First, prices in Germany are not twice as high as in France (though they are significantly higher).
EdF tariffs for 2017 are 15.6 euro cents/kWh (there's a standing charge for connection). Off-peak night-time electricity is 12.7 euro cents/kWh. German electricity costs for 2017 are 28.8 euro cents/kWh (I don't know if there are any off-peak rates but given that solar renewable inputs to the grid disappear at night I doubt it).
I'd say that's close to double the French cost. It's also why Germans burn a lot of Russian gas to heat their homes while the French use nuclear non-carbon electrical heating. Sadly the cheap electricity means they tend not to insulate their homes very well since it is less cost-effective to spend the money to do so. On the upside I'd expect the French to have a faster takeup of electric cars than Germany since it will be significantly cheaper to charge them overnight using the low off-peak tariffs.
Careful though, although the price per kilowatt hour is cheap, the French government provides huge subsidies to its nuclear industry that come out of general taxation.
Careful though, although the price per kilowatt hour is extortionate, the German government provides huge subsidies to its renewables industry that come out of the consumer's pockets.
Thanks to those generous subsidies to the nuclear generators though, France is a lot greener than Germany and has been for decades. Money well spent, I say!
The Indian announcement is that they are planning to build ten pressurised heavy-water reactors, nothing to do with Westinghouse whose PWRs and BWRs are light water moderated designs. These are an indigenous Indian design similar to other HW reactors they have already built and have been operating for decades.
Whether they actually get built or not I don't know. I have a standard that any new reactor project only really exists when they start bending metal and pouring concrete on site. If the planners have permission, funding, a site etc. it's a lot more likely it will go ahead but still not guaranteed.
India just brought a new reactor on-stream, a second Russian-designed VVER-1200 PWR, in April this year but everything else still under construction is a pressurised heavy-water design (there's also a recently completed breeder reactor they hope to start up this year).
The French burn some coal to generate electricity since it's cheap, producing a few hundred MW on average. Germany burns a lot of brown coal and some anthracite (black coal) because it's cheap, to generate tens of gigawatts on average.
I get the 40GW French nuclear output figure from a near-real-time monitoring webpage at this site (which I referenced in my previous posting).
French electricity demand peaks at about 80GW in January when it's cold and dark at which time EdF attempts to have all their reactors on-line to meet the extra demand (hence the refuelling operations being scheduled during the summer). Throughout January this year they produced nearly 60GW of nuclear electricity pretty much continuously. They do burn more coal during winter in part to make up the difference.
France burns very little coal through the year to generate electricity, unlike its neighbour Germany which burns over 170 milion tonnes of mostly brown coal each year.
As for hydro yes France also gets a chunk of its electricity supply from that source, mostly from the French Pyrenees, assuming it's been raining or snowing sufficiently. They also have a small tidal barrage power station as well as some grid solar in the south of the country and some wind farms.
Right now, as I type this France's electricity demand is about 50GW. Of that 40GW is supplied by nuclear power and about 8GW comes from hydro. They are getting a grand total of 350MW from coal right now, 3GW from gas and 4.1GW from solar plus some power from other generating sources such as biomass and wind.
Yes that does add up to more than 50GW. France is exporting 3.5GW to Spain, 2.5GW to Italy, 2GW to Britain and 350MW to Switzerland while importing about 1GW from Germany. It almost always exports more electricity than it imports by a significant amount because it doesn't cost any more to keep the reactors running at full power since the fuel is cheap. Saying that they tend to refuel their reactors during the summer on a staggered basis as demand reduces so some of their nuclear capacity drops out at that time.
France has a higher demand per capita for electricity than most other European countries since their nuclear-generated electricity is cheap and so they use it for heating homes and other buildings and for industrial processes rather than burning lots of imported gas. That's why their carbon load per capita is way lower than virtually any other comparable European nation.
wind and solar energy are cheaper than other sources of energy (even without subsisdies),
If this is true why is the electricity price in green renewables Germany twice as high as their neighbour France which relies on nuclear power for nearly all of its electricity generation?
It's really weird since Germany actually generates most of its electricity from brown coal and Russian gas which is dirt-cheap.
You do realise that the years-out-of-date table of "Nuclear power plants under construction" in the Wikipedia article actually came from the World Nuclear Organisation's webpages?
China builds very few single-site reactors and the Wikipedia table only lists the start date of the first reactor on a given site -- for example Fangchenggang is going to have six reactors but the first two reactors only started construction in 2010 (they're now finished and in operation). The next two started building in December 2015 and December 2016 respectively. The final two reactors might start construction this year but it's not certain.
I took a look at Google Maps for the Fangchenggang reactor site -- the satellite view dated 2017 shows two completed reactors on the east coast of the peninsula with two more reactors under construction to the west of them (you can see the circular basemats quite clearly). Here's a picture of Fangchenggang 3 under construction:
They're not good guys but per capita is the only way to look at it since pollution and increased CO2 levels in the plantary atmosphere do not respect national boundaries. If all the CO2 the US, China, India etc. emitted stayed within their borders then fine but it doesn't and when it comes to burning coal Americans punch way above their weight individually.
If China was a dozen smaller countries, each burning 250 million tonnes of coal a year then maybe you'd have a point, but it isn't. China is still struggling to bring the benefits of modern electricity supplies to a lot of its citizens and that means, like America, burning cheap fossil fuel and like America that cheap fossil fuel tends to be coal. It's just that Americans use more electricity and other fossil fuel primary energy per capita than Chinese people do -- not so many internal air flights, fewer giant pickup trucks making long daily commutes on freeways, fewer airconditioning units etc.
The [Construction Start] listings in bold are real construction projects, concrete and metal and not just press releases and Powerpoint presentations. They have completion dates ranging from this year through 2021. I count a total of 15 reactors currently under construction which started after March 2011, the date of the Great Tohoku earthquake and the resulting explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. In addition there are six reactors which started construction before March 2011 which have still to be completed but they have not been abandoned. They did suffer from construction delays during the moratorium though.
There's a bunch more reactors in the late planning stage where approval has been given, sites selected, contracts signed and financing arranged but they're not quite at the pouring concrete and
bending metal stage so they're not counted. I expect most of those projects will actually go ahead in the future. Past that point there are even more reactor projects still in the early planning stages but it's very likely those plans will change significantly.
Nuclear was going to be big in China, but after Fukushima they cancelled anything not already started as the risk and cost became clearer.
Actually what happened was China had a moratorium on new nuclear plant projects for a couple of years after Fukushima to study what had happened, and then they restarted commissioning new reactor projects after that. Since it takes about five or six years for them to complete a 1GW reactor from scratch they're only bringing five reactors online this year, six years after the 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan caused a dip in the number of starts. They're beginning construction on eight new reactors this year though and they expect to keep that tempo up for the next decade and more.
Their planned nuclear buildout of about 300GW capacity by 2050 is still a drop in the bucket though and going forward they expect to be still deriving about 50% of their increased electricity demand from coal, albeit by burning it in less polluting and more efficient new plants.
Nyaa was/is a favourite site for foreign-language (JP and CN mainly) drama, anime and manga torrents. I don't think it or its replacement carries a lot of Western stuff.
Why SHOULD the US shoulder the responsibility, when we aren't even the worst polluter?
America burns about 3 tonnes of coal per capita each year (900 million tonnes last year for 320 million people). China burns a little over two tonnes of coal per capita each year (2.9 billion tonnes last year for 1.4 billion people). India burns about the same amount of coal as America does to supply 1.3 billion people, about half a tonne per capita.
America IS the worst polluter of the three, and that doesn't even begin to take the oil and gas the US also burns into consideration. Americans use over twice as much energy per capita as the rest of the world and much of that energy is derived from fossil fuel.
Steve never said: minimum thickness.
And he also never said: minimum number of ports.
