Or it could be part of general trend of splitting off internet and creating a firewalled chinese internet. PRC is explicitly favoring this outcome for decades now with explicit incentives via legal, financial and social routes.
They already did that ages ago. Any web tech company that wants access to Chinese market needs to play ball with PRC (just like what Apple and Microsoft does). Average Chinese person really doesn't care about global web, and the ones that really do, figure a way out through VPNs. I'm not Chinese, so I might be totally wrong, but that is my perception of talking to expats or people who still in the country.
Organizations dealt with certain "weirdnesses" (the great Firewall) for a long time. But my sense is that over the past few years there's been an increasing sense of pulling back from all this.
It has to do with govt subsidy policy on making EVs that ended couple of years ago. Before that, every company with cash and even local govts entered EV manufacturing to avail the subsidies. Even when their core competency has nothing to do with EV manufacturing and even manufacturing anything. Same reason, some companies filled dumping yards with bogus "sold EVs", since repairing and keeping quality when being used will cost them more instead of making some substandard EV and generating fake sales cert.
Similar policy PRC used when building up solar and battery industries. Subsidise a hundred companies, and few will come out as winners. Reportedly with real estate issues and semi trade war economy is facing headwinds and PRC is scaling down subsidies.
CATL and BYD have more than 50% share of world's battery manufacturing capacity. And the trend is upwards. Same reason china EVs are edging out Telsa and EU EVs out in international market, where LFP is becoming more common.
China's EV market is about 60% of the global EV market. And no foreign battery competitors have been able to participate in China's local EV market (ie, shadow-ban) since 2015 and all EV OEMs, local or foreign, are required to use locally made batteries by local companies only. China's discriminatory and anticompetitive EV policies are the key reasons for the US IRA in 2022 and the EU's recent antisubsidy tariff against Chinese EV imports.
About 40% of Tesla's battery supply comes from those two -- the other 60% from Panasonic and LG. LFP is most widely deployed in China, but that is not why China's "edging out" Tesla -- LFP's market share outside China is not that big. LFP is just a low-end batteries for entry-level, low-range EVs.
Fission is pathway to nukes, so every nation with intention of building nukes invests in fission regardless of commercial viability. Fusion on the other hand is pure r&d project and may give bragging rights if a country gets it first. So even in China it is not priority.
Wait, isn't fusion also possibly applicable as a weapon? I mean, thermonuclear weapons exist today with fission bomb being the fuze, once we achieve fusion ignition can't we build thermonuclear bomb from it that would not need uranium/plutionium?
Why are we fighting each other now? It's largely cultural and religious motivations, if we worked together as a planet we could get some really interesting things done.
“We” don’t have and don’t want to seriously fight each other. But it’s not “us” at the wheel. They have their own idea what we should do and until we get rid of them completely, your question will stay naive. This feature of our species was important for building civilization, but it will drag future generations down to the monkey bottom forever.
India is on various blacklists of various western govt for military or advanced tech thoroughout cold war and even until recently. Pentium chips were denied even as late as 90s. Sanctions on Indian started to ease after 123 agreement, but India is still on US entity list restriction.
There is difference though, as most major Indian companies hardly invest in R&D and are happy to just keep using licensed IP from west. Indian companies, and general public, have very little risk appetite.
> various blacklists of various western govt for military or advanced tech
Indian private sector corporations were excluded from the sanctions regime.
Until a couple years ago (like 2015 or 2016 I think), all Indian defense manufacturing and R&D was done by PSUs like Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Bharat Electronics Limited, Armoured Vehicles Nigam Limited, etc
> Pentium chips were denied even as late as 90s
For Nuclear Non-Proliferation reasons, which was done by the Indian public sector.
India straight up didn't have a private sector MIC until the 2010s.
> India is still on US entity list restriction
It's public sector units, not the private sector players like Tata who have work with companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing for over 20 years.
