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Bill Gates Investing $2 Billion In Renewables
An anonymous reader writes: Bill Gates has dumped a billion dollars into renewables, and now he's ready to double down. Gates announced he will increase his investment in renewable energy technologies to $2 billion in an attempt to "bend the curve" on limiting climate change. He is focusing on risky investments that favor "breakthrough" technologies because he thinks incremental improvements to existing tech won't be enough to meet energy needs while avoiding a climate catastrophe. He says, "There's no battery technology that's even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it's cloudy and you don't have sun or you don't have wind. Power is about reliability. We need to get something that works reliably." At the same time, Gates rejected calls to divest himself and his charitable foundation of investments in fossil fuel companies.
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Nuclear (fission) isn't 'renewable' in any sense of the word, uranium is getting scarcer, thorium and other alternatives have proved worthless. Nuclear as in fusion is not even on the horizon. Why invest in failure?
There was a time when people were very pronuclear, but the idiot motherfucking operators in Chernobyl and Fukishima fixed this problem.
TFTFY.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A lot of people can't even maintain a home generator. For example, come a disaster, people hit the hardware stores and buy open frame construction generators that put out 4-10kw. However, they are obscenely noisy. After the disaster, they are shoved in the garage and forgotten about.
Well, come the next would be disaster, that generator is pulled out... and won't start. The E-10 gasoline in the tank has turned to varnish, the carb is clogged to uselessness, and in some climates, the windings on the armature are corroded, so it can't even get a current in the first place.
Good generators are expensive. Yes, one can buy a Harbor Freight special for ~$100, which is a clone of Yamaha's ET800 model, made in the 1970s... but it has no voltage regulation, and has very dirty power, where adding/removing a load may result in a 160 volt spike. A good Yamaha or Honda portable inverter generator costs five to ten times as much as the open framed models found at hardware stores... but are a thousand to ten thousand times as quiet, and have a lot better parts availability. To boot, power is extremely clean.
Or the generator gets maintained and oiled... and the person uses a "widow maker" cord to backfeed the house power, which is not a good thing for people working on the lines when power is out. Some pocos are so tired of this, they will pull an offending house's meter, and not reconnect power until the place puts in a up to code way of allowing for generator power (transfer switch [1], safety breaker interlock [1].)
In general, home generators are useful, but one can't expect them to realistically be used in a blackout situation.
[1]: Best of all worlds is a whole-house UPS with two power inputs. That way, the generator is independant of the mains power, and either or both (for a short time) cutting off would not affect power in the house.
If your Windows is crashing a lot, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you have chosen your hardware components and driver vendors poorly.
In the future electric vehicles will be used instead of generators. Nissan already offer it in Japan. A Leaf with a 24kWh battery can run a typical house for a few days, depending on how frugal you are with the power.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC