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Toshiba Is 'Burning Cash At An Alarming Rate' (reuters.com)
bsharma quotes a report from Reuters: Faced with the prospect of a multibillion-dollar write-down that could wipe out its shareholders' equity, Japan's Toshiba is running out of fixes: It is burning cash, cannot issue shares, and has few easy assets left to sell. The Tokyo-based conglomerate, which is still recovering from a $1.3 billion accounting scandal in 2015, dismayed investors and lenders again this week by announcing that cost overruns at a U.S. nuclear business bought only last year meant it could now face a crippling charge against profit. Toshiba says it will be weeks before it can give a final number, but a write-down of the scale expected -- as much as 500 billion yen ($4.3 billion), according to one source close to Toshiba -- would leave the group scrambling to plug the financial hole and keep up hefty investments in the competitive memory chip industry, which generates the bulk of its operating profit. "Toshiba's immediate problem is that it is burning cash at an alarming rate, and this will be more than challenging," said Ken Courtis, chairman of Starfort Investment Holdings. "I see little option but to sell a slew of non-core assets."One source in the semiconductor industry said Toshiba could revive plans to list a slice of the memory chip business, which though highly profitable burns through cash for reinvestment. "Toshiba will probably need to sell 30-40 percent of the NAND business in an IPO to secure enough cash," the source said, adding China's aggressive drive into NAND flash memory chips could make the timing reasonable. The group has already said it could reconsider the "positioning" of its nuclear business, deemed core last year, and has signaled it could trim an 87 percent stake.
They make stuff relevant to slashdotters, and their future is therefore also relevant. How is your whining relevant?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Westinghouse AP-1000. A 'new', safe(r) plant that was supposed to be the savior of the nuclear power industry. Unfortunately, it's still to complicated and expensive for anybody to put together on any sort of economical basis. Toshiba holds a majority stake in Westinghouse.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
> But for a place like Denmark, wind power alone can sometimes supply more electricity than the country's *entire* demand
Denmark imports trash to burn in order to heat houses. At it's peak, on a day with perfect winds, their renewables can provide the ELECTRICITY for a few hours, while they are burning coal and trash for heat, diesel and gasoline for transportation. Normally, wind provides about 5% of their energy, due to a nasty problem called the cube law (more on that later).
Even if you ignore the trash burning heating plants and focus only on electricy, coal power provides 48.0% of Denmark's *electricity*.
Wind is really awesome in some ways, seriously. It's great when the wind is great, but the cube law is a motherfucker. The power of wind is proportional the velocity CUBED. Suppose a windmill is designed to work in winds up to 40 MPH wind. 40^3 is 64,000, so the structure is absorbing 64,000 units of power without damage. When the wind is 10 MPH, the power is 1,000; 99% less. In a structure designed for 64,000 power, 1% of the energy will be lost in big beefy bearings, etc. At 10 MPH, 1% is most of the power available - a 10 MPH wind barely overcomes friction and there's no substantial power generated. The cube law is a bitch, but it's fundamental physics.
That's not to say wind power shouldn't be used! It's great when the wind is right and you can throttle down the natural gas power plants.