Think of a three guys assembling a car vs. Henry Ford's assembly line: very little high tech, but very much economies of scale.
I agree, over a hundred years ago economies of scale were not so technologically focused (though, I feel there is a strong argument that the assembly line, itself, is a technology that only makes sense at a certain volume, but I digress. ..). Do you have any examples more recent than a century ago? Sure, there are volume discounts, financing cost reductions, etc. . . but technology related CapEx is by far #1 these days. At least for similarly quickly advancing technologies (solar, wind, portable computing, etc. ..).
How much of that is snazzy cutting edge tech, and how much is existing tech at much higher economies of scale?
I don't know if you can separate "cutting edge tech" from "economies of scale." Economies of scale allow you to economically adopt technologies for production that could never have been used before (i.e. "cutting edge") due to limited scale. Think of a dozen guys putting together a car vs a robotic production line. The biggest gains these day's from economies of scale ARE technological (think volumes reaching a point that make "automation" worth it). Generally speaking, economies of scale results in the increase of the potential ROI in bringing new tech to market, regardless of what "type" of tech (snazzy?) that is.
Asked a different way, what do the kW/kg and time-to-charge curves look like?
Hasn't Tesla put to rest kW/kg and time-to-charge for vehicles? The Model S has comparable range as an ICE, so why do we need more kW/kg at this point (unless you are thinking of air travel)? Also, do you refill your car everyday with gas? Why bother charging outside when you can just charge while you sleep (all you need is enough range to last one day and you never have to even think "gotta fill her up. .." as this happens while you are sleeping). Accordingly, kWh/$ is the only thing that matters for vehicles at this point and it is coming down very quickly. Stationary applications have the additional "# of cycles over life" factor, which is also increasing quite nicely.
Consequently, battery tech is moving super fast (again, point me to something besides solar or wind that is moving faster) and in the areas that are most important.
You must live in one of those sad, sad places that does not yet have a super charger network (seems to match well with your attitude towards EVs. ..). . . JFYI, it takes me about ~10min on average to charge to where I need to go from a super charger.
Of course, 99% of the time I do not even have to worry about charging away from home because I rarely drive that far. For road trips, I rent a car. For home improvement projects, I rent a truck.
Maybe some will see this as inconvenient, but for me it is totally worth it at its current price. I especially feel this way when I watch you ICE-agers slowly roll forward (Barney Rubble style) after a green light in my rear-view mirror. . . totally priceless. . .
The Nissan Leaf is one of the cheapest cars you can get that can blow away most other cars when accelerating from 0 to "legal in-town speed."
If your commute involves stop lights and changing lanes, it is super fun to drive and a bargain. The general public still seems oblivious to its acceleration, which adds to the fun when you quietly blow past them when they try to cut you off in a "funny looking car" (while their ICE wails in futile protest. ..)
Someone who has learned enough economics to use terms like "diminishing return" should also have been taught that knowledge capital does not apply. Does lighting someone else's candle diminish your own lit candle? It is as if you are saying that water boils at 100 C, so evaporation can only occur at 100 C. I could go to the trouble to explain/prove everything myself, or I could just point you to the textbook ("Authority") saying otherwise for brevity. At the end of the day, the onerous is on you to prove that generally accepted facts and theories are wrong.
If you could go back in time and ask people in the early 20th century what the early 21st century would be like I think they'd be surprised not by all of the technology that looks like magic to them, but with how little has really changed.
Thanks, this goes back to my point of, "If they are so advanced, then where are their giant horses!?" Technological advances have occurred in the most important areas for them to occur. That people have failed to realize where these were going to be in the past is merely a testament of their limited knowledge/foresight and says nothing of the technological progress that has taken place. Your comment here says more about yourself than anything else.
Some technologies (like nuclear) are extremely centralized, government regulated, and monopolistic. Then there are technologies that are on the opposite spectrum.
The latter is improving exponentially
.
I think many of us like to be wildly optimistic about the speed of technological and scientific advances because our own lifespans are so short.
So you think if people lived 1,000 years, they would not be blown away by how quickly things have changed in the last. . . 2% of their lifetimes!"
I am amazed how opposite I see your points as being. . . One of us must suffer from logic dyslexia. . . Are you sure this is not some kind of ruse to prove my point with a flawed anti-thesis?
