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Infinite Karma posted:I've got to ask where these guys are getting their info, because I buy and sell lithium-ion batteries at wholesale prices and they are way, way, way higher than this. Much closer to $800-1000/kWh. Obviously megacorporations can buy and manufacture them at a discount in bulk before packaging them for sale, but does it make sense to talk about the costs somewhere in the middle of the manufacturing chain, instead of at the end of the chain when they're available to purchase and use? Costs are coming down but it's hilarious when industry "insiders" project double digit percentage price drops year-over-year for technology like this. I would love to see those sorts of prices as well. We utilize HFO sets for power and run an extra one just for redundancy - hurting fuel efficiency and running up maintenance hours. I have organized PLC/SCADA gurus to implement a powerstation wide SCADA control linked into the process plant SCADA so that load shedding can be implemented such that large loads such as a 4MW mill can be dropped off in the event of a generator trip but obviously that comes with process interruption and wear and tear costs. Instead of load shedding, if 4MW could be provided for 20 mins, it would give enough time to run up another generator in the event of a power trip and also allow for the generators to be operated all the way up to 100% average continuous power output (with the battery being the spinning reserve). Is there a rule of thumb for how much power output Li ion can give for a given amount of storage? eg, does 4 mWh of storage allow for 2 mW instantaneous output (and therefore I have to capex 8 mMh @ $800/kWh = $6.4 million to achieve 4 mW spinning reserve). If wiring it up so I only need just the absolute storage and the cheaper price it means 1.35 mWh @ $100/kwh = $135k so pretty much a no brainer.
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Nov 18, 2019 13:12
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Bucky Fullminster posted:I wonder the extent to which eBikes play into all this? Seems like a pretty big field which has come out of nowhere quite quickly and could have an effect on the R&D and demand and deployment of batteries etc. funny you ask, check out this report I just stumbled on this morning https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/rmi_breakthrough_batteries.pdf for those who don't like to click pdf links, here's the key graph:  the crossover point where the up-front cost of electric scooters is cheaper than 2-strokes is now, so the massive switch of that market over to batteries will drive the next order of magnitude of growth in demand and manufacturing, which will drive the next ~15% improvement via economies of scale. StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 18, 2019 14:59
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Is there a rule of thumb for how much power output Li ion can give for a given amount of storage? eg, does 4 mWh of storage allow for 2 mW instantaneous output (and therefore I have to capex 8 mMh @ $800/kWh = $6.4 million to achieve 4 mW spinning reserve). If wiring it up so I only need just the absolute storage and the cheaper price it means 1.35 mWh @ $100/kwh = $135k so pretty much a no brainer. Depending on the specific li-ion chemistry things tend to fall in the 1/4C to 4C range (which is quite broad). You mostly see 1/4C systems when its combined with a solar plant and expected to cycle every single day until it dies, so its on the conservative end to last 20+ years. Whereas 4C systems would be more for like rail guns and poo poo. For your case 1 - 2C is likely where a system would fall (so you'd need a 1 - 2MWh system to produce 2MW on a trip). If we assume a 1.5MWh battery (set) at a total-system-cost of $600/kWH that's $900k. ABBs website is impossible to find good info because these things always involve sales reps and custom quotes, but just to get you started: https://new.abb.com/ups/systems/three-phase-ups/conceptpower-dpa-500 https://search-ext.abb.com/library/Download.aspx?DocumentID=PPMV_PG3435_DB_00&LanguageCode=en&DocumentPartId=&Action=Launch https://www.tesla.com/megapack It sounds like you're close enough in both the numbers and the need that it'd be worth the time to engage a few sales reps to get some rough estimates. Even if it doesn't work out this year, you'll have a baseline to work off in 2 - 5 years when you look again. It would be super awesome if you shared what you heard 
StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Nov 18, 2019 |
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Nov 18, 2019 15:27
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LOL Germany. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/germany-wind-power-fact-of-the-day.html
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Nov 18, 2019 20:24
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:LOL Germany. From the article it says that local politicians are against wind power? I wonder why the hell that is unless it’s an area that has many fossil fuel related jobs but that isn’t something that Germany is known for, no?
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Nov 18, 2019 21:02
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Tab8715 posted:From the article it says that local politicians are against wind power? I wonder why the hell that is unless it’s an area that has many fossil fuel related jobs but that isn’t something that Germany is known for, no? It looks ugly. NIMBY.
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Nov 18, 2019 21:15
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Deteriorata posted:It looks ugly. NIMBY. Especially when they put them in front of their beautiful open pit lignite coal mines!
