> A 'brand' is a stamp of quality, so mixing budget and premium products into one brand is generally a bad thing.
Indeed.
The problem is that making yourself a premium brand is hard, and expensive. And with Apple and Samsung already in that space, what does HTC have to offer to make themselves noticed?
I really think this is just the endgame of the market shaking itself out. I suspect that the leaders of today will be the leaders of tomorrow and everyone else will be either niche, low-end, or gone.
> Countries that want to and commit to building nuclear can do it well, on decent schedule and budget
Uhh, yeah.
Over the years, Russia has committed to building something like 50 reactors. After Chernobyl, that was reduced to something like 25. They have grand plans for a closed fuel cycle using breeder/burners and reprocessing, and lots of other ideas. So far they've successfully built three. The rest remain hopelessly overdue or completely unfunded. They have decommed as many as they've built since 2000.
China had big plans too, something between 50 and 100 reactors over a 25 to 45 year period. Then the 2008 Sichuan earthquake happened, and they learned that all the construction companies lied and cut corners practically everywhere. The famous school that collapsed only did so because the construction team couldn't be bothered to bend the end of the rebars in the vertical supports, which would have otherwise easily survived. This, needless to say, opened many people's eyes, and the plans have been scaled back to about 25 reactors.
However, these plans are very much in doubt. CNNC based much of its economic arguments on buying up old western designs and then selling them, with Chinese financing, around the world. This did not happen, no one is interested in building nuclear and sales have been rather limited. As a result, the government has been somewhat more interested in renewables, which everyone is buying, and the country has since become the largest installer of wind and solar on the planet. They install more PV in the last five years than the entire planned nuclear buildout.
Nuclear is dead. Siemens, Framitome, AECL, Westinghouse, Toshiba, B&W, BNFL, and on and on and on. The few remaining players are all on life support - GE looks very much like they'll end development with their current generation, Areva only remains alive due to repeated massive French taxpayer infusions, and CNNC's only prospects are local.
You can pretend this isn't true, and many people reply to my messages talking about all these paper plans, but to anyone that's actually worked in the energy industry, the CAPEX > $7.50 is a death knell and everyone knows it.
>after the thousandth charge-discharge cycle Solid electrolytes are generally better at this, because you don't get the carriers migrating to places they don't come out of again. And in this case, if it does prevent dendrite formation, which would seem likely for the same reasons, then the other "sudden loss" avenue is gone as well. At first glance you should expect such a battery to last longer.
>They say 'half charge in 20 mins at a superstation' That gets me ~150 miles. In my current ICE car > that would take 4-5 gallons depending on how I drive it. I can get 5 gallons in 5 mins easy
This is not a problem, this is a GIGANTIC OPPORTUNITY. If I was Tim Horton's I'd be building charger stations at every location on a highway. A captive audience who has to spend 20 minutes waiting on the side of the highway for something? My god man, think of it!
Layouts would have to change. Lots more seating, less drive-through in relative terms.
> How come France can afford it for the last 40 years
Do you mean nuclear power? They can't, it's been repeatedly bailed out with massive injections of taxpayer money, about once a decade. The most recent was just last year, when Areva was essentially bankrupt (again). The rest of the industry, in France, Germany and the UK, all bailed long ago.
> As late as 2016, the guys selling solar panels talked about an average national break-even
*COST* break-even, not energy break-even. Come on.
> I still find it hard to believe a worst case of 1.4 years. Does that take into account the total energy cost > including transportation of raw materials and finished products, installation, cabling, batteries and meters?
Yes. There's this thing called "google", why don't you try it out?
> I'd expect the range to be at least an order of magnitude in difference.:rolleyes:
A 1k array in Tonopah will make about 1700 kWh per year (after all derates). The same system in Fairbanks makes just over 1030. That's less than a factor of 2, and due entirely to weather. Everyone has 12 hours a day, on average, over a year.
> I think the key question is, why does it take so many worked to produce only about 1% of our electrical energy? Umm, that's painfully obvious no? Because we're still building new units. The nuclear industry used a lot more workers when it was 1% of the energy supply too.
> Solar panels do not produce much more energy than they take to make.
Solar panels make somewhere between 5 and 15 times as much energy as they take to make. The large variance between those two numbers is due to methodological differences in how you count energy - the lower number includes factors like the people on the assembly line will use their pay to buy things that require energy, while the higher number considers only the actual energy of the panel itself (and things like shipping and installing). Both numbers continue to improve as the assembly lines squeeze efficiency.
This has been demonstrated repeatedly by very large studies from well-known groups like NREL and the World Energy Council, as well as, literally, hundreds of academic papers you can find online in a few seconds. Perhaps you might want to avail yourself of the miracle of Google before posting demonstrably wrong information?
> and a bunch of morons like you who can't do basic arithmetic Pot, meet kettle.
> Why don't you stop living in 1987 and recognize that web sites are HyperCard stacks, web pages are > HyperCard cards, and JavaScript is your HyperTalk scripting language.
A key component to HC was its pervasive and invisible data storage, of which there is no analog in the basic JS/DOM world. And to compare JS to HT is a bit of a joke, both good and bad.
> There is nothing you can do with it today you can't do faster with native code
Which is not the point of the product, at all.
The only point of this effort is to allow you to use your existing.Net code on other platforms. It does that fairly well.
Other *really* means iOS and Android. I have used the iOS version and it does what it is supposed to, building apps that use native UI with our.Net business logic below. I don't know if the Android version is as good, but I can't imagine why it would not be.
There are lots of places in the world that are not the US, and don;'t have the same subsidy system you have. Wind and PV are doing even better there, mostly because they don't have entrenched billionaires like the Koch brothers spending millions of dollars to convince you it's all a plot.
> Thorium seems like it might be viable alternative.
Nope.
I just got the numbers from the World Nuclear Association a few days ago, from their last major report circa 2013. The "nuclear island" part of a reactor design is a little under 30% of the cost of the plant as a whole.
A modern plant like the AP-1000 costs about $7.60/Wp CAPEX. That means the rest of the plant is about $5.30. So the absolute minimum cost for a thorium plant, assuming the reactor costs zero dollars, is $5.30.
A wind turbine, complete and fully commissioned, costs about $1.50/Wp CAPEX. Now there's a difference in CF, but that's easily accounted for. Modern large (~2.5MWp) turbines have CF around 35%, while a modern nuclear plant is about 90%. So...
5.30 /.9 = 5.88 1.50 /.35 = 4.28
In other words, wind is ~30% cheaper than thorium even if you don't actually build the reactor.
Tell me how that is going to compete 20 years from now after wind costs continue to fall every year.
Ah yes, the "makes sense" clause, which in this case means "I have no clue but I'm going to post anyway".
> shut the turbine down and spare the maintenance?
No. The marginal production cost for wind is close to zero. As opposed to, say,a gas plant, where even at idle you're still burning fuel. This has been *repeatedly* covered here on Ars.
> The answer is the subsidies.
Maybe it's different in Texas, but everywhere I'm familiar with the subsidies are in the form of tax credits and are on the order of 20% of the LCoE. In comparison, something like the nuclear industry receives about 10 times that amount of money, all of it up-front, and still isn't competitive,
Why is anyone surprised by this? A wind turbine is a generator, which all plants have, some blades, a steel pole, and a concrete base. Of course that is going to be able to compete once the learning curve kicks in. PV is even simpler, it's basically a storm window with some wiring. It doesn't even have moving parts. On a pure CAPEX basis there's no way anyone can compete.
> Frequently they underestimate owner's costs and T&D in these comparisons and only look at simplistic > models of construction labor/material and fuel costs
Fuel costs... for solar?
> I can tell you that natural gas combined cycle plants are still far cheaper to build and run than solar or wind.
They simply are not. They are certainly competitive, but in the last two years or so the CAPEX side for PV and wind has been plummeting. Here's a reasonably up-to-date listing:
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I am aware, "666BOX" by IPSharp had all the features he's claimed and was first written in 1974. That is, to, cc, bcc, reply etc.
I'm sure others here can come up with other examples?
> A 'brand' is a stamp of quality, so mixing budget and premium products into one brand is generally a bad thing.
Indeed.
The problem is that making yourself a premium brand is hard, and expensive. And with Apple and Samsung already in that space, what does HTC have to offer to make themselves noticed?
I really think this is just the endgame of the market shaking itself out. I suspect that the leaders of today will be the leaders of tomorrow and everyone else will be either niche, low-end, or gone.
> Countries that want to and commit to building nuclear can do it well, on decent schedule and budget
Uhh, yeah.
Over the years, Russia has committed to building something like 50 reactors. After Chernobyl, that was reduced to something like 25. They have grand plans for a closed fuel cycle using breeder/burners and reprocessing, and lots of other ideas. So far they've successfully built three. The rest remain hopelessly overdue or completely unfunded. They have decommed as many as they've built since 2000.