To not want large amounts of energy to do things requires us to be not just wrong about basic physics
Actually, as we get better at technology, we are able to do A LOT more with LESS (e.g. LEDs, SSD, night vision genetically engineered eyes, etc. ..). Anyway, I think a lot of this is "if there are greater beings than us, then where are their giant horses!?" nonsense. . .
Face it, we really are not as advanced as we think we are. . . Which means we can try to make great points in this discussion, but they might as well be monkey grunts when it comes to truly solving this problem. We just need better tech . . . : (
Fortunately, we are advancing very quickly . . . : )
The simplest explanation seems to be that technology is exponential. Civilizations have an extremely short slice of history where they can start influencing things at a global scale before they become godlike and impossible to detect.
We currently lack the technology to detect civilizations that are not global yet and cannot detect gods, hence, the universe looks empty to us right now. . .
If you CAN create a Dyson Sphere, you probably no longer NEED a Dyson Sphere. Are we trying to genetically engineer giant horses to pull our horse buggies faster?
You are arguing that France is wasting money on the project, itself, but it seems you should be arguing that France wastes orders of magnitude more of that every year on PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERS! What idiots! Instead of paying professionals, they could have just come to/. and had a bunch of free (in cost and time) smart asses do all the HARD SCIENCE to confirm whether or not the project is feasible ('cause, you DO have actual data supporting your points above and not just a soar asshole from rigorous "fact" extraction to show for your post, right!?)!
As with many things, comparing anything else but cost and generation output between the two projects results in a pretty absurd comparison. . .
ITER is planned to produce net 450MW output at, so far, 14B USD cost. Keep in mind, that is ALL or NOTHING. That is a pretty low bar for the roadway to beat. . . AND, the roadway can be stopped at any time (10km not performing as expected. . . uhm. . . guess we'll stop here. . . ), so the opportunity cost is massively different.
That is the great thing about tech like solar and wind. You can do absurd things on the cheap in an industry used to throwing away ten of BILLIONS at a time! There is absolutely no comparison. This is like cell phones kicking the ass of landlines. The economics of the industry have changed and so swiftly that the armchair experts are still arguing yesterday's talking points. . .
Humanity also could build a carriages being polled by ants and us that instead cars. Jus it doesn't mean it's a good idea, or should be done . ..
Unlike the absurdity you posted, building-integrated photovoltaics is a legitimate technology with obvious advantages. If power generation could be easily and cheaply combined with conventional construction technologies, the reduced costs and ecological impacts would be immense. Your treating this technology like some kind of absurd magic reveals nothing but your unabated ignorance of said technology.
. . . , especially from everyone's public money.
How the hell do you expect to be able to modify public roads without public money? The very nature of such a project requires it to be public. Maybe you are against public roads?
Sorry, Anon. . . TLDR; . . . Except for the first sentence. . . go create an account and I might read the rest of your post one day.
This money could be better spent researching THE MATERIALS
Oh, just like how the conventional solar industry has started booming because everyone focused 100% on material research alone instead of economies of scale? Except that is exactly what did NOT happen!? It was the economies of scale that created the virtuous cycle of innovation and up scaling we are seeing today. NOT the Ivory Tower. . .
Solar power is incredibly cheap, decentralized, and easy to access. Treating it like another Ivory Tower technology like fusion is exactly the WRONG approach. It is SOOOO much cheaper than other energy projects that trying all sorts of crazy, bold things with it is exactly what is and should be happening.
Seriously, of all the things to be bitching about in the world, this project seems like it should be low on the list, yet/.ers are foaming at the mouths by the look of the top comments right now. Even if this project is destined to failure, do you actually believe humanity will never, ever be able to capture solar energy from roads? Well, if you admit it might be possible one day, then guess what? It is going to take projects like this one failing to eventually get there (or did you think technological progress hatches like a magic egg if you wait long enough?).
A project like this is NOTHING compared to the money spent on fusion so far. Is it actually any more of a long shot than fusion? Seems like people who have trouble prioritizing their bitching list should not be so critical of how others are prioritizing their long shot energy projects. Besides, this has nothing to do with the project, and you are just blowing off steam because it is Sunday, and you couldn't get a date on Saturday night, AGAIN, right?
If only people could get rich off of pissing all over someone else's idea. . ./.ers could finally move out of their parents' basements and stop being such bitter a-holes. . .