> Indian companies hardly invest in R&D ... Indian companies, and general public, have very little risk appetite
It's because of the financials. India allows 100% foreign ownership in R&D FDI, so there's no reason for Tata Electronics to try and build a local chip design R&D arm when Nvidia and Intel have massive R&D labs in Bangalore and Hyderabad that have been chugging along since the 2000s and can pay salaries in USD.
There is some incipient work on making indigenous RISC-V architecture chips, but it looks like bullshit to me.
> Indian private sector corporations were excluded from the sanctions regime.
Most blacklists are regarding product codes. No separate carve out for pvt companies. Sure after 123 agreement, most restrictions are being negotiated and lifted slowly and India is not being added to new blacklists. But, that is recent phenomenon.
Can't it be used for things like smart power meters, water supply, or myriad other non-mobile 'smart things' or even that is tall order considering their capabilities?
To be specific it's airplane engines, 5th gen turbofan engines. China started building COMAC airplanes too, probably with questionable maintenance and serviceability story, that they can push with govt airlines. They are still having trouble with modern turbofan engines though.
Pumped hydro storage is approximately cost competitive with new nuclear. It depends on ease of incentives, building permits and finance mechanisms available for building new hydro vs nuclear. Estimated LCOE of new hydro in India for example is Rs9/kwh(~$100/Mwh) which is comparable to new nuclear estimates of $55-90/Mwh. China is also building pumped hydro at good pace. And pumped hydro doesn't have to fight entrenched anti-nuclear lobby while doing it.
US and EU storage incentives encourage battery storage schemes over pumped hydro though. They either expect cost of battery storage to become less than pumped hydro shortly, or the lack of construction firms lobbying for pumped hydro is making battery the prominent storage option.
Offriver closed loop pumped hydro just needs two football size fields hundreds of meter apart in elevation. Most continents have plenty of suitable locations for PHS, though they are distributed unevenly. According to the paper, there are 600k feasible locations for PHS world wide, or capacity to store 70% of global energy demand in 2017.
> Offriver closed loop pumped hydro just needs two football size fields hundreds of meter apart in elevation
A football field sized reservoir isn't going to hold much water unless it's deep. Realistic pumped hydro sites are much larger than 500 square meters. And those two reservoirs can't be too far apart, because excess lateral distance reduces output and increases the energy required to refill it.
It also needs to be close to a source of water in order to fill the reservoir and refill any loss due to evaporation.
It also needs to be close to a major highway otherwise the costs of construction will be immense because of the long distance that materials and equipment must be shipped. This is particularly problematic because most pumped hydro potential is in mountainous terrain where transportation is expensive.
And lastly, this site has to be close to places that have energy demand, otherwise you'll need to build miles and miles of transmission lines. This is also a problem because the places that have pumped hydro potential also have hydroelectric potential, and usually already generate electricity from dams. Norway and Brazil have huge pumped hydro potential, but already generate most electricity from dams.
The conditions for a viable pumped hydro sites are much more narrow than "two football field sized reservoir a few hundred meters apart in elevation".
The paper you cited just ran an algorithm over a terrain height map. It did not attempt to account for accessibility. Good luck developing the immense pumped hydro potential in Tibet. Pumped hydro would be great if we could teleport concrete, excavators, and turbo machinery into some of the most remote parts of the world. But unfortunately this is not in our capabilities.
Even if the 70% of global energy demand in 2017 estimate is off by a factor of five or so, that's still plenty of storage to cover for renewable intermittency.
I wouldn't be surprised if less than 1% of the identified hydroelectric sites were viable to build at all, and 0.1% were more cost competitive than batteries. Huge amounts of the identified hydropower sites are located in Tibet, which is far too remote to conduct big construction projects. Another big region with hydro electric storage potential is Brazil. But they already generate almost all of their electricity from renewables and they don't need pumped hydro. Again, the paper you cited just ran an algorithm over a height map. There was zero consideration of proximity to transportation, proximity to energy demand, and proximity to water to fill the reservoirs.
There are other fun options, a number already tested and being expanded upon.