It's just that when he was in charge the devices got slimmer and lighter and the number of ports got "simplified". The trend continues even though Steve Jobs is no longer sliding laptops into envelopes during keynotes and most people love it. Tech folks looking for expandability, flexibility, raw power etc. from Apple products are SOL.
You can get your wishlist laptop from a number of other suppliers though. What you can't get is your wishlist laptop with an Apple logo on it running OS/X (not, at least, without Hackintoshing it). Until some brave soul from Apple's Black Ops team comes running down the aisle at a keynote and throws a fat heavy powerful Apple laptop through Steve's face projected on the screen then you're one of the SOL Brigade.
Steve still runs things. Laptops have got to be slimmer and lighter than the previous generation because Steve said so. Minimum number of ports, because Steve said so. Older ports get tossed way too early in the lifecycle because Steve said so.
Maybe someday there will be a Khrushchev moment at Apple when a new guard actually stands up and says "well, you know maybe Steve wasn't perfect like we've always said and maybe we should start listening to our customers and..." but at the moment Apple is run by Steve's handpicked acolytes and they aren't going to disrespect their Godhead.
The reason Silicon Valley wants H1-B visas is that the idea of hiring someone and training them for a few years is alien to them.
Many companies have the lifespan of a mayfly and can't train properly anyone since they won't be in business in two years time. As for H1-B visas they constitute a tiny part of the total tech employment market in the US and don't noticeably depress salary levels but they're a good scapegoat for some folks who can't find that perfect 200k a year job churning out basic DBA apps for financial services, because "the Other took my job!"
At the moment China burns about 3 billion tonnes of coal a year, mostly to generate electricity. They don't burn a lot of gas right now compared to other nations. They're planning a big increase in their total generating capacity up to about 2TW and a lot of that increase is going to be fuelled by gas as they cut back on coal but they're going to emit more CO2 in total in the process because of the increase.
Right now China burns about 2 tonnes of coal per capita each year. America burns about 3 tonnes of coal per capita annually but it also burns a lot more gas and oil per capita to power their first-world economy and infrastructure, military, road and air travel etc. China wants that sort of economy and infrastructure too.
MS provides support for its products even when they have signally failed in the marketplace, like Win 10 Mobile. Contrarily folks bitch when they DON'T provide patches for old out-of-support software -- there's a current furore over a security hole in Win2003R2 Server which MS isn't patching since they stopped support for that particular version over two years ago.
Regular Win 10 runs perfectly well on phone-sized systems such as tablets without the hardware limitations of phones two generations back (ARM CPUs with one or two cores, limited memory, limited storage etc.) so Win 10 Mobile isn't really needed but there are still customers out there who do use it. It will reach EOL and support will eventually be terminated but there's no rush.
An electric car with a useful range, say 300km on a single charge requires a battery pack that will cost five thousand bucks US, minimum. Add in the cost of the rest of the car and it's not going to be cheaper new than 20-25 kbucks even for a subcompact.
The really bad news is that a battery pack's cost holds up the second-hand cost of an electric car. I can buy a usable petrol or diesel car or a small van second-hand off Gumtree or Craigslist for a thousand bucks which would last me for a year with minimum maintenance costs. Even if I had to junk it afterwards no problem, I can just go and buy another one. A lot of people buy cheap second-hand cars this way as get-to-work daily drivers.
An electric car with a decent battery able to travel even 200km on a single charge will cost several thousand bucks so they'll never be cheap enough for less-affluent folks to buy second-hand.
But some of the things they're trying are just so new that unexpected failure modes are bound to appear.
It would have been better for them if detecting the unexpected failure mode of supercooled LOX penetration of the carbon fibre windings on the helium bottle had been done on the ground in a test rig rather than in a complete stack on the launch pad. That's what testing in aerospace is meant to do and part of the reason launches are so expensive.
SpaceX is now required by launch customers to carry out hotfire tests without the payload being integrated -- this means the launch vehicle has to be rolled out to the pad, hotfired then returned to an integration facility, have the payload installed and then the completed stack rolled out to the pad again. This adds extra costs in time and money to a launch. It may be that in the future, after racking up a number of trouble-free launches their customers will opt for the cheaper option of integration/rollout/hotfire/launch but for now the cost of the extended procedure is going to have to be eaten, probably by SpaceX. Thorough testing might have been cheaper in the long run.