I thought I was in trouble because I needed to get to my project's wiki for some reference info during the outage and then I remembered that I had done a git pull on the wiki not too long ago.
Well, in the first scenario you are only using 21% of the original amount of electricity for the same amount of light. In the second scenario, you are only using using ~24.8% (5.2/21) of the electricity used with the previous technology for the same amount of light. That is a comparable impact.
If you had read my link on the "Rebound Effect," you would know that the fear I am addressing is that lighting technology that uses less electricity will just increase the overall use of electricity used for lighting because now people will use a lot more of it (> 5x more). My argument is that even if that happened by their prediction date of 2030 (so lighting use would be 5x the use of today), we could reduce it again to roughly ~1/5. So though the savings per bulb is a lot less, the assumption is that there are 5x more bulbs existing at that point.
Of course, there are other arguments against the LED rebound effect. For instance, since I switched to LEDs I have installed almost 2 dozen yard lights and several security lights. However, each one is solar powered, so even though my lighting use has increased dramatically due to LEDs, my additional use has had not increased my demand on electricity at all.
This is why I have trouble giving much weight to those warning about an LED rebound effect. I read somewhere that the authors of a paper on the LED rebound effect had to push out their prediction date (from 2015 to 2030).
The thing is, in 15 years we will be replacing old LEDs (which get around ~80 lumens/watt) with new LED technology (theoretically, ~300 lumens/watt). The impact will probably be comparable to replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs today.
I suppose in 30 years we will just have engineered our eyes to work flawlessly without any artificial lighting . . .:p
Slashdot Mirror
Think of a three guys assembling a car vs. Henry Ford's assembly line: very little high tech, but very much economies of scale.
I agree, over a hundred years ago economies of scale were not so technologically focused (though, I feel there is a strong argument that the assembly line, itself, is a technology that only makes sense at a certain volume, but I digress. . .). Do you have any examples more recent than a century ago? Sure, there are volume discounts, financing cost reductions, etc. . . but technology related CapEx is by far #1 these days. At least for similarly quickly advancing technologies (solar, wind, portable computing, etc. . .).
How much of that is snazzy cutting edge tech, and how much is existing tech at much higher economies of scale?
I don't know if you can separate "cutting edge tech" from "economies of scale." Economies of scale allow you to economically adopt technologies for production that could never have been used before (i.e. "cutting edge") due to limited scale. Think of a dozen guys putting together a car vs a robotic production line. The biggest gains these day's from economies of scale ARE technological (think volumes reaching a point that make "automation" worth it). Generally speaking, economies of scale results in the increase of the potential ROI in bringing new tech to market, regardless of what "type" of tech (snazzy?) that is.
Asked a different way, what do the kW/kg and time-to-charge curves look like?
Hasn't Tesla put to rest kW/kg and time-to-charge for vehicles? The Model S has comparable range as an ICE, so why do we need more kW/kg at this point (unless you are thinking of air travel)? Also, do you refill your car everyday with gas? Why bother charging outside when you can just charge while you sleep (all you need is enough range to last one day and you never have to even think "gotta fill her up. . ." as this happens while you are sleeping). Accordingly, kWh/$ is the only thing that matters for vehicles at this point and it is coming down very quickly. Stationary applications have the additional "# of cycles over life" factor, which is also increasing quite nicely.
Consequently, battery tech is moving super fast (again, point me to something besides solar or wind that is moving faster) and in the areas that are most important.
Slashdot is not for you. . .
Are you sure that you are jaded or just willfully ignorant?
Show me another technology (besides wind and solar power) that has improved this quickly in the last 10 years.
You must live in one of those sad, sad places that does not yet have a super charger network (seems to match well with your attitude towards EVs. . .). . . JFYI, it takes me about ~10min on average to charge to where I need to go from a super charger.
Of course, 99% of the time I do not even have to worry about charging away from home because I rarely drive that far. For road trips, I rent a car. For home improvement projects, I rent a truck.
Maybe some will see this as inconvenient, but for me it is totally worth it at its current price. I especially feel this way when I watch you ICE-agers slowly roll forward (Barney Rubble style) after a green light in my rear-view mirror. . . totally priceless. . .
There haven't been any significant improvements in the speed of serial information processing in nearly a decade
Yes, let's write off the latest decade of humanity being at its technological pinnacle because did not meet fanboy expectations.
