GW and TWh are not the same unit. You need to multiply by the hours of effective sun in a year (and applying some reduction factor for the fact that there isn't 24h of sun every day, nor that the full production capacity is reached)
Even if that doesn't cover the energy demand, the number is not negligible for 438 GW of capacity.
Assuming that the effective full sun equivalent in terms of energy production is only 10% of a day in average, we get:
24 h/d × 365 d × 0.1 × 0.438 TW = 384 TWh
I have no idea about the 10% factor, someone more knowledgeable can coreect me, but, we are not speaking thousands of years if the growth continues before the full energy production value is getting close to the energy demand.
In 2022 the US had ~143 TWh of utility scale solar PV [1]. Utility scale solar PV had a nameplate capacity of ~71 GW [2]. So, the average US capacity factor for utility installations is ~0.25.
Or, for simpler calculations, just multiply nameplate capacity by ~2,000 to get the expected annual generation in Wh.
0.1 is reasonable, allowing for cloud cover and dust films reducing output. Maybe a bit high because often panel nameplate output exceeds capacity in other parts of the chain (inverters, grid export points).
But the 438 number should be 180. Cleantechnica is perpetually over-optimistic. Today, we have 180.
Left implied in the original post, but let's make it explicit: we also want folks to switch from ICE to EVs, and the grid is going to have to increase capacity by an order of magnitude to service all of those. We can't yell "EVs are the future" without understanding that that also means we need vastly more electric power than there is today if we also want people to be able to rely on having power at all times. Because EVs don't charge "throughout the day", they get plugged in at night, all at the same time, and good luck with that on the current grid.
Even if 40GW per year gets us to the current coverage in a hundred years, that's not the target. The target needs to be 400GW a year _at the very least_ and realistically it needs to be a terawatt+ if we want to see it happen in our lifetime.
The target isn't today's grid capacity, nor today's usage. It's the one we can expect 50 years from now. Because public infrastructure gets updated at a glacial pace, and charged at "take what we quoted you, double it, then double it again because lol bribes that you can never prove" practices everywhere.
Americans drove 3.19 trillion miles last year. EVs can go ~3.1 miles/kWh, so if we swapped out all the vehicles for EVs, they'd have consumed ~1 PWh in electricity. That's 25% more electricity than we generated last year.
The total US nameplate generation capacity is just 1.3 TW - including mothballed generators, so I'm not sure why we'd need to add 400 GW of capacity per year let alone get to tens of TW of generation capacity.
Admittedly, solar can't generate electricity all the time, but even with a modest 20% capacity factor, it'd take about 600 GW of solar to generate 1 PWh of electricity per year.
Moreover, we rarely come close to using 100% of our existing generation capacity, outside of a few hours during hot summer days. EVs, being well, energy storage devices that are stationary the vast majority of the time, seem well suited to charging whenever we have excess supply - which is again, most of the time.
> With Legacy Support, organisations running their systems on top of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS can obtain an additional two years of expanded security maintenance and phone and ticket support. This enables IT managers to prepare a detailed upgrade plan for the next LTS
Yeah sure... Couldn't make that plan over the last 8 years, but two more will surely do it.
Ah, very interesting! I still have my sandstorm running over these many years (although seldom used, but amazingly it just continues to run/auto-update with no admin work needed).
I like the idea a lot, thanks for developing this and sharing to the community!
Yeah, learned about it while reading the documentation of Fossil (from the same SQLite people). Their approach certainly has its own merits (and drawbacks).
Just wondering how they will transition once the original few people at the top of the hierarchy need to retire, eventually it will happen.
I guess they need to find younger trusted committers with the same dedication and spirit. That's not necessarily easy. But for a piece of software as important as SQLite, I have a feeling they will find those.
The problem with “future worry”s is that the Universe doesn't always agree with us on when that future will be, and it often happens to be closer than expected, even more often closer than desired.
Of all the recent failures of moon landers, Luna 25 is the most intriguing one. It failed simply because the retro-burn continued too long. It was a simple timed operation, unlike all the complex logic that goes into landing. Makes me wonder about the state of the Russian space programme.
The most recent former head of the agency has apparently expressed skepticism about the US moon landings in 1969 and also has a degree in economics. Allegedly the program has been hollowed out by corruption. Perhaps someone more qualified to comment could shed some light on this?
If you mean Dmitry Rogozin, then yeah, he was a total dick (a part of which he has allegedly lost recently in Ukraine) who peddled all sorts of lies and oversaw the decline of Russian space capabilities.
I wouldn't be surprised if he expressed doubt over the Moon landings considering that he was also the one to push the absurd claim that the hole that had been drilled into a Soyuz was sabotage done by a space-crazed American female astronaut.
I don't know about the percentage of affected stars in a typical galaxy collision but note that you don't need a collision for two stars to affect each other. We're not speaking of interaction like on a pool table. The gravity will significantly affect star systems that pass significantly close from each other.
> I don't know about the percentage of affected stars in a typical galaxy collision but note that you don't need a collision for two stars to affect each other.
True, but the way in which they affect each other is that they try their best to collide.
From that perspective, it's kind of weird if collisions don't happen.
Is it? Think of a single star during a galactic collision. It wants to collide with every star in the other galaxy. It gets pulled this way and that, so, in sum, it decides to collide with the oncoming galaxy as a whole. Unfortunately, despite having billions or trillions of stars, that other galaxy is mostly empty space. The poor original star that we were tracking was unable to collide with any star at all.
Well, why do we keep attempting to collide with the Sun instead of striking out for the center of the Milky Way? Everything you just wrote applies just as much to the Earth as it does to a star heading through a foreign galaxy.
I had the same experience, trying to self-host my VPN or other evasion solutions only served to get my server and domains banned for all other purposes from inside the GFW. The symptoms were exactly the same as you described (at first, they "sort of work, but unreliably, with extremely minimal bandwidth and would suddenly stop working after some time").
In the end, I'm not going to try that anymore, I haven't been in China for 2+ years now due to COVID, but next time, I'll hope my server is out of the blacklist again and hope I can access my (self-hosted) emails and other normal services that don't try to evade it.
The student VPN of another Asian university or the employee VPN of a well established company seemed to work last time. Not sure if that can be counted on reliably though...
