The renewable energy changes and policy

I think the geopolitical dynamics of the new energy world will be different than the current energy one. If China sells a small country solar panels and batteries, even EVs, they won't have the same kind of control as one would have with oil and gas prices. If they had already built out solar and batteries, or even partly so, and had trouble with China, then the panels they already bought would last for 25 years and the batteries would likely last that long too. There will be other vendors in India, America, Europe and southeast Asia. I dunno how much pressure China could exert by those means and it would hurt business as word spread about the extortion, look what happened to Russian when they tried that shit.

India is well positioned to take advantage of solar and many of those 3 wheeled vehicles we see in the cities are gong EV at a fast rate, such vehicles are easy to make as EVs, as are scooters. Above all India has no oil and wants energy independence like most other countries and in a decade or two they should have an abundance of energy and that often changes everything for many societies. The coming solar and EV transition will benefit India the most, as will wind turbines in the mountains and along the coast. New highly efficient solar distillation technology will open up arid lands. and supply cities there too.

If China came into the North American market through Mexico for EVs, batteries, solar and robots, it should not present a serious national security threat in the short term. If there was trouble with China, Mexico would nationalize their factories and with Uncle Sam's help carry on, no doubt America would encourage this and even arm twist on it. It would be the same for their factories inside the EU. With factories there comes technology transfer and no critical things made in China.

Auto manufacture is getting highly automated and when you get them right, battery production can be highly automated, far more and ICE engine and transmission assembly and for much lower cost than machining thousands of parts and gears. It reduces not just the part count, but the moving part count too and dramatically lowers mechanical complexity. All it takes is cheap power dense batteries to make it even better and more attractive to larger numbers of people. With cheap better batteries, one can see how an EV can out compete an ICE vehicle on price, operating costs and maintenance. Cheap batteries for EVs mean cheap home storage batteries and their electronics, with the end of net metering in many places, to make solar pay, you'll need to store some power too.

RoboWife! That's the way foxnews is pitching the tech, Eve has no rights either... Stepford wife 1.0


Eve the robot can cook, clean and guard your home
A robot that can handle any household task and keep you secure

If the democrats win, they might address this issue with minimum battery standards and a few types of solid-state batteries are reported to work well at -30C, not start to fail at +30 degrees F!

DIY-HP-LED said:

If the democrats win, they might address this issue with minimum battery standards and a few types of solid-state batteries are reported to work well at -30C, not start to fail at +30 degrees F!

Driver slams EVs as Tesla CEO called out for not addressing vehicle 'genocide'

TESLA owners have slammed the company as the charging stations have stopped working in places reaching below-zero temperatures. Due to the recent tundra-like weather in Chicago, electric vehicle ow…

www.the-sun.com

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Legislate physics?

cannabineer said:

Legislate physics?

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Regulations like with all other technology from railroads to cars, there are industry standards and government requirements for safety and a host of other things. There will likely be standards for cold weather battery performance as more options evolve.

Home batteries will eventually get cheaper and for some with EVs it is still worth installing solar panels, just a small amount of storage can offset utility bills significantly. A plugged in EV can also act as a home battery or will in the future with recently adopted standards. That cheap small second EV commuter car plugged in, in the driveway, might also serve another purpose.

Here come humanoid robot muscles as AI and Wi-Fi provide the brains. This might end up slashing production costs, increasing versatility and cutting the power usage by humanoid robots who will be powered by next generation batteries. Coming for a job near you and closer than you think, this could bring it much closer.

There is are dozens of robot companies now, maybe hundreds and their suppliers, think they would be interested?


Artificial Muscles in Modern Technology
Artificial muscles imitate human muscles and provide flexible and natural movements compared to traditional motors, making them one of the basic elements used in soft robots, medical devices, and wearable devices. These artificial muscles create movements in response to external stimuli such as electricity, air pressure, and temperature changes, and in order to utilize artificial muscles, it is important to control these movements precisely.

Switches based on existing motors were difficult to use within limited spaces due to their rigidity and large size. In order to address these issues, the research team developed an electro-ionic soft actuator that can control fluid flow while producing large amounts of force, even in a narrow pipe, and used it as a soft fluidic switch.

Professor IlKwon Oh, who led this research, said, “The electrochemical soft fluidic switch that operates at ultra-low power can open up many possibilities in the fields of soft robots, soft electronics, and microfluidics based on fluid control.” He added, “From smart fibers to biomedical devices, this technology has the potential to be immediately put to use in a variety of industrial settings as it can be easily applied to ultra-small electronic systems in our daily lives.”

If the new muscles work out and with AI via Wi-Fi and costs falling rapidly as capabilities increase, look for humanoid robots to have an increasing impact, along with other automation and their industrial robot cousins. Automation is the only way to compete in solar panel, battery and EV manufacture. Robots can not only just replace humans; they can work 24/7 in a renewables powered factory in Mexico and crank out cheap, solar panels, EVs and home batteries. Even the forklifts loading the shipping containers of products and others bringing raw material into the plant can be robots, the less human labor the lower the cost. If they own their own supply chain and that is largely automated too, then they will be able to compete with others doing the same thing and trying to survive. Most of the jobs people still do at these plants are under threat by humanoid robots that might cost less than $100K by 2030. A repetitive manufacturing job on a factory floor should be the first to go as will quality control with increasing use of AI and cameras.

