers with diminishing buyers for fuel for electricity generation, heating and light transportation globally. This should have industry and national consequences for some countries who produce oil and gas. It might not even be economical for them to use it themselves to generate power and new ICE cars will be harder to get. America and Canada are among the largest oil producers too and it will hurt places here as well and upset local economies.

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

If China and India are producing solar panels and they will be produced in America, Mexico and Europe soon, then deployment should accelerate over the coming decade. As deployment increases power rates should drop, unless the utility owns the government in which case they will make off like bandits. Plenty of homeowners will be making their own power though, storing it too, if batteries are cheap and utility rates are high. Even though many less efficient factories close, others apparently will take their place, perhaps with new automation and better panels.

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

An interesting video full of facts and figures about the advantages of electrification and renewable power generation.

Why we Want to Electrify

Fighting climate change is good, but national security, clean air, and profits are even better. The benefits that electrification carries are very broad.

The elegance of electricity allows for very clever and very resourceful devices that combustion never managed to enable.

 

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An overload of solar panels cut prices in half last year — but not in the US

"Prices in Europe have significantly cratered," one expert told Business Insider. "In the US, it's a different story."

markets.businessinsider.com

An overload of solar panels cut prices in half last year — but not in the US

• Global solar panel prices have crashed by 50% as China has flooded the market with modules.
• But US prices saw a much smaller decline, given barriers to its trade with China.
• Instead, a jump in domestic demand has helped prices slide, though this may change in 2024.

A massive pileup of solar panels last year has halved the average price of the modules, as China's blowout manufacturing sent supply soaring.

According to the International Energy Agency, the country is on track to account for 85% of global solar-module manufacturing by 2028. Its output has been so strong that it recently forced the closure of one of Europe's largest solar production plants, while fueling a panel supply glut that has yet to be unwound.

"Prices in Europe have significantly cratered, because of that oversupply and stockpiling," David Feldman of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory told Business Insider. "In the US, it's a different story."

Instead, the US solar market has largely stayed insulated from the supply flood, with less than 0.1% of module imports coming from China. Between the first and third quarter last year, US modules depreciated by only 10%-15%, Wood Mackenzie reported in December.

That's as US legislation effectively bars solar panel trade with China. Restrictions include tariffs, as well as the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), a 2022 law that prohibits imports from China's Xinjiang region.

Still, some of the domestic depreciation was a result of the ripple effects from China's output, Feldman said. Some Chinese companies have set up manufacturing in other parts of Southeast Asia, allowing them some access to American markets.

But for the most part, US price declines and stockpiling result from internal changes.

There was indeed some level of oversupply, as the enactment of UFLPA and other trade barriers with China created supply crunch worries.

"There were just concerns about installers getting panels," Feldman said. "So developers and installers were working to sort of get a good supply chain, and there was potentially a little bit of an overwhelm."

Meanwhile, demand has generally jumped, incentivized by the Inflation Reduction Act and the technology's increasing efficiency and cheapness.

But the pipeline for new projects has slowed considerably, Feldman said. On a national level, demand for solar has been dampened by higher interest rates, and debt financing has become much more expensive.

As projects are set to run dry in California as well as the Northeast, residential solar installations could decline by 12% this year, Wood Mackenzie estimated.

But the research firm expects this to be a singular dip, and for the market to recover by an annual rate of 10% between 2025 and 2028.

"[Analysts] are expecting significant increases, but that said, manufacturing has probably grown more than that. So it might be a few years for demand to catch up with the amount of manufacturing that has happened," Feldman said.

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

The early shocks of the AI technical revolution as it becomes more capable it will replace more people, first in its birthplace, the people who created the technology will be its first victims! It will spread to other businesses, as yet another wave of office jobs disappears, mental jobs are easier to replace than physical jobs that require humanoid robots, but they are being born now. Writers, actor's, composers, musicians and others in the entertainment industry are put at risk too, machines can create, deal in emotions, simulate thinking as well as do math. An attractive simulated screen person that looks and sounds real is easier to create than a physical thing like a robot and it can serve thousands of customers at the same time. Mundane jobs like taking orders at the drivethru or quality control inspection will disappear too.

Tech layoffs are already on pace to surpass last year after another brutal week

Job cuts to start 2024 are higher and more concentrated than tech layoffs in the past two years

qz.com

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

It doesn't mean it won't decimate certain types of information related jobs and could be overlooking future specialized hardware developed for such tasks, instead of lots of individual processors. They have a serious point, but there may be a point where developing technology lowers costs enough to really count.

AI Has A Giant, Expensive Flaw

Turns out, your job is safe.

medium.com

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/tech/ai-labor-market-mit-study/index.html

 

[cannabineer]

Coolness I’m putting here under a common theme of engineers advancing the art for cheap.

It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew

Ingenuity packed more computing power than all other NASA deep space missions combined.

arstechnica.com

As cool as Ingenuity's flight log may be, the better story may be how the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory did it. Due to the aforementioned thin atmosphere, the team was constrained to a mass of just 4 pounds (less than 2 kg) for the entire helicopter. That is the equivalent of approximately five cans of Campbell's soup.