China had big plans too, something between 50 and 100 reactors over a 25 to 45 year period. Then the 2008 Sichuan earthquake happened, and they learned that all the construction companies lied and cut corners practically everywhere. The famous school that collapsed only did so because the construction team couldn't be bothered to bend the end of the rebars in the vertical supports, which would have otherwise easily survived. This, needless to say, opened many people's eyes, and the plans have been scaled back to about 25 reactors.
However, these plans are very much in doubt. CNNC based much of its economic arguments on buying up old western designs and then selling them, with Chinese financing, around the world. This did not happen, no one is interested in building nuclear and sales have been rather limited. As a result, the government has been somewhat more interested in renewables, which everyone is buying, and the country has since become the largest installer of wind and solar on the planet. They install more PV in the last five years than the entire planned nuclear buildout.
Nuclear is dead. Siemens, Framitome, AECL, Westinghouse, Toshiba, B&W, BNFL, and on and on and on. The few remaining players are all on life support - GE looks very much like they'll end development with their current generation, Areva only remains alive due to repeated massive French taxpayer infusions, and CNNC's only prospects are local.
You can pretend this isn't true, and many people reply to my messages talking about all these paper plans, but to anyone that's actually worked in the energy industry, the CAPEX > $7.50 is a death knell and everyone knows it.
> Ford Escort or Chevy Cruz, they'd probably be alive today
Driving when that drunk can be fatal in any car. ANY car.
> This can or cannot be caused by humans.
And cancer can and can not be caused by smoking. So go ahead and smoke. Please. Lots, and rapidly. Thanks.
> Conversely, from the same vantage point Apple Watch is clearly not on the same level.
Not same level != not success
Come on. Ferrari has been around for most of the history of cars, yet by your measure they're a raging failure compared to Cherry.
>Vehicles pulling trailers are limited to 55MPH on all US freeways.
Good thing the US is the entire world then, I say, while typing in Toronto.
And who cares anyway? How often would you really need this? Once or twice a year?
>after the thousandth charge-discharge cycle
Solid electrolytes are generally better at this, because you don't get the carriers migrating to places they don't come out of again. And in this case, if it does prevent dendrite formation, which would seem likely for the same reasons, then the other "sudden loss" avenue is gone as well. At first glance you should expect such a battery to last longer.
> All EVs should include range extending generators
If its on a trailer, sure. That makes it entirely optional.
>They say 'half charge in 20 mins at a superstation' That gets me ~150 miles. In my current ICE car
> that would take 4-5 gallons depending on how I drive it. I can get 5 gallons in 5 mins easy
This is not a problem, this is a GIGANTIC OPPORTUNITY. If I was Tim Horton's I'd be building charger stations at every location on a highway. A captive audience who has to spend 20 minutes waiting on the side of the highway for something? My god man, think of it!
Layouts would have to change. Lots more seating, less drive-through in relative terms.
> How come France can afford it for the last 40 years
Do you mean nuclear power? They can't, it's been repeatedly bailed out with massive injections of taxpayer money, about once a decade. The most recent was just last year, when Areva was essentially bankrupt (again). The rest of the industry, in France, Germany and the UK, all bailed long ago.
> As late as 2016, the guys selling solar panels talked about an average national break-even
*COST* break-even, not energy break-even. Come on.
> I still find it hard to believe a worst case of 1.4 years. Does that take into account the total energy cost
> including transportation of raw materials and finished products, installation, cabling, batteries and meters?
Yes. There's this thing called "google", why don't you try it out?
> I'd expect the range to be at least an order of magnitude in difference. :rolleyes:
A 1k array in Tonopah will make about 1700 kWh per year (after all derates). The same system in Fairbanks makes just over 1030. That's less than a factor of 2, and due entirely to weather. Everyone has 12 hours a day, on average, over a year.
http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php
> I think the key question is, why does it take so many worked to produce only about 1% of our electrical energy?
Umm, that's painfully obvious no? Because we're still building new units. The nuclear industry used a lot more workers when it was 1% of the energy supply too.
> Solar panels do not produce much more energy than they take to make.
Solar panels make somewhere between 5 and 15 times as much energy as they take to make. The large variance between those two numbers is due to methodological differences in how you count energy - the lower number includes factors like the people on the assembly line will use their pay to buy things that require energy, while the higher number considers only the actual energy of the panel itself (and things like shipping and installing). Both numbers continue to improve as the assembly lines squeeze efficiency.
