211–220 of 312 posts
Maybe at least increasing energy costs will force people and companies to ditch Electron-based "programs" (or Java/NodeJS in case of servers). Native is much more energy efficient by definition.
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There's a massive business opportunity for someone willing to produce low density batteries for home use. In a lot of countries customers are billed significantly less during the night than during the day for electricity, so the incentives already exist to make it financially worthwhile if a home battery pack that can provide a days typical use can be installed at a reasonable cost. This would substantially smooth ou…
> There's a massive business opportunity for someone willing to produce low density batteries for home use. Can you explain why, please? I'm genuinely interested. I don't understand how this would be anything other than rich prepper niche market. Installing batteries in all homes is going to be more expensive than grid storage, since you will need to pay more in total installation costs rather than installing ginormo…
At scale the costs could come down quite substantially given that the basic chemistry is iron, salt, water and little else - at which point it's a substantial financial boon to the customer given that they could see an up to 50% reduction in their energy costs (going by tariffs in my own region) to compensate.
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You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas. With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever. New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
The rush out of nuclear fission power still shocks me. It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
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You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas. With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever. New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
The rush out of nuclear fission power still shocks me. It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
And please do not come up with future inventions that will magically remove that issue, that does not help.
Btw, it wasn't really a rush, it was started more than 30 years ago by not building new nuclear power plants. Many of the power plants are actually at the end of their lifetime anyway.
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> They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind This is a complete mischaracterization of why Germany invested so much into renewables. Like... 20 years ago? Germany saw the writing on the wall when it comes to how they were getting their energy which at the time was mostly coming from coal. They didn't want to go Nuclear for whatever reason so that left renewables and natural gas which wasn't preferred…
I would say the big mistake was to only use pipelines to Russia for gas. They should have built LNG terminals as redundancy. And maybe push for another pipeline to Algeria either through France and Spain or Austria/Switzerland and Italy. They basically left the door open to abusive trade partners by not building any redundancy on such a critical resource. And it is not just electricity Germany needs gas for as it is…
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While I'm a fan of nuclear power myself, I don't think this is true. Nuclear is only good for base loads, current high prices are mostly driven by peak demand.
Wouldn't it be the case that the nuclear portion would be price stable, so any fluctuations in say the last 30% of power to reach peak power would be less severe in the final bill?
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No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What happens is: your provider purchase "green energy certificates" which means that some green electricity was generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else. No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let…
When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else. Since this thread is about Germany, and not everyone on HN reads threads in scope, it's worth pointing out that this is not universal. In most of Texas, for example, the wind blows most fiercely — and regularly — at night. Solar power contributes to the grid during the day, and wind power picks up that generation loss when the sun goes do…
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You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas. With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever. New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
The rush out of nuclear fission power still shocks me. It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
Every energy source is the perfect energy source, if you choose to ignore its problems. Just like every operating system is the perfect operating system if you overlook its flaws.
Messing with atoms is better than burning fossil fuels, but let's not pretend that it's perfect.
not been reported so irresponsibly.
"Blame the messenger" is an ancient, and irresponsible game.
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Highly disagree. Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC. The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server…
You probably live in the USA, because 200w 24/7 would cost me about 600€/year which is definitely significant.