SpaceX isn't doing the rocket business the way other rocket builders do. That's a plus and also a minus on their part.
In this case they tried something new, supercooling the fuel and oxidiser to improve launch performance. Older fuddy-duddy rocket builders, if they decided to try this sort of thing would spend a couple of years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying the concept out, building prototypes, testing them to destruction and analysing the parts microscopically to see what happened to them. SpaceX did the equivalent of compiling the code and running a few unit tests and when nothing broke they beta-tested it with a paying customer's payload on top. Oops.
A previous launch failure was due to a third-party strut failing under load -- again SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility. This is something the older rocket builders do as a matter of course with the customer paying for it in the launch pricetag.
They're learning their lessons but it's costing them money, time and more importantly reputation. More rigorous testing will push the price of launches up and that eats into their low-cost launch niche while other contenders with proven track records of not cutting corners are pushing down into that market bracket (ISRO for one).
Turn that around. When has Microsoft actively killed a tool that was highly depended upon in enterprise without offering an alternative?
Small Business Server (SBS). It was cannibalising sales of their more expensive low-end server offerings so it had do go despite being just the job for man-and-a-dog companies. Of course some might say that businesses like Joe's Garage isn't "enterprise"...
Near as I could figure it, Fraunhofer doesn't do coal, they only offer renewables (solar and wind) so it's not relevant. Here's a result from Google showing in chart form the last ten years or so of German electricity production (2005 - 2014):
Over the ten year period shown in the first chart non-carbon-emitting green nuclear production is down, renewable production is up and CO2-emitting coal and lignite production is not changing very much. The lowest production was in 2008 and 2009 during a world-wide recession.
As I said before, the non-carbon nuclear supply (currently about 95 TWh) is going away totally by government diktat in 2023. The projected increase in renewables will probably cover that loss in generating capacity (although renewables aren't a good replacement for baseload generation without lots of expensive storage or backstop fossil-carbon gas CCGT) but it means Germany will be still burning lignite in ten years time at the same rate it does today to keep the lights on. It's either that or freeze in the dark.
There is zero evidence that Germany plans to abandon burning lignite any time this century, never mind 2040 or 2060. There have been lots of fanciful announcements about renewables taking over and the end of fossil CO2 emissions but the facts don't agree. Ten years ago Germany generated about 40% of its electricity from coal and lignite, about 290 TWhrs. In 2015 it generated about 40% of its electricity from coal and lignite, about 270 TWhrs. The increase in renewables generation over that period has been balanced by a reduction in nuclear non-carbon baseload generation, from about 25% to 15%. That 15% is going away totally by 2023 when the last nuclear power station will be closed by government order. Either the Germans spend a lot more on building out their renewable fleet, improving their grid to handle the fluctuating supply, add large amounts of storage and start replacing their first-generation wind turbines and solar installations which are reaching end-of-life, or they burn more lignite. My bet is on the latter.
Germany has no intention of eliminating fossil fuel burning in the near or even the far future. At the moment they generate 40% of their electricity demand from coal and lignite. They *hope* to have reduced their coal and lignite consumption by 2050 but it's a big industry and employer, and they have billions of tonnes of extractable lignite resources within their own borders so it's not going to disappear completely. They have legislated the shutdown of their non-fossil nuclear power plants by 2023 and that means they will have to find another 15% or so of replacement generating capacity when that happens. A lot of that coming shortfall could be covered by burning more coal.
Slashdot Mirror
First, prices in Germany are not twice as high as in France (though they are significantly higher).
EdF tariffs for 2017 are 15.6 euro cents/kWh (there's a standing charge for connection). Off-peak night-time electricity is 12.7 euro cents/kWh. German electricity costs for 2017 are 28.8 euro cents/kWh (I don't know if there are any off-peak rates but given that solar renewable inputs to the grid disappear at night I doubt it).