Those five cans of soup include your helicopter blades, which are several feet long, the batteries, the computer, the sensors and camera, the legs, the solar panel—all of it.

So, how did the team do it? They ditched traditional, space-rated hardware. They just couldn't take the mass penalty. For example, the RAD750 computer that operates most modern spacecraft—including the Perseverance rover—weighs more than 1 pound. They couldn't blow that much mass on the computer, even if it was designed specifically for spaceflight and was resistant to radiation.

Instead, Tzanetos said Ingenuity uses a 2015-era smartphone computer chip, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It has a mass of half an ounce.

The RAD750, introduced in 2001, is based on 1990s technology. The modern Qualcomm processor was designed for performance and has the benefit of 20 years of advancement in microprocessor technology. In addition to being orders of magnitudes cheaper—the RAD750 costs about a quarter of a million dollars, while the Qualcomm processor goes into inexpensive mobile phones—the newer chip has bucketloads of more performance.

"The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined," Tzanetos said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power that has flown on NASA's big missions beyond Earth orbit, from Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.

A similar philosophy went into other components, such as the rechargeable batteries on board. These are similar to the lithium batteries sold in power tools at hardware stores. Lithium hates temperature cycles, and on the surface of Mars, they would be put through a hellish cycle of temperatures from -130° Fahrenheit (-90° C) to 70° (20° C).

The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn't fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn't destroy the battery's storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

Coolness I’m putting here under a common theme of engineers advancing the art for cheap.

It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew

Ingenuity packed more computing power than all other NASA deep space missions combined.

arstechnica.com

As cool as Ingenuity's flight log may be, the better story may be how the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory did it. Due to the aforementioned thin atmosphere, the team was constrained to a mass of just 4 pounds (less than 2 kg) for the entire helicopter. That is the equivalent of approximately five cans of Campbell's soup.

Those five cans of soup include your helicopter blades, which are several feet long, the batteries, the computer, the sensors and camera, the legs, the solar panel—all of it.

So, how did the team do it? They ditched traditional, space-rated hardware. They just couldn't take the mass penalty. For example, the RAD750 computer that operates most modern spacecraft—including the Perseverance rover—weighs more than 1 pound. They couldn't blow that much mass on the computer, even if it was designed specifically for spaceflight and was resistant to radiation.

Instead, Tzanetos said Ingenuity uses a 2015-era smartphone computer chip, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It has a mass of half an ounce.

The RAD750, introduced in 2001, is based on 1990s technology. The modern Qualcomm processor was designed for performance and has the benefit of 20 years of advancement in microprocessor technology. In addition to being orders of magnitudes cheaper—the RAD750 costs about a quarter of a million dollars, while the Qualcomm processor goes into inexpensive mobile phones—the newer chip has bucketloads of more performance.

"The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined," Tzanetos said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power that has flown on NASA's big missions beyond Earth orbit, from Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.

A similar philosophy went into other components, such as the rechargeable batteries on board. These are similar to the lithium batteries sold in power tools at hardware stores. Lithium hates temperature cycles, and on the surface of Mars, they would be put through a hellish cycle of temperatures from -130° Fahrenheit (-90° C) to 70° (20° C).

The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn't fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn't destroy the battery's storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.

In the end, it all about cheaper, cheaper wins!

 

[cannabineer]

In the end, it all about cheaper, cheaper wins!

I’d say it’s half about that, and half about the more expensive projects that lay down the core technology that can be done faster, cheaper, smaller in following generations.

I don’t remember the title, but there is a book about Apollo that described how building the command and lunar module computers effectively drove the integrated circuit industry from a novelty to the early stages of the awesome growth of the decades following.

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

I’d say it’s half about that, and half about the more expensive projects that lay down the core technology that can be done faster, cheaper, smaller in following generations.

I don’t remember the title, but there is a book about Apollo that described how building the command and lunar module computers effectively drove the integrated circuit industry from a novelty to the early stages of the awesome growth of the decades following.

In the end to have a wide impact, it must be more economical and offer benefits, capitalism is a Darwinian system that not only includes selection, but luck too, just like nature.

 

[cannabineer]

In the end to have a wide impact, it must be more economical and offer benefits, capitalism is a Darwinian system that not only includes selection, but luck too, just like nature.

Darwin described a system that has no conscious component. It is without bias imposed on the stochastic nature of the selection process.

Capitalism cannot be compared, since conscious manipulation is built right into its fabric. You appear to believe in one of the big lies of market libertarianism: that the market constantly seeks an optimum. That simply is not so. The big players have individual optima that are far from the theoretical max common good. And they distort the market for personal/corporate gain.

Capitalism is inherently corrupt. Greed is emphatically not good. The meager hope is that the vector sum of the various interests’ maneuverings leaves us in a tolerable compromise situation.

As an example of a market with figurative rabies, look at pharma in US. The firms, together with the insurers, have evolved a system in which drugs and procedures are grossly overpriced, killing thousands of those with no or limited insurance coverage.

The research divisions are guided to produce medicines aimed at the boomers — well-insured retirees. So we see drugs being turned out that they will buy at a sharp discount from the retail price.