Of the projects selected, 16 will be led by private industry, 22 by academic institutions, 3 by non-profit organizations, and 8 by DOE National Laboratories. Selected projects will advance decarbonization technologies in the following areas:

• Decarbonizing Industrial Heat (10 projects, $25.3 million): Selected projects will accelerate high-impact technology innovations for equipment and components to decarbonize thermal processes across the industrial sector.
• Low-Carbon Fuels Utilization R&D (6 projects, $20.7 million): Selected projects will focus on research, development, validation, and demonstration needed to accelerate the commercial readiness of hydrogen-fueled process heating technology and low-carbon-input, flexible CHP (combined heat and power).
• Exploratory Cross-Sector R&D (5 projects, $14 million): Selected projects, partially funded by DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, will focus on emerging R&D areas for technologies and materials that enable industrial decarbonization and significantly increase energy efficiency.
• Decarbonizing Chemicals (6 projects, $30.5 million): Converting between chemical building blocks to create consumer and industrial products, such as fuels, polymers, and paints, is incredibly energy intensive. Selected projects will focus on decarbonization technologies for high-volume chemicals with significant CO2 emissions, including advanced separations processes, advanced reactor systems, and dynamic catalyst science.
• Decarbonizing Iron and Steel (7 projects, $37 million): Selected projects, partially funded by DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, will focus on decarbonization opportunities in iron and steel production, including innovative manufacturing technologies to enable decarbonization; electrification of existing manufacturing processes; overcoming challenges associated with utilizing hydrogen in steelmaking; and addressing scrap contaminants in recycling.
• Decarbonizing Food and Beverage Manufacturing (5 projects, $11.1 million): Selected projects will focus on low- and zero-carbon solutions for process heating, cooling, and refrigeration in a wide variety of energy-intensive food and beverage operations.
• Decarbonizing Cement and Concrete (5 projects, $20 million): Selected projects will address cement’s direct process emissions and will accelerate the commercial readiness of emerging low-carbon or net-zero technologies for the cement and concrete industry that provide energy savings and other benefits such as reduced complexity and improved process efficiency and optimization.
• Decarbonizing Forest Products (5 projects, $12 million): Selected projects will focus on decarbonization opportunities in energy-intensive drying, paper forming, and pulping processes.

Going renewables and EVs for economic reasons alone along with efforts to decarbonize industry and shipping should lower our carbon footprint significantly. It should do this while raising the standard of living for most of the global population over the next decade and be even more dramatic in the decade after that. If significant cuts can be made to livestock agriculture over the same time frames, then we will be well on our way to zero emissions and might be looking at mitigation methods to lower carbon.

Expect new highly efficient solar desalination technology to take off too and rapidly make present methods obsolete. I would expect pilot plants based on new methods this year of various designs in the middle east and elsewhere, after that large scale solar desalination plants along desert coasts everywhere in the next 15 years as the technology follows S curves for adoption and cost curves over time. It offers big advantages over present methods and will crash the cost of fresh water in arid many places. There is need and lots of capital in the middle east and it can transform that part of the world in a decade, it doesn't even need that much capital compared to the value it provides.

Thinking about all the steel those new EVs will require, it will mostly be recycled existing ICE cars that it will be composed of, with a much lower carbon footprint. Steel, aluminum, and copper as well as other metals can all be recovered from old ICE cars that hit the shredder.

If they can make a pretty good EV for $10,000 USD in 10 years, with the new muscle technology, continuing progress in electronics and AI, then how much will a robot that can do housework and other tasks cost in 10 years? If you own a business and can have a $50,000 humanoid robot do the job a human is doing for $50K a year plus benefits and it works 4 times longer a week and twice as fast as a human, it might be worth some programing effort and an online subscription service for a brain for your bots. Once you own or lease them and if they are durable and easy to repair or just replace, you will never go back to human labor again! Those new muscles look like an enabling technology to me, along with AI and external cameras, sensors and such, self-driving technology is helping too. If the robots have the bodies, new cheap efficient muscles and batteries, then AI should be able to provide the brains and a server rack might control the higher functions of hundreds or thousands of robots at various customers simultaneously. There might be subscription services of various kinds, until the robots got smart enough to operate autonomously.

DIY-HP-LED said:

If they can make a pretty good EV for $10,000 USD in 10 years, with the new muscle technology,

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I don’t think anyone is interested in a “muscle car”.
giggling, ducking

cannabineer said:

I don’t think anyone is interested in a “muscle car”.
giggling, ducking

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Should have used a semicolon.

DIY-HP-LED said:

Should have used a semicolon.

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No actually; the commas are correct.

cannabineer said:

I don’t think anyone is interested in a “muscle car”.
giggling, ducking

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It looks like it might be a key enabling technology for robotics, right down to facial expressions. It's not what it is now, it's what it could be in five or ten years if it is found to be useful, cheap, a way forward that can be iteratively improved. Enabling technologies are what I look for to cause change, batteries for EVs and solar storage, new fresh water solar distillation technology and things in biotech like nutrient solution prices and continuous flow bioreactors that enable scaling.