I'd say that's close to double the French cost. It's also why Germans burn a lot of Russian gas to heat their homes while the French use nuclear non-carbon electrical heating. Sadly the cheap electricity means they tend not to insulate their homes very well since it is less cost-effective to spend the money to do so. On the upside I'd expect the French to have a faster takeup of electric cars than Germany since it will be significantly cheaper to charge them overnight using the low off-peak tariffs.
Careful though, although the price per kilowatt hour is cheap, the French government provides huge subsidies to its nuclear industry that come out of general taxation.
Careful though, although the price per kilowatt hour is extortionate, the German government provides huge subsidies to its renewables industry that come out of the consumer's pockets.
Thanks to those generous subsidies to the nuclear generators though, France is a lot greener than Germany and has been for decades. Money well spent, I say!
Carbon per capita in 2016
France 5.75 tonnes
Germany 9.06 tonnes
The Indian announcement is that they are planning to build ten pressurised heavy-water reactors, nothing to do with Westinghouse whose PWRs and BWRs are light water moderated designs. These are an indigenous Indian design similar to other HW reactors they have already built and have been operating for decades.
Whether they actually get built or not I don't know. I have a standard that any new reactor project only really exists when they start bending metal and pouring concrete on site. If the planners have permission, funding, a site etc. it's a lot more likely it will go ahead but still not guaranteed.
India just brought a new reactor on-stream, a second Russian-designed VVER-1200 PWR, in April this year but everything else still under construction is a pressurised heavy-water design (there's also a recently completed breeder reactor they hope to start up this year).
The French burn some coal to generate electricity since it's cheap, producing a few hundred MW on average. Germany burns a lot of brown coal and some anthracite (black coal) because it's cheap, to generate tens of gigawatts on average.
I get the 40GW French nuclear output figure from a near-real-time monitoring webpage at this site (which I referenced in my previous posting).
http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk...
French electricity demand peaks at about 80GW in January when it's cold and dark at which time EdF attempts to have all their reactors on-line to meet the extra demand (hence the refuelling operations being scheduled during the summer). Throughout January this year they produced nearly 60GW of nuclear electricity pretty much continuously. They do burn more coal during winter in part to make up the difference.
Which part of "for nearly all" did you miss?
France burns very little coal through the year to generate electricity, unlike its neighbour Germany which burns over 170 milion tonnes of mostly brown coal each year.
As for hydro yes France also gets a chunk of its electricity supply from that source, mostly from the French Pyrenees, assuming it's been raining or snowing sufficiently. They also have a small tidal barrage power station as well as some grid solar in the south of the country and some wind farms.
Right now, as I type this France's electricity demand is about 50GW. Of that 40GW is supplied by nuclear power and about 8GW comes from hydro. They are getting a grand total of 350MW from coal right now, 3GW from gas and 4.1GW from solar plus some power from other generating sources such as biomass and wind.
http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk...
Yes that does add up to more than 50GW. France is exporting 3.5GW to Spain, 2.5GW to Italy, 2GW to Britain and 350MW to Switzerland while importing about 1GW from Germany. It almost always exports more electricity than it imports by a significant amount because it doesn't cost any more to keep the reactors running at full power since the fuel is cheap. Saying that they tend to refuel their reactors during the summer on a staggered basis as demand reduces so some of their nuclear capacity drops out at that time.
France has a higher demand per capita for electricity than most other European countries since their nuclear-generated electricity is cheap and so they use it for heating homes and other buildings and for industrial processes rather than burning lots of imported gas. That's why their carbon load per capita is way lower than virtually any other comparable European nation.
wind and solar energy are cheaper than other sources of energy (even without subsisdies),
If this is true why is the electricity price in green renewables Germany twice as high as their neighbour France which relies on nuclear power for nearly all of its electricity generation?
It's really weird since Germany actually generates most of its electricity from brown coal and Russian gas which is dirt-cheap.
