[PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth

Sat Feb 15 19:05:55 UTC 2025

Here is some hard data from a north state.

I drive EV almost daily for the last 2-ish years. So is my skiing/kayaking
buddy.

He has solar on his modest 2k-ish sq. feet house. I don't because I don't
own my town house condo roof.

His solar roof produces more electricity than he can use in his heat pump +
car, averaging over the year. The way it works over here, he can
offset/supply generated surplus power with nearby address - his son who
does not have favourable roof orientation. That lowers his son bill by
about 1/3 during the summer last year. I do not have more details.

He has ordinary market solar cells, not some crazy efficient space type
ones. I am told that his year output is about 15MWh. Obviously more on
sunny and summer days than in the winter and cloudy days.

I have no heat pump (20+ year old AC) - my yearly hosehold power
consumption for the whole house + EV is about 10MWh. EV accounting for
about 2.5MWh at about 12k miles driven.

This is the reality I live in - not a dream - 4.3 miles per kWh without a
rack, or 3.4 miles per kWh with sea kayak on the roof. Give or take.

I wish I could get 1MWh delivered for wholesale $70-$100. I pay $360 per
MWh delivered.

Best, Tomas

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 00:29 Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com> wrote:

> > From: Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com>
> >  >while they careen down residential streets at 50 mph in their 700
> > horsepower > (50 kilowatt) SUVs.
>
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 09:41:16PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> TM> Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument.
>
> No, its the old "I will ignore what you wrote and spout
> misanthropic hallucinations instead" argument.  I'm sorry
> you dislike traffic cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who
> dodges speeding cars on the increasingly rare days when
> I go east to Portland.
>
> TM> You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every single
> day,
> TM> don't you?  At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from your
> job.
> TM> And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store it
> in a
> TM> battery for nightly charging of your EV.   There's a LOT of energy in
> solar
> TM> power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need to
> be.
> TM> But that is coming.
>
> So many claims, so little time.
>
> I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers
> like me.  Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to
> practical maximum, increasing from 15% to 16% over two
> decades.  Cost has plummeted, but that is mostly GIGANTIC
> factories in China.  Concentrator system efficiency has
> more than doubled, but the watts per hectare has not.
>
> In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed
> natural biodiversity (where your next superdrug will
> emerge), or convert an inadequate fraction of greenhouse
> gas CO₂ back into oxygen and trees and toilet paper.
>
> Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global
> warming, but I've done the physics and the math, and
> I'm afraid they are mostly correct.  I take comfort in
> the fact that they are entirely mistaken about systems
> and engineering ... but that includes nearly everyone.
>
> Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons.
> That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia,
> Chile, China, and Argentina.  The US extracts 1% of the
> world supply, though we have 4% of the lithium brine
> reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide cloudy-day
> storage for millions of electric vehicles.  Extracting
> that lithium creates a LOT of pollution.
>
> ----
>
> I've published journal papers about an entirely different
> approach to energy storage.
>
> A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy
> storage combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer;
> On winter nights, we use power generated by summer day
> PV in Australia (at other times South America or China
> or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a surplus.
>
> http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop
>
> The technology isn't too difficult; I've built desktop
> demo maglev systems.
>
> The principal change required is Pacific rim peace and
> mutual cooperation.  I'm not holding my breath, sigh.
>
> DARPA offered to fund my research, but at age 70, I said
> they should find energetic younger researchers to do the
> work.  I explained that the system capacity scales as
> the square of the cost; double the cost, quadruple the
> delivered value.  Thus a 100 meter demo is expensive and
> sorta useless.  A 100 kilometer demo is a thousand times
> the expense, but a million times the productivity and
> usefulness.  Still not global scale.
>
> That kind of scaling sounds like pie-in-the-sky to folks
> who haven't ridden the Silicon Wave from RTL NOR gates to
> tera-transistor solid state memories.  I expect thousands
> will understand it, out of billions who've never wielded
> a wafer probe.  Anyway ...
>
> A mature 10,000 kilometer system would be 100 times more
> expensive, 10,000 times more productive, but damned
> difficult to protect from sabotage in parts of the world
> that "we" don't control.  It would serve billions of people
> around the Pacific Rim.  Probably five or ten giant systems,
> for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade.
>
> But as always, billions of resentful people will be left
> out.  It doesn't take many resentful people to fly planes
> into skyscrapers, or depth-charge undersea energy systems.
>
> The principal construction materials would be iron (for
> the rotor) and aluminum (for the wiring).  Plus a shit
> ton of electronics; a small but costly silicon mass
> fraction controlling a mega-shit-ton of wire and rotor.
>
> Anyway ... it won't be ready next week or next year.
>
> Neither will the megatonne lithium supply for hundreds
> of millions of stationary and mobile batteries, or any
> of the other green technologies relying on constrained
> resources and giant mining and giant factories that we
> haven't started building yet.  This isn't as easy as a
> blog post, or increasing an exponent in a spreadsheet.
>
> And NONE of it will be costless, or without serious side
> effects requiring costly mitigations.  The world is way
> too crowded to throw our shit over the fence; the people
> on the other side will fire artillery shells back IF WE
> ARE LUCKY, and engineered pathogens if we AREN'T lucky.
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> KHL> I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The Consequences
> of Mass
> KHL> Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane.  Published in 2001, and
> >sitting
> KHL> on a shelf in the PSU library ever since.  Shane claimed that laptop
> screens
> KHL> narrow our thinking in time and breadth.
>
> TM> Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all.
>
> The point is that our brains and visual systems evolved
> for 360 degree awareness, combining saccades of our
> retinal fovea into a much larger gestalt "image" of the
> landscape and PEOPLE around us, in 3D+T.  It isn't the
> screen pixels that matter, it is our retinal pixels and
> the brain regions they drive, and how those affect us
> semi-evolved social apes and our cooperative skills.
>
> Or lack thereof, fellow geeks!
>
> Shrivel that megayear-evolved process, and you shrivel a
> large fraction of what makes us civilized, aware, mostly
> cooperative humans.  Shane was a media consultant; his
> job was to peddle media effectiveness, but his avocation
> was asking "What does this mean?  What might happen?"
>
> Yes, billions of people don't have that avocation.
> More neurotypical people are aware of (and appreciate)
> such skills, even if they have fewer of them.  The mind
> blind, not so much.  I tend toward the latter, sigh.
>
> Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge
> of your screen, regardless of screen pixel count.
>
> "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
> than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Hamlet, W.S.)
>
> TM> The problems aren't tech.  The problems are people and always have
> been.
>
> And the most important problem is that crazy person I
> see in the mirror, darkly.  Apostle Paul referenced
> that mirror before Star Trek.  We may never learn
> where Paul plagiarized it from.
>
> "Good artists copy, great artists STEAL" (Picasso)
>
> Implying Picasso's self-awareness and self-criticism.
> Criticizing others is not the path to enlightenment.
>
> Keith L.
>
> --
> Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com
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