131–140 of 170 posts
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Good thing we aren’t doing anything to destabilize a climate system that’s not causing us too much trouble as of now.
You mean, like manufacturing electronics? It takes about 1MWh to manufacture a laptop, the same energy needed to drive a Tesla for 3000 miles. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2229029/computer-factor...
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You mean, like manufacturing electronics? It takes about 1MWh to manufacture a laptop, the same energy needed to drive a Tesla for 3000 miles. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2229029/computer-factor...
What about energy expended manufacturing the Tesla?
It is a very interesting calculation to look at the energy cost of manufacturing any EV, and how long it takes to "pay it back" compared to an ICE-powered car, and under various sources of power for the electrical grid used to charge it. However, that was supposed to be beyond the scope of this conversation.
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So probably 10MWh to build a Tesla, before even driving it?
Nearer 25MWh, and that's just for the battery pack. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00078...
So what is more sustainable?
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The Chinese government is willing to spend what it takes to win and this is the reason why they will win. The US government is way too reluctant to spend in this regard. The Chinese government is investing hundreds of billions in artificial intelligence, hundreds of billions more in renewables, and so on. I don't see Congress giving a blank check to scientists and engineers, like China does.
Maybe eventually, but at the moment they lag some generations behind US/Japan/Taiwan/Korea. This, in spite of the fact that China has been dumping money into the industry for years. There’s a narrative in the west that China is “willing to spend what it takes to win”, but at the same time, China’s spending is tied up by internal politics (also, corruption, pork, kickbacks) as much as US spending is. China is also, fo…
A better comparison mould have been circa 2000 "asian tiger" policies of south korea, taiwan, etc. The idea was to subsidize industries with massive growth potential... on a 20-50 year horizon. On that sort of a timeline, F-35 program might be considered an ok success. More expensive than necessary, but better than not having invested. For this to make sense, fighter jets need to be a massive growth industry, and adjacent to other massive growth industries. Not sure if the US has appetite for generational investments in industries.
A lot goes into success and failure at something like this than the "correct theory" though.
Part of the idea behind letting the semiconductor industry decline is that it frees up capital and human resources to work on higher ROI stuff. It's hard to get a high ROI manufacturing, because manufacturing has a high "I." Building factories is capital intensive.
It's possible to make a decent case that it succeeded too. The US absolutely dominates the high ROI, high margin industries: Software, financial services, pharma. Design... Intangibles. You can't make a money machine like FB, Pfizer or JPMorgan if (a) marginal costs are real or (b) you need to invest capital in order to grow.
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Yes, as it happens. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25604508 AMA
why is the semi industry so cyclical? do you see this changing?
The most recent roller-coaster peak was actually driven by technology innovation. NAND Flash chips were made via a '2D' process until about 2016 when '3D' processes were perfected. That meant many more bits of flash could be built for the same real estate on the chip. It also required many more deposition and etch process steps for the same output. This drove Samsung, Micron and Toshiba to all spend huge $ on equipment at the same time in order to capture market share in this new tech. Then, they realized they'd overbuilt and turned off the spend.
The end result: Our business was +90% 2016-2017. Then -60% by mid-2018.
We thought it had stabilized from 2010-2016. But in reality, the consolidation of players simply made the spend numbers larger and we got clobbered by 3D NAND. Next up, COVID. There will be a cliff, only question is when.
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Are you saying that the Chinese government is not subsidizing the entire semiconductor industry in China to drive companies outside of China out of business? They have a documented history of doing this in multiple industries over the course of many years. Notice how substantially all of the consumer electronics devices that used to be made in the US or Japan or Korea or Germany are now made in China.
I'd like to see this documented history. You mentioned electronics, but have they raised prices?