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Nov 18, 2019 21:22
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Secretive energy startup backed by Bill Gates achieves solar breakthroughquote:Heliogen, a clean energy company that emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, said it has discovered a way to use artificial intelligence and a field of mirrors to reflect so much sunlight that it generates extreme heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius. I have to imagine that they're doing more than just concentrated solar with an AI figuring out where the sun is. Maybe AI-driven adaptive optics to correct the outgoing wavefront to the receiver, to achieve a smaller spot size? That would be truly cool and should accomplish a lot more than what concentrated solar normally achieves
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Nov 20, 2019 06:58
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QuarkJets posted:Secretive energy startup backed by Bill Gates achieves solar breakthrough Correcting outgoing wavefronts sounds fascinating, and I wonder if anyone is looking in to it, but this really does sound like they're just aligning the mirrors precisely "with software". I didn't know conventional CST was leaving that much on the table. How do they get the heat from up there in the tower to where it's needed I wonder? Also: "One problem with solar is that the sun doesn't always shine, yet industrial companies like cement makers have a constant need for heat. Heliogen said it would solve that issue by relying on storage systems that can hold the solar energy for rainy days" Oh cool, hear that guys? They have storage systems. What are they you ask? Mind your own business, sheesh.
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Nov 20, 2019 12:00
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Taking a guess - Molten Salt storage
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Nov 20, 2019 13:44
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If molten salt can work at those temperatures then yeah that would make sense, not sure why they couldn't just say that though, it's not like it's secret technology or anything. Feels like CNN were more interested in getting their 'fighting climate change with AI' soundbite.
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Nov 20, 2019 14:13
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Solar heat for making cement would be a huge benefit to the carbon footprint of the whole process. You'd need to reach, what? 1200 to 1500 degrees for it to work, do they say just how hot they've managed to get it? Yeah, it would probably be a bit inconvenient to make cement when the sun is shining brightly, but it's not like we don't have a lot of other industries that wait for an opportune time to operate, like arc furnaces. edit: Yeah, I see the article already talks about it a lot. Still, it would be really big. Might also be useful in nitrogen fixing, as well. Chemical plants as well, but we want to try and cut back on that as much as we can anyways. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 14:50
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If we ever want more nuclear plants, it would help to address the situation at San Onofre (20 miles from where I live). Seriously, this is just wrong. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-11-19/san-onofre-nuclear-plant-waste-radioactive Last year, as a crane operator maneuvered to place a 50-ton cask of spent nuclear fuel into a storage vault, the massive cask got caught on an inch-thick steel guide ring and hung there for about an hour. Workers at the site were not prepared for such a dangerous complication. If the canister had fallen and leaked radioactive gas or liquids, the 18-foot plunge could have led to a panicked evacuation along the coast of California. Even with thoughtful planning, safeguarding people and the environment from a nuclear accident is a complex problem, affirmed a recent report by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. The nuclear waste storage facility sits on an erosion-prone bluff 2 feet above the mean high tide. Seismic activity often occurs, and four tsunamis hit the region between 1812 and 1930. Geologists say the potential for another tsunami is elevated in the area, which has 8.4 million people living within a 50-mile radius. The lack of preventive measures at San Onofre is disturbing. There is no procedure in place to remove the 50-ton casks of highly radioactive waste from their vaults in response to changing environmental conditions such as erosion or rising sea levels. There is no budget to inspect the spent fuel, nor funds to transfer radioactive waste from thin-walled to sturdier thick-walled casks. In the event of corrosion and loss of containment, there are no procedures in place to repair or slow the leak of radioactive contaminants.
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Nov 20, 2019 17:12
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reminder for the "baseload" perfectionists, we do not have a 100% reliable grid today, and things are only going to get worse from here: https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/20/us/california-pge-power-shutoffs/index.html
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Nov 20, 2019 17:21
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StabbinHobo posted:reminder for the "baseload" perfectionists, we do not have a 100% reliable grid today, and things are only going to get worse from here: Ah yes, clearly the solution to a problem is to double down on it.
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Nov 20, 2019 17:44
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VideoGameVet posted:If we ever want more nuclear plants, it would help to address the situation at San Onofre (20 miles from where I live). Seriously, this is just wrong. What exactly do you think would happen if a nuclear fuel cask fell to the ground? The atoms don't suddenly fly out and explode... they sit where they are and continue to be radioactive. It's not a "nuclear accident" and wouldn't require people to be evacuated, that's not really possible at San Onofre because the reactors have been shut down for years. Tsunamis aren't nuclear magic either - Fukushima was a problem because the waste still needed to be actively cooled, and the tsunami knocked out the generators that pumped cool water into the storage pools. When the generators went down, the water stopped circulating, evaporated, and then the casks started a fire.
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Nov 20, 2019 17:49
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Infinite Karma posted:This is so bad I have to hope you're emptyquoting the article instead of seriously posting this. This is literally an opinion piece that "nuclear bad! every nuclear plant shutdown is a little miracle from god!" The casks at SONGS have 5/8" thick walls. I agree that this article is biased, but this is a PR nightmare.
