You require inertia in the grid to maintain frequency and other stability stuff.
Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines.
I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will help if it's an issue with over-demand the grid managers can do rolling blackouts to manage while fixing the supply problems. The grid is just broken at the moment and the solar can't maintain the grid alone.
Large Inverter Based Resources (IBR) such as huge solar parcs, grid-scale batteries or high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines can be programmed to behave like rotating generators, or even to smooth out smaller ripples. They also don't necessarily need a leading grid frequency but can be used to generate their own frequency normal to cold-start or resync a grid.
Only "small stuff" IBRs need a leading frequency from the grid and disconnect outside their safety corridor because those usually aren't controllable from some central grid authority. Thus the stupid-but-safe behaviour mandated for them.
The greenery in question appears to be a tidal estuary (but I'm not 100% sure) and it also appears to be close to the downtown center of a city of 4 million people who all need some amount of electricity to live their daily lives. The ecosystem of the body of water on which these panels are installed is I would imagine relatively undisturbed by the solar PV - it's a question of aesthetics whether or not this habitat has been degraded.
My feeling is that these over-water panels generating a not-insignificant amount of power are an ideal compromise between the sprawl of the built environment of (Taizhou, China) and the natural ecosystem.
I believe that the installation in that picture and a number of other installations in the Taizhou region are built over a river system or some kind of tidal water reservoir I was unable to find the exact area but [1] is a nearby installation.
Land use is a large contributing factor to climate change but this particular image seems to be the best case scenario for large solar installation the ecosystem (marshland?) appears to be relatively undisturbed (also considering it is centrally located in a city of 4 million people solar panels or not it seems pretty lush). And I'll parrot an often cited statistic: "the entire U.S. could be powered by utility-scale solar occupying just 0.6% of the nation’s land mass" this (imo) makes a good case for solar PV as a relatively large chunk of installed grid capacity it just seems like a better compromise than the alternatives.
If utility scale battery storage ever pans out (that or UHV transmission or both) then we could see renewable sources like solar+wind actually work as base-load capacity.
Others also comment on this thread that converted agricultural land (i.e. field to pasture) meshes well with solar PV installation the plants typically do not need full sun. I would guess that a small percentage of installed solar required any kind of land shaping or clearing although it does happen [2].
I imagine anything that actually is used in a factory environment to not look as humanoid as the press photos (especially the head there's no point in having that top appendage which does nothing but remind the reader of star wars) and also have a beefy power-cable suspended from the ceiling.
If so then what a colossal waste of our planetary carbon budget. I don't know what the backend on this app is (maybe it was done properly i really hope so) but surely there is a solution which maintains or surpasses the accuracy of an LLM and uses <1% of the compute resources.
Like a small vision model combined with the size/measurements data from the AR sensors modern phones come with and an open source caloric values database should achieve the 90% accuracy they are claiming.
Ronald Wright writes about "progress traps" in A Short History of Progress. It's been awhile since I read that but I think about it more and more these days with AI products on the rise.
No, this is a completely unsolvable problem with just a camera.
You cannot differentiate a high calorie meal from a low calorie meal on sight alone.
The waste is selling a lie, enabled by AI bullshit artists and the public's seeming inability to understand that the US has no legal (or market most of the time) requirements to be truthful, upfront, or honest in marketing.
Like people just take this shit at face value and I don't understand how you can live in the US for more than a few years and not recognize that marketing is just lies, like not even smart or clever lies.
Others are pointing this out but for anyone curious Tesla has received a tonne of indirect subsidy via electric vehicle sales incentives on the consumer side of the equation which absolutely translates into increased corporate profits. Across the globe EV sales in developed nations are very boosted via government programs ((which is a good thing imo)). I'll just link a wikipedia page[1] since I don't want to find a solid source but this isn't really debated it's the real world effect of laws and bills passed by the US gov and dozens of other countries around the world and has been extensively studied.
Pretty funny to find this at the top of the article.
"The company's pullback on data center projects has raised concerns about demand for AI services and has weighed on global tech stocks, particularly chipmakers like Nvidia.
"Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense."
That graph of the average US tariff rate over time, which I also saw in a BBC article, really brings home how seismic a change Trump's tariffs announcement is.
There is a certain Bitcoin evangelist who will preach the gospel of a self governing currency that via a system of rules will automatically validate transactions between trust-less parties in a decentralized manner over a globe-spanning internet protocol but then complain when that same system does not prevent them from accidentally sending the entire contents of their "wallet" to an address in North Korea.
The system does not represent ownership the system only tracks of the validity of transactions and if the North Korean government proposes a valid transaction of your BTC or ETH to an address they control and a mining-node includes that transaction in a block which a majority of the network accepts then those assets are no longer yours they belong to North Korea.
The properties of the crypto-asset ecosystem which allow it to be ungoverned also make it ungovernable.
I would imagine exchanges these days routinely monitor incoming and outgoing transactions, and if they suspect the funds are stolen, they are freezed. I would imagine North Korea doesn't have really an easy job laundering that BTC they have stolen.
They are simply having to duplicate all the things Visa provides its customers.
BTC is inherently deflationary in the sense that once new coins cease to be mined the total number of BTC will decrease over time due to lose, theft and death. I know that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned 10 years ago. I can name several other people that have done the same. I would think this one property makes it undesirable for use as a currency.
> I know that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned 10 years ago. I can name several other people that have done the same. I would think this one property makes it undesirable for use as a currency.
How is this any different from losing your wallet with physical currency?
In many cases if you lose your physical wallet, someone else will find it and the cash will stay in circulation, but even if not, as physical currency is much more inflationary it's no big deal.
The second point is that most people keep a lot less money in a physical wallet, usually no more than say a few hundred dollars. Whereas a bitcoin wallet will often contain thousands or more so is more akin to a bank account.
"Canadian tariffs" doesn't mean anything please specify on which goods you are referring to. (e.g. lumber, dairy etc...)
The American government is proposing across the board on every import (>=$800 or something) tariffs which has never been implemented by the Canadian government on American goods.
Canada is highly protective of certain industries which are typically small and are engaged in by a large voting population but small portion of the economy (GDP). As a percentage of total goods that American companies might actually want to export to Canada import tariffs are typically quite low.
Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines.
I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will help if it's an issue with over-demand the grid managers can do rolling blackouts to manage while fixing the supply problems. The grid is just broken at the moment and the solar can't maintain the grid alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource
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