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The DoD's Industrial Capabilities report to Congress[1] that got posted on HN last week recommended exactly this: > "Outside of the United States, foreign governments and their citizens pay the lion’s share, one way or another, of the cost of building the fab. The companies do not. They take on the other massive set of costs: running the fab. The hard truth is that if the United States does not start doing the same,…
The Chinese government is willing to spend what it takes to win and this is the reason why they will win. The US government is way too reluctant to spend in this regard. The Chinese government is investing hundreds of billions in artificial intelligence, hundreds of billions more in renewables, and so on. I don't see Congress giving a blank check to scientists and engineers, like China does.
Makes sense as the cells are a commodity and extremely cheap (7¢/Watt...). They’re a minority of solar panel costs (15-30¢/Watt) which are themselves a minority of installed solar costs (70-100¢/Watt utility, above $2/Watt residential), but it leaves the US heavily reliant on imports for the Green New Deal or related initiatives.
Violet power is interesting as they’re setup across the street from a shuttered polysilicon plant in Washington state IIRC. They’re planning to be vertically integrated in panel manufacture (& eventually use that silicon plant) for cells with extremely high efficiency (20 and eventually 30%) cells with a 50 year warranty lifetime (double the normal 25). It’s a good approach for a US company, IMHO. They want to eventually get to 5GW/year output capacity. Which sounds like a lot but is minuscule compared to what we need.
To transition to electrified everything, the US needs 1TW average electricity. We currently produce ~500GW average, 300GW of which comes from fossil fuels. Nameplate solar capacity is only about 10-20% of average electricity output (depending on lots of factors including seasonal effects), so to replace the 300GW average of fossil fuel electricity, we’d need 1500-3000GW of solar nameplate. To electrify everything, we’d need an additional 500GW average, for a total of 4-8 Terawatts of additional nameplate solar.
To do that over 20 years would require 200-400GW per year of solar cell and panel capacity output. And this is just the existing US demand. We need to be investing a ridiculous amount in solar factory capacity RIGHT NOW if we’re serious about climate action.
(Luckily solar panel factories only cost about 20¢/(Watt/year) in capital cost even in the US... maybe about the same for combined cell/wafer/silicon capacity for a total of 50¢/(W/year), so 200GW/yr vertically integrated factory capacity may only cost $100 billion to build out which is not that much when you think about it... Except we aren’t doing it.)
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Making chips in US makes little sense except to get the coveted tarif relief for the very few remaining highly tarriffed goods. And if China decides to put sanctions on your fabs, you will just get a $10B microelectronics theme park on your hands because you will have nowhere to sell your chips. Do not count the last point lightly. I'm fully serious saying that US will likely have nowhere to sell those chips to. And…
Do you think the US can't retaliate by throwing sanctions on consumer goods back? Board assembly is automated. It can move back here.
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The DoD's Industrial Capabilities report to Congress[1] that got posted on HN last week recommended exactly this: > "Outside of the United States, foreign governments and their citizens pay the lion’s share, one way or another, of the cost of building the fab. The companies do not. They take on the other massive set of costs: running the fab. The hard truth is that if the United States does not start doing the same,…
The Chinese government is willing to spend what it takes to win and this is the reason why they will win. The US government is way too reluctant to spend in this regard. The Chinese government is investing hundreds of billions in artificial intelligence, hundreds of billions more in renewables, and so on. I don't see Congress giving a blank check to scientists and engineers, like China does.
Excuse me
"Win" what exactly? Why even use such adversarial polarizing language when we are talking of overall human development?
Huge segments of the US live in economic precarity, do you feel like you have "won"? After all that was the point of the Cold War, wasnt it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DoD's Industrial Capabilities report to Congress[1] that got posted on HN last week recommended exactly this: > "Outside of the United States, foreign governments and their citizens pay the lion’s share, one way or another, of the cost of building the fab. The companies do not. They take on the other massive set of costs: running the fab. The hard truth is that if the United States does not start doing the same,…
The Chinese government is willing to spend what it takes to win and this is the reason why they will win. The US government is way too reluctant to spend in this regard. The Chinese government is investing hundreds of billions in artificial intelligence, hundreds of billions more in renewables, and so on. I don't see Congress giving a blank check to scientists and engineers, like China does.