But with drugs priced in the millions and insurers typically charging the patient 10%, medical outcome becomes a function of wealth. The libertarian pipedream describes the market working very differently — but it does not.

The Medicine Is a Miracle, but Only if You Can Afford It (Published 2023)

A wave of new treatments have cured devastating diseases. When the costs are too much, even for the insured, patients hunt for other ways to pay.

www.nytimes.com

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

Darwin described a system that has no conscious component. It is without bias imposed on the stochastic nature of the selection process.

Capitalism cannot be compared, since conscious manipulation is built right into its fabric. You appear to believe in one of the big lies of market libertarianism: that the market constantly seeks an optimum. That simply is not so. The big players have individual optima that are far from the theoretical max common good. And they distort the market for personal/corporate gain.

Capitalism is inherently corrupt. Greed is emphatically not good. The meager hope is that the vector sum of the various interests’ maneuverings leaves us in a tolerable compromise situation.

As an example of a market with figurative rabies, look at pharma in US. The firms, together with the insurers, have evolved a system in which drugs and procedures are grossly overpriced, killing thousands of those with no or limited insurance coverage.

The research divisions are guided to produce medicines aimed at the boomers — well-insured retirees. So we see drugs being turned out that they will buy at a sharp discount from the retail price.

But with drugs priced in the millions and insurers typically charging the patient 10%, medical outcome becomes a function of wealth. The libertarian pipedream describes the market working very differently — but it does not.

The Medicine Is a Miracle, but Only if You Can Afford It (Published 2023)

A wave of new treatments have cured devastating diseases. When the costs are too much, even for the insured, patients hunt for other ways to pay.

www.nytimes.com

Capitalism is Darwinian in a general sense and overall is stochastic in nature and economic success is the selection criteria. In nature the environment often changes as it does in societies and capitalism adapts, so do the parasites! The metaphor works to a point, including dumb luck!

 

[cannabineer]

Capitalism is Darwinian in a general sense and overall is stochastic in nature and economic success is the selection criteria. In nature the environment often changes as it does in societies and capitalism adapts, so do the parasites! The metaphor works to a point, including dumb luck!

No.

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

No.

We are talking about economic Darwinism here, not social Darwinism and it's not the strongest survive, but those who can rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions.

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

Will it impact AI predictions? Perhaps not directly but it might take a lot of the load off of more conventional methods of production, dropping costs eventually and taking market share. If some future AI companies wanted a lot of conventional chips for AI, it might be easier to find a fab to do the job, if some of their low-end market was taken away.

It possibly removes a bottleneck in global chip production and the expansion of the industry globally, depending on if it works out economically and on policy. It puts multiple players in the game with competing technologies in a narrow field, it's not just the chips advancing, but the machines producing them, and the processes used.

Canon plans to disrupt chipmaking with low-cost “stamp” machine

Company is challenging industry leader ASML with its nanoprint lithography tech.

arstechnica.com

 

[Drop That Sound]

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

No current worth a damn, unless you want to use it or a bunch in a low power application or even storge power in a regular battery for periodic use. The mars rover is nuclear powered, but stores energy in batteries too. Devices like this won't have much of an impact on climate change and can never power your phone or car. Everybody is competing against wind, solar and battery storage for the most part and it is cheaper than coal or other fossil fuels, just the cost of the fuel, over 20 years, or soon will be. Green is the color of money these days and capitalism is the only realistic way to change the energy economy, the transportation economy as well, electricity is cheaper for that too.

 

[DIY-HP-LED]

Those future batteries might be a long way off, but there are many improved and new battery technologies going to market, or soon will be, that will be good enough for the near term. Even in North America it will take many ICE vehicles off the road for economic reasons, electric transport is much cheaper, even free if you have solar. There will be hiccups and slowdowns, more as those who don't like EVs are forced to embrace them or at least drive them! I think there might be exemptions for rural ICE half tons businesses and actual farmers, they will know where they live from the vehicle registration. Older trucks might be kept on the road for a long time if grandfathered in, if people think it necessary, though gas might be hard to get in a decade, the last of the gas stations should be in rural America.

Each breakthrough translated into products, however, means batteries can be used for more applications and would be lighter and more power dense and not everybody needs batteries that work in the cold except the transportation industry in certain regions.

The Batteries Of Tomorrow Are In The Laboratories Of Today - CleanTechnica

Better batteries are under development at Cornell and Harvard as researchers rush to solve the problem of dendrites.

cleantechnica.com

 

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Don't take them outside or leave them in the sun or they might fry. A lot of portable household tech is obsolete within a decade these days anyway and it could do away with a lot of replaceable batteries and chargers. Get that kind of performance out of an outside designed durable panel and it might make a lot of things possible.

Canadian startup offers 35%-efficient indoor perovskite PV modules

Canada’s Solaires Entreprises says its indoor perovskite modules are suitable for powering a range of electronic devices, such as wireless keyboards, smart door locks, electronic shelf labels, and sensors.

www.pv-magazine.com

 

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Let's talk about China's economy and talking points to come....