China is building several "gravity towers" (different design to [1] but same concept), Australia is designing third generation (after a 1MW test pilot, and current 288MWh plant under construction) high temperature molten salt thermal energy storage tanks to night time buffer solar plants used to produce green methanol for use as a sustainable shipping fuel.
None of these have actually been used for grid storage. Heated sand has been used for district heating, but electric generation is more challenging because it requires higher temperature gradients. There's plenty of other ideas people are pursing: hydrogen electrolysis, compressed air, giant flywheels, ammonia, I could go on.
Why are people exploring all these alternative energy storage methods? Because grid storage is not feasible with current storage options. We're still looking for the silver bullet to solve grid storage. Will these new ideas yield storage at lower cost than the existing systems? Maybe, maybe not. A grid powered by primarily intermittent sources is viable if such a silver bullet is found, but that's a pretty big if to bet the future of the electric grid on. A very realistic outlook for wind and solar is that we saturate peak production, waste a ton of excess electricity, and keep burning fossil fuels because the silver bullet never materializes.
> None of these have actually been used for grid storage.
So what? As is clearly implicit to the meanest intellect in my comment above these are alternatives that are being built right now after having already passed pilot testing and now being scaled up for grid storage.
> A very realistic outlook for wind and solar is that we
overproduce during daytime here in Australia, have sufficient wind through much of the night to tick over, and use the excess to produce green hydrogen, ammonia, methonal, etc to buffer nighttime demand and for use in mining, transport and agriculture.
> So what? As is clearly implicit to the meanest intellect in my comment above these are alternatives that are being built right now after having already passed pilot testing and now being scaled up for grid storage.
No, they are not. They are still in the prototype stages. Gravity storage is still being prototyped. Heated sand is only being used for district heating. If you've got news about a real production deployment of grid storage using these systems, I'd be eager to read it.
> and use the excess to produce green hydrogen, ammonia, methonal [sic], etc to buffer nighttime demand
If we find a feasible way of doing these things. These storage schemes are theoretically possible, but as of yet they are not demonstrated to be viable at grid scale. The reason why most of the talk is around batteries is because they're the most viable storage option at the moment. Will one of the systems you listed deliver much better grid scale storage? Maybe, maybe not.
If your point is that intermittent sources are viable contingent on an energy storage breakthrough, then yeah I'm in agreement. But it's not exactly wise to bet the future of your electrical grid on a technological breakthrough that may or may not happen.
If you have mpv or avconv/ffmpeg based video player, you can play and seek the in the gif video file. You can use `mpv http-gif-url` to play it directly.
It is more of installers/maintainers not interested in fixing the chargers. They would already have information about how much is being payed for each charger and from that would know some charger is broken.
I'm sure the installers/maintainers are not the blame here though. Of course they'd like to get paid for doing it. It's the owners of the equipment that don't want to pay for the maintenance. Let's place the blame at the appropriate feet here.
The issue is maintaining already installed chargers. Lot of chargers are either physically broken or rated for low charging rate because something inside is broken. And no one fixing it in months. Changing the connector won't fix the issue when chargers are not fixed for months on end.
People, especially techie types here on HN, tend to simply forget or not know to begin with just how many service technicians and laborers are necessary to keep all this tech running.
Just because you can imagine it does not mean it's possible, folks.
The problem really is the companies. EA essentially rushed their product out the door knowingly with substandard (both in quality and actual standardization) that's led to their issues.
They are simply not built to last and their bespokeness leads them to be difficult to repair.
This isn't a case of oversimplifying, especially considering we can look across the street at a company who is doing exactly what we're asking for.
> Reston, VA (April 17, 2018) – Electrify America announced today it has selected key charging equipment suppliers – ABB, BTC Power, Efacec and Signet – to jointly deploy its new ultra-fast electric vehicle (EV) charging systems throughout the United States.
Yes, that's _exactly_ the issue. When they need to service a station, they need just the right parts. That's also from 2018. There a lot of chargers built before then. I read an article not too long ago where the new CEO was explaining that the reliability issue is, essentially, they rushed to get the first generations of chargers out so fast that they had to source parts from