This has been demonstrated repeatedly by very large studies from well-known groups like NREL and the World Energy Council, as well as, literally, hundreds of academic papers you can find online in a few seconds. Perhaps you might want to avail yourself of the miracle of Google before posting demonstrably wrong information?
> and a bunch of morons like you who can't do basic arithmetic
Pot, meet kettle.
So what happened to EDGE? Lots of talk about 5 years ago, now nothing.
> Why don't you stop living in 1987 and recognize that web sites are HyperCard stacks, web pages are
> HyperCard cards, and JavaScript is your HyperTalk scripting language.
A key component to HC was its pervasive and invisible data storage, of which there is no analog in the basic JS/DOM world. And to compare JS to HT is a bit of a joke, both good and bad.
68 billion? The airport in Osaka cost $20 and the new one in Dubai is $33 billion.
Cray, of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-3/SSS
> But yeah, nuclear construction sounds expensive
"Nuclear fission, continual business failures for 50 years!"
Siemens. Framatome. Westinghouse. Babcock and Wilcox. Toshiba. AECL. BNFL.
> There is nothing you can do with it today you can't do faster with native code
Which is not the point of the product, at all.
The only point of this effort is to allow you to use your existing .Net code on other platforms. It does that fairly well.
Other *really* means iOS and Android. I have used the iOS version and it does what it is supposed to, building apps that use native UI with our .Net business logic below. I don't know if the Android version is as good, but I can't imagine why it would not be.
There are lots of places in the world that are not the US, and don;'t have the same subsidy system you have. Wind and PV are doing even better there, mostly because they don't have entrenched billionaires like the Koch brothers spending millions of dollars to convince you it's all a plot.
> Thorium seems like it might be viable alternative.
Nope.
I just got the numbers from the World Nuclear Association a few days ago, from their last major report circa 2013. The "nuclear island" part of a reactor design is a little under 30% of the cost of the plant as a whole.
A modern plant like the AP-1000 costs about $7.60/Wp CAPEX. That means the rest of the plant is about $5.30. So the absolute minimum cost for a thorium plant, assuming the reactor costs zero dollars, is $5.30.
A wind turbine, complete and fully commissioned, costs about $1.50/Wp CAPEX. Now there's a difference in CF, but that's easily accounted for. Modern large (~2.5MWp) turbines have CF around 35%, while a modern nuclear plant is about 90%. So...
5.30 / .9 = 5.88 .35 = 4.28
1.50 /
In other words, wind is ~30% cheaper than thorium even if you don't actually build the reactor.
Tell me how that is going to compete 20 years from now after wind costs continue to fall every year.
> the frequencies blocked by the clouds are not the ones that PV cells are most efficient at collecting.
Uhhh, yes they are. PV is most efficient in red, and clouds block that just fine.
My panels have been going for six years now, they show a pretty much linear production with cloud percentage.
The temperature effects you note are minor in comparison, I can't even see them on my production charts, except for gross seasonable time frames.
> Wouldn't it make more sense to
Ah yes, the "makes sense" clause, which in this case means "I have no clue but I'm going to post anyway".
> shut the turbine down and spare the maintenance?
No. The marginal production cost for wind is close to zero. As opposed to, say,a gas plant, where even at idle you're still burning fuel. This has been *repeatedly* covered here on Ars.
> The answer is the subsidies.
Maybe it's different in Texas, but everywhere I'm familiar with the subsidies are in the form of tax credits and are on the order of 20% of the LCoE. In comparison, something like the nuclear industry receives about 10 times that amount of money, all of it up-front, and still isn't competitive,
Why is anyone surprised by this? A wind turbine is a generator, which all plants have, some blades, a steel pole, and a concrete base. Of course that is going to be able to compete once the learning curve kicks in. PV is even simpler, it's basically a storm window with some wiring. It doesn't even have moving parts. On a pure CAPEX basis there's no way anyone can compete.
> Frequently they underestimate owner's costs and T&D in these comparisons and only look at simplistic
> models of construction labor/material and fuel costs
Fuel costs... for solar?
> I can tell you that natural gas combined cycle plants are still far cheaper to build and run than solar or wind.
They simply are not. They are certainly competitive, but in the last two years or so the CAPEX side for PV and wind has been plummeting. Here's a reasonably up-to-date listing:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf
Look on page 11.