/. and fanboy sour grapes. . .
What is it about
The Nissan Leaf is one of the cheapest cars you can get that can blow away most other cars when accelerating from 0 to "legal in-town speed."
.)
If your commute involves stop lights and changing lanes, it is super fun to drive and a bargain. The general public still seems oblivious to its acceleration, which adds to the fun when you quietly blow past them when they try to cut you off in a "funny looking car" (while their ICE wails in futile protest. .
Your link doesn't really back up your claim. . .
Someone who has learned enough economics to use terms like "diminishing return" should also have been taught that knowledge capital does not apply. Does lighting someone else's candle diminish your own lit candle? It is as if you are saying that water boils at 100 C, so evaporation can only occur at 100 C. I could go to the trouble to explain/prove everything myself, or I could just point you to the textbook ("Authority") saying otherwise for brevity. At the end of the day, the onerous is on you to prove that generally accepted facts and theories are wrong.
If you could go back in time and ask people in the early 20th century what the early 21st century would be like I think they'd be surprised not by all of the technology that looks like magic to them, but with how little has really changed.
Thanks, this goes back to my point of, "If they are so advanced, then where are their giant horses!?" Technological advances have occurred in the most important areas for them to occur. That people have failed to realize where these were going to be in the past is merely a testament of their limited knowledge/foresight and says nothing of the technological progress that has taken place. Your comment here says more about yourself than anything else.
Some technologies (like nuclear) are extremely centralized, government regulated, and monopolistic. Then there are technologies that are on the opposite spectrum. The latter is improving exponentially .
I personally suspect that the law of diminishing returns applies to scientific and technological advancement. . .
The economists who actually "invented" the concept of "diminishing returns" do not agree with you that it also applies to "knowledge capital."
I think many of us like to be wildly optimistic about the speed of technological and scientific advances because our own lifespans are so short.
So you think if people lived 1,000 years, they would not be blown away by how quickly things have changed in the last. . . 2% of their lifetimes!"
I am amazed how opposite I see your points as being. . . One of us must suffer from logic dyslexia. . . Are you sure this is not some kind of ruse to prove my point with a flawed anti-thesis?
To not want large amounts of energy to do things requires us to be not just wrong about basic physics
Actually, as we get better at technology, we are able to do A LOT more with LESS (e.g. LEDs, SSD, night vision genetically engineered eyes, etc. . .). Anyway, I think a lot of this is "if there are greater beings than us, then where are their giant horses!?" nonsense. . .
Face it, we really are not as advanced as we think we are. . . Which means we can try to make great points in this discussion, but they might as well be monkey grunts when it comes to truly solving this problem. We just need better tech . . . : (
Fortunately, we are advancing very quickly . . . : )
The simplest explanation seems to be that technology is exponential. Civilizations have an extremely short slice of history where they can start influencing things at a global scale before they become godlike and impossible to detect.
We currently lack the technology to detect civilizations that are not global yet and cannot detect gods, hence, the universe looks empty to us right now. . .
If you CAN create a Dyson Sphere, you probably no longer NEED a Dyson Sphere. Are we trying to genetically engineer giant horses to pull our horse buggies faster?
Personally, I have been advocating phasing out coal in favor of nuclear for over 40 years
Maybe simply advocating is not enough?
Can you prove that the exact same thing is not happening to an even greater extent (due to the higher costs involved ) with fusion projects?
You are arguing that France is wasting money on the project, itself, but it seems you should be arguing that France wastes orders of magnitude more of that every year on PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERS! What idiots! Instead of paying professionals, they could have just come to /. and had a bunch of free (in cost and time) smart asses do all the HARD SCIENCE to confirm whether or not the project is feasible ('cause, you DO have actual data supporting your points above and not just a soar asshole from rigorous "fact" extraction to show for your post, right!?)!
As with many things, comparing anything else but cost and generation output between the two projects results in a pretty absurd comparison. . .
ITER is planned to produce net 450MW output at, so far, 14B USD cost. Keep in mind, that is ALL or NOTHING. That is a pretty low bar for the roadway to beat. . . AND, the roadway can be stopped at any time (10km not performing as expected. . . uhm. . . guess we'll stop here. . . ), so the opportunity cost is massively different.