You do realise that the years-out-of-date table of "Nuclear power plants under construction" in the Wikipedia article actually came from the World Nuclear Organisation's webpages?
China builds very few single-site reactors and the Wikipedia table only lists the start date of the first reactor on a given site -- for example Fangchenggang is going to have six reactors but the first two reactors only started construction in 2010 (they're now finished and in operation). The next two started building in December 2015 and December 2016 respectively. The final two reactors might start construction this year but it's not certain.
I took a look at Google Maps for the Fangchenggang reactor site -- the satellite view dated 2017 shows two completed reactors on the east coast of the peninsula with two more reactors under construction to the west of them (you can see the circular basemats quite clearly). Here's a picture of Fangchenggang 3 under construction:
http://www.power-technology.co...
They're not good guys but per capita is the only way to look at it since pollution and increased CO2 levels in the plantary atmosphere do not respect national boundaries. If all the CO2 the US, China, India etc. emitted stayed within their borders then fine but it doesn't and when it comes to burning coal Americans punch way above their weight individually.
If China was a dozen smaller countries, each burning 250 million tonnes of coal a year then maybe you'd have a point, but it isn't. China is still struggling to bring the benefits of modern electricity supplies to a lot of its citizens and that means, like America, burning cheap fossil fuel and like America that cheap fossil fuel tends to be coal. It's just that Americans use more electricity and other fossil fuel primary energy per capita than Chinese people do -- not so many internal air flights, fewer giant pickup trucks making long daily commutes on freeways, fewer airconditioning units etc.
The plans are not back on, they are only finishing sites that had progressed before the accident.
Do you really believe that? Weird...
You can find a list of nuclear power reactors which started construction in China after Fukushima here, about halfway down the page.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
The [Construction Start] listings in bold are real construction projects, concrete and metal and not just press releases and Powerpoint presentations. They have completion dates ranging from this year through 2021. I count a total of 15 reactors currently under construction which started after March 2011, the date of the Great Tohoku earthquake and the resulting explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. In addition there are six reactors which started construction before March 2011 which have still to be completed but they have not been abandoned. They did suffer from construction delays during the moratorium though.
There's a bunch more reactors in the late planning stage where approval has been given, sites selected, contracts signed and financing arranged but they're not quite at the pouring concrete and bending metal stage so they're not counted. I expect most of those projects will actually go ahead in the future. Past that point there are even more reactor projects still in the early planning stages but it's very likely those plans will change significantly.
Nuclear was going to be big in China, but after Fukushima they cancelled anything not already started as the risk and cost became clearer.
Actually what happened was China had a moratorium on new nuclear plant projects for a couple of years after Fukushima to study what had happened, and then they restarted commissioning new reactor projects after that. Since it takes about five or six years for them to complete a 1GW reactor from scratch they're only bringing five reactors online this year, six years after the 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan caused a dip in the number of starts. They're beginning construction on eight new reactors this year though and they expect to keep that tempo up for the next decade and more.
Their planned nuclear buildout of about 300GW capacity by 2050 is still a drop in the bucket though and going forward they expect to be still deriving about 50% of their increased electricity demand from coal, albeit by burning it in less polluting and more efficient new plants.
Nyaa was/is a favourite site for foreign-language (JP and CN mainly) drama, anime and manga torrents. I don't think it or its replacement carries a lot of Western stuff.
Why SHOULD the US shoulder the responsibility, when we aren't even the worst polluter?
America burns about 3 tonnes of coal per capita each year (900 million tonnes last year for 320 million people). China burns a little over two tonnes of coal per capita each year (2.9 billion tonnes last year for 1.4 billion people). India burns about the same amount of coal as America does to supply 1.3 billion people, about half a tonne per capita.
America IS the worst polluter of the three, and that doesn't even begin to take the oil and gas the US also burns into consideration. Americans use over twice as much energy per capita as the rest of the world and much of that energy is derived from fossil fuel.
Steve never said: minimum thickness. And he also never said: minimum number of ports.