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Nov 20, 2019 17:55
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VideoGameVet posted:The casks at SONGS have 5/8" thick walls.
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Nov 20, 2019 17:58
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Infinite Karma posted:What do you mean it's a PR nightmare? The cask "accident" happened last year if that article is to be believed and nobody knew or cared, because it wasn't news. This article is a victory lap over final approval to dismantle the reactors. Personally, I dearly wish they had not broken the reactor in the first place ... my rates went way up because of that. My point is, placing the casks On The Beach (Ironic, when you think about it) and the choice of casks is just wrong. And if one had dropped and broken open, while the scenario the OpEd paints is unlikely, it still would have been a major problem. We can't get any expansion of nuclear capacity if the industry treats these issues in a "gently caress you, make me" manner.
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Nov 20, 2019 18:01
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VideoGameVet posted:The lack of preventive measures at San Onofre is disturbing. There is no procedure in place to remove the 50-ton casks of highly radioactive waste from their vaults in response to changing environmental conditions such as erosion or rising sea levels Yes there loving well is. It's called Yucca mountain, and the NIMBYists shut it down. That's the only reason that stuff's still being stored on-site at the plants that make it. Is there a procedure to remove the countless millions of tons of toxic fly ash from its holding facilities at coal plants all around the country? No.
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Nov 20, 2019 18:11
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Phanatic posted:Yes there loving well is. It's called Yucca mountain, and the NIMBYists shut it down. That's the only reason that stuff's still being stored on-site at the plants that make it. Yeah, I had hoped that the POTUS would have opened Yucca since he lost NV anyway.
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Nov 20, 2019 18:15
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Imagine is safety standards and their scrutiny and media coverage were actually proportional to their risk and actual ongoing harm.
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Nov 20, 2019 18:21
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Bucky Fullminster posted:If molten salt can work at those temperatures then yeah that would make sense, not sure why they couldn't just say that though, it's not like it's secret technology or anything. Feels like CNN were more interested in getting their 'fighting climate change with AI' soundbite. Probably because what they actually have are plans for storage, would be my guess. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Solar heat for making cement would be a huge benefit to the carbon footprint of the whole process. You'd need to reach, what? 1200 to 1500 degrees for it to work, do they say just how hot they've managed to get it? 1000 deg Celsius No word on whether that was sustained or peak or what
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Nov 20, 2019 19:33
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QuarkJets posted:Probably because what they actually have are plans for storage, would be my guess. Also, how is heating a small point to 1000 degrees C useful for making steel or concrete, when you have to heat a large volume up to high temperatures? Like, shine that beam on a big pile of steel scrap and all that metal's going to be conducting that heat away from that point as fast as it can, you're not going to melt it down that way.
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Nov 20, 2019 19:46
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VideoGameVet posted:The casks at SONGS have 5/8" thick walls. The spent fuel storage casks? You mean the ones they hit with TRAINS in the 1970s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu1YFshFuI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VMdspuaig0 VideoGameVet posted:Personally, I dearly wish they had not broken the reactor in the first place ... my rates went way up because of that. They are not as weak as is being portrayed. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 19:58
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Presumably the point is as small as you have mirrors. The point isn't tiny on a traditional solar thermal plant, after all, it's a big tower. A traditional furnace has the same problem, too. The heat from combustion gets transferred at the bottom or blown through the product depending on how it's set up. If you want to replace a furnace, to say, make clinker, then you just need to make a concentration of heat similar to what you'd get from the actual burners. A big solar tower can produce hundreds of megawatts. That's more than enough energy to melt steel, but since the temperature of the tower is much lower than that needed to make steel, you can't just directly use it to produce superheated air for a blast furnace. You'd have to convert it into electricity and then use the electricity to make the heat. If you can directly provide thermal energy that is that hot, then you could skip the middleman.
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Nov 20, 2019 20:04
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You are aware there is a big difference between temperature and heat, right?
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Nov 20, 2019 20:10
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StabbinHobo posted:reminder for the "baseload" perfectionists, we do not have a 100% reliable grid today, and things are only going to get worse from here: You could fix this overnight by changing the California law that makes utilities 100% liable for any fires they cause, even if they weren't negligent. The rolling blackouts aren't a limitation of our current power generation systems, they're a result of California's laws and regulations. (Yes, it's not quite that simple as you need infrastructure improvements that PG&E didn't make, but SDG&E did. However, everyone forgets that SDG&E had to fight the CPUC to get the rate increases to make these improvements, while PG&E tried but failed. Most of the op-eds just say they should have tried harder, but that's a pretty lame response. Undoubtedly PG&E failed in some respects, but so did the CPUC)
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Nov 20, 2019 20:28
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They should take those Bill Gates mirrors and use AI to point them at police helicopters
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Nov 20, 2019 20:29
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:You are aware there is a big difference between temperature and heat, right? Yes. The point is that the amount of energy available from the sun in a given area is the same. I can build an acre of pond, or an acre of mirrors and the amount of energy striking them would be exactly the same. However, that pond is never going to boil. I can, however, boil water with the mirrors all striking a pipe that I'm pushing water through. It's basically the same thing for this. What they would do, I assume, is heat up molten salt to 1400 degrees, which you'd normally then use to make steam and run a turbine. But you don't have to run a turbine. You could instead exchange the heat with air and make a jet of superheated air, which you could then put into a rotary kiln or blast furnace directly.