That is the great thing about tech like solar and wind. You can do absurd things on the cheap in an industry used to throwing away ten of BILLIONS at a time! There is absolutely no comparison. This is like cell phones kicking the ass of landlines. The economics of the industry have changed and so swiftly that the armchair experts are still arguing yesterday's talking points. . .
Really, so you are saying it is cheaper to power the lights in my yard with little coal, oil, and natural gas power generators?
We are talking total project costs, not unit costs. Maybe you will figure out the difference after you figure out how to create an account?
Humanity also could build a carriages being polled by ants and us that instead cars. Jus it doesn't mean it's a good idea, or should be done . . .
Unlike the absurdity you posted, building-integrated photovoltaics is a legitimate technology with obvious advantages. If power generation could be easily and cheaply combined with conventional construction technologies, the reduced costs and ecological impacts would be immense. Your treating this technology like some kind of absurd magic reveals nothing but your unabated ignorance of said technology.
. . . , especially from everyone's public money.
How the hell do you expect to be able to modify public roads without public money? The very nature of such a project requires it to be public. Maybe you are against public roads?
This money could be better spent researching THE MATERIALS
Oh, just like how the conventional solar industry has started booming because everyone focused 100% on material research alone instead of economies of scale? Except that is exactly what did NOT happen!? It was the economies of scale that created the virtuous cycle of innovation and up scaling we are seeing today. NOT the Ivory Tower. . .
Solar power is incredibly cheap, decentralized, and easy to access. Treating it like another Ivory Tower technology like fusion is exactly the WRONG approach. It is SOOOO much cheaper than other energy projects that trying all sorts of crazy, bold things with it is exactly what is and should be happening.
Seriously, of all the things to be bitching about in the world, this project seems like it should be low on the list, yet /.ers are foaming at the mouths by the look of the top comments right now. Even if this project is destined to failure, do you actually believe humanity will never, ever be able to capture solar energy from roads? Well, if you admit it might be possible one day, then guess what? It is going to take projects like this one failing to eventually get there (or did you think technological progress hatches like a magic egg if you wait long enough?).
/.ers could finally move out of their parents' basements and stop being such bitter a-holes. . .
A project like this is NOTHING compared to the money spent on fusion so far. Is it actually any more of a long shot than fusion? Seems like people who have trouble prioritizing their bitching list should not be so critical of how others are prioritizing their long shot energy projects. Besides, this has nothing to do with the project, and you are just blowing off steam because it is Sunday, and you couldn't get a date on Saturday night, AGAIN, right?
If only people could get rich off of pissing all over someone else's idea. . .
I thought I was in trouble because I needed to get to my project's wiki for some reference info during the outage and then I remembered that I had done a git pull on the wiki not too long ago.
Blockchain != Bitcoin. Now that you know that fact, you can start posting comments relevant and beneficial to the topic of discussion. . .
Wait. . . I must be new here. . .
The Simpsons beat Futurama on traditional television. Netflix is the futur. . . AMA!!!!!
be something geeky like the original Futurama. . .
Well, in the first scenario you are only using 21% of the original amount of electricity for the same amount of light. In the second scenario, you are only using using ~24.8% (5.2/21) of the electricity used with the previous technology for the same amount of light. That is a comparable impact.
If you had read my link on the "Rebound Effect," you would know that the fear I am addressing is that lighting technology that uses less electricity will just increase the overall use of electricity used for lighting because now people will use a lot more of it (> 5x more). My argument is that even if that happened by their prediction date of 2030 (so lighting use would be 5x the use of today), we could reduce it again to roughly ~1/5. So though the savings per bulb is a lot less, the assumption is that there are 5x more bulbs existing at that point.
Of course, there are other arguments against the LED rebound effect. For instance, since I switched to LEDs I have installed almost 2 dozen yard lights and several security lights. However, each one is solar powered, so even though my lighting use has increased dramatically due to LEDs, my additional use has had not increased my demand on electricity at all.
This is why I have trouble giving much weight to those warning about an LED rebound effect. I read somewhere that the authors of a paper on the LED rebound effect had to push out their prediction date (from 2015 to 2030).
:p
The thing is, in 15 years we will be replacing old LEDs (which get around ~80 lumens/watt) with new LED technology (theoretically, ~300 lumens/watt). The impact will probably be comparable to replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs today.
I suppose in 30 years we will just have engineered our eyes to work flawlessly without any artificial lighting . . .