It's just that when he was in charge the devices got slimmer and lighter and the number of ports got "simplified". The trend continues even though Steve Jobs is no longer sliding laptops into envelopes during keynotes and most people love it. Tech folks looking for expandability, flexibility, raw power etc. from Apple products are SOL.
You can get your wishlist laptop from a number of other suppliers though. What you can't get is your wishlist laptop with an Apple logo on it running OS/X (not, at least, without Hackintoshing it). Until some brave soul from Apple's Black Ops team comes running down the aisle at a keynote and throws a fat heavy powerful Apple laptop through Steve's face projected on the screen then you're one of the SOL Brigade.
Intel's higher-end Xeons can have as many as 22 cores (E5-2699 Broadwell) with 44 threads per socket. All they cost is money.
It just worked. .... Back when Steve ran things.
Steve still runs things. Laptops have got to be slimmer and lighter than the previous generation because Steve said so. Minimum number of ports, because Steve said so. Older ports get tossed way too early in the lifecycle because Steve said so.
Maybe someday there will be a Khrushchev moment at Apple when a new guard actually stands up and says "well, you know maybe Steve wasn't perfect like we've always said and maybe we should start listening to our customers and..." but at the moment Apple is run by Steve's handpicked acolytes and they aren't going to disrespect their Godhead.
The reason Silicon Valley wants H1-B visas is that the idea of hiring someone and training them for a few years is alien to them.
Many companies have the lifespan of a mayfly and can't train properly anyone since they won't be in business in two years time. As for H1-B visas they constitute a tiny part of the total tech employment market in the US and don't noticeably depress salary levels but they're a good scapegoat for some folks who can't find that perfect 200k a year job churning out basic DBA apps for financial services, because "the Other took my job!"
Note the phrase "coal equivalent".
At the moment China burns about 3 billion tonnes of coal a year, mostly to generate electricity. They don't burn a lot of gas right now compared to other nations. They're planning a big increase in their total generating capacity up to about 2TW and a lot of that increase is going to be fuelled by gas as they cut back on coal but they're going to emit more CO2 in total in the process because of the increase.
Right now China burns about 2 tonnes of coal per capita each year. America burns about 3 tonnes of coal per capita annually but it also burns a lot more gas and oil per capita to power their first-world economy and infrastructure, military, road and air travel etc. China wants that sort of economy and infrastructure too.
MS provides support for its products even when they have signally failed in the marketplace, like Win 10 Mobile. Contrarily folks bitch when they DON'T provide patches for old out-of-support software -- there's a current furore over a security hole in Win2003R2 Server which MS isn't patching since they stopped support for that particular version over two years ago.
Regular Win 10 runs perfectly well on phone-sized systems such as tablets without the hardware limitations of phones two generations back (ARM CPUs with one or two cores, limited memory, limited storage etc.) so Win 10 Mobile isn't really needed but there are still customers out there who do use it. It will reach EOL and support will eventually be terminated but there's no rush.
An electric car with a useful range, say 300km on a single charge requires a battery pack that will cost five thousand bucks US, minimum. Add in the cost of the rest of the car and it's not going to be cheaper new than 20-25 kbucks even for a subcompact.
The really bad news is that a battery pack's cost holds up the second-hand cost of an electric car. I can buy a usable petrol or diesel car or a small van second-hand off Gumtree or Craigslist for a thousand bucks which would last me for a year with minimum maintenance costs. Even if I had to junk it afterwards no problem, I can just go and buy another one. A lot of people buy cheap second-hand cars this way as get-to-work daily drivers.
An electric car with a decent battery able to travel even 200km on a single charge will cost several thousand bucks so they'll never be cheap enough for less-affluent folks to buy second-hand.
But some of the things they're trying are just so new that unexpected failure modes are bound to appear.
It would have been better for them if detecting the unexpected failure mode of supercooled LOX penetration of the carbon fibre windings on the helium bottle had been done on the ground in a test rig rather than in a complete stack on the launch pad. That's what testing in aerospace is meant to do and part of the reason launches are so expensive.