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Nov 20, 2019 20:33
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:If you want to replace a furnace, to say, make clinker, then you just need to make a concentration of heat similar to what you'd get from the actual burners. A big solar tower can produce hundreds of megawatts. That's more than enough energy to melt steel, but since the temperature of the tower is much lower than that needed to make steel, you can't just directly use it to produce superheated air for a blast furnace. You'd have to convert it into electricity and then use the electricity to make the heat. But in that case, the temperature at the point of concentration isn't all that relevant and reaching 1000C has nothing to do with it. You could produce electricity to make the heat with only 900C at the concentration point, so what's the milestone mean? The article indicates that's not what's being talked about : quote:Essentially, Heliogen created a solar oven — one capable of reaching temperatures that are roughly a quarter of what you'd find on the surface of the sun. It sounds like they're talking about reflecting the sunlight to some retort, which contains the raw materials, and heating that retort. But to heat the whole retort to that temperature and keep it there is different than just heating some particular part of it to 1000 C. 1000 C. isn't even all that high! You can hit *temperatures* considerably higher than that with a Fresnel lens from some old rear-projection TV, doesn't mean it's a useful means of smelting steel. What matters is power in vs power out. Basically I don't see what the big deal is about reaching this particular temperature when solar concentrators were already in the very close neighborhood of it anyway.
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Nov 20, 2019 20:34
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Basically what he said. 1000c is a pretty meaningless number by itself. If the heat energy is enough to do something useful with it, fantastic. And more to the point, since this is what they seem to be claiming, if it's enough to process steel on an industrial scale, that might be a game changer. If.
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Nov 20, 2019 20:45
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I think the big deal is you can skip the middleman. You lose energy by converting a 900C focal point into steam, running a turbine, producing electricity, and then making an arc furnace or something. edit: And yes, it does always hinge on it being enough to do at an industrial scale, like you said. This seems to be what they're claiming, and we already know that there is enough energy in a given solar plant to power a number of furnaces at an industrial scale as is by generating electricity. You would gain a lot of efficiency by skipping that step if you could do it.
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Nov 20, 2019 20:46
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I think the big deal is you can skip the middleman. You lose energy by converting a 900C focal point into steam, running a turbine, producing electricity, and then making an arc furnace or something.
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Nov 20, 2019 20:49
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Infinite Karma posted:It's only worth doing if you can skip the middleman, otherwise you should just build the best solar electric generator wherever you want, and use electricity from the grid (or wherever you can get it) to run an electric furnace. Obviously. If you couldn't skip the middle man then it wouldn't really matter. I think what they're claiming is they can skip the middleman, assuming that they have an actual claim at all. Like others have noted, it doesn't matter how hot your focal point is unless you've also got enough energy behind it to actually heat enough workable material up to that level. Heat really is the only thing that any form of solar thermal power has, anyways. The way things are you're probably better running photovoltaics on any given piece of land, they're easier to maintain and put out similar amounts of power from what I understand.
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Nov 20, 2019 20:56
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It's a solar furnace, in effect, but this is the issue with breathless reporting by media who dont have the slightest loving clue. Does it work? Iunno. If it does, fantastic.
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Nov 20, 2019 20:59
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LOL China. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/china-fact-of-the-day-57.html
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Nov 20, 2019 21:01
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Yeah, well, all reporting is pretty terrible when it comes to science. The company website isn't any better, either. IT claims that it can reach up to 1500 which is hot enough to make cement, at least, but doesn't really provide much information. I signed up to get their data sheets, but they're all just one page advertisements. So it's very possible that it is all just a load of hype by some tech company.
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Nov 20, 2019 21:06
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About halfway down the page it starts talking about how the company is ready to go public, so.... yeah. They make a big deal of how this is a total game changer but offer very little actual information, so I'm calling this one dubious until proven otherwise
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Nov 20, 2019 21:07
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Super dubious. They claim their first focus is on producing hydrogen, but we already have thermochemical hydrogen production, and it can be done at much lower temperatures, so unless there's something I'm missing where high temperature conversion is a lot more efficient or cheaper, then it's all just basic tech company hype. Which is sad, because I kinda dig the idea of a big solar blast furnace.
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Nov 20, 2019 21:12
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