SpaceX is now required by launch customers to carry out hotfire tests without the payload being integrated -- this means the launch vehicle has to be rolled out to the pad, hotfired then returned to an integration facility, have the payload installed and then the completed stack rolled out to the pad again. This adds extra costs in time and money to a launch. It may be that in the future, after racking up a number of trouble-free launches their customers will opt for the cheaper option of integration/rollout/hotfire/launch but for now the cost of the extended procedure is going to have to be eaten, probably by SpaceX. Thorough testing might have been cheaper in the long run.
SpaceX isn't doing the rocket business the way other rocket builders do. That's a plus and also a minus on their part.
In this case they tried something new, supercooling the fuel and oxidiser to improve launch performance. Older fuddy-duddy rocket builders, if they decided to try this sort of thing would spend a couple of years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying the concept out, building prototypes, testing them to destruction and analysing the parts microscopically to see what happened to them. SpaceX did the equivalent of compiling the code and running a few unit tests and when nothing broke they beta-tested it with a paying customer's payload on top. Oops.
A previous launch failure was due to a third-party strut failing under load -- again SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility. This is something the older rocket builders do as a matter of course with the customer paying for it in the launch pricetag.
They're learning their lessons but it's costing them money, time and more importantly reputation. More rigorous testing will push the price of launches up and that eats into their low-cost launch niche while other contenders with proven track records of not cutting corners are pushing down into that market bracket (ISRO for one).
Turn that around. When has Microsoft actively killed a tool that was highly depended upon in enterprise without offering an alternative?
Small Business Server (SBS). It was cannibalising sales of their more expensive low-end server offerings so it had do go despite being just the job for man-and-a-dog companies. Of course some might say that businesses like Joe's Garage isn't "enterprise"...
Near as I could figure it, Fraunhofer doesn't do coal, they only offer renewables (solar and wind) so it's not relevant. Here's a result from Google showing in chart form the last ten years or so of German electricity production (2005 - 2014):
http://energytransition.de/201...
Over the ten year period shown in the first chart non-carbon-emitting green nuclear production is down, renewable production is up and CO2-emitting coal and lignite production is not changing very much. The lowest production was in 2008 and 2009 during a world-wide recession.
As I said before, the non-carbon nuclear supply (currently about 95 TWh) is going away totally by government diktat in 2023. The projected increase in renewables will probably cover that loss in generating capacity (although renewables aren't a good replacement for baseload generation without lots of expensive storage or backstop fossil-carbon gas CCGT) but it means Germany will be still burning lignite in ten years time at the same rate it does today to keep the lights on. It's either that or freeze in the dark.
There is zero evidence that Germany plans to abandon burning lignite any time this century, never mind 2040 or 2060. There have been lots of fanciful announcements about renewables taking over and the end of fossil CO2 emissions but the facts don't agree. Ten years ago Germany generated about 40% of its electricity from coal and lignite, about 290 TWhrs. In 2015 it generated about 40% of its electricity from coal and lignite, about 270 TWhrs. The increase in renewables generation over that period has been balanced by a reduction in nuclear non-carbon baseload generation, from about 25% to 15%. That 15% is going away totally by 2023 when the last nuclear power station will be closed by government order. Either the Germans spend a lot more on building out their renewable fleet, improving their grid to handle the fluctuating supply, add large amounts of storage and start replacing their first-generation wind turbines and solar installations which are reaching end-of-life, or they burn more lignite. My bet is on the latter.
Germany has no intention of eliminating fossil fuel burning in the near or even the far future. At the moment they generate 40% of their electricity demand from coal and lignite. They *hope* to have reduced their coal and lignite consumption by 2050 but it's a big industry and employer, and they have billions of tonnes of extractable lignite resources within their own borders so it's not going to disappear completely. They have legislated the shutdown of their non-fossil nuclear power plants by 2023 and that means they will have to find another 15% or so of replacement generating capacity when that happens. A lot of that coming shortfall could be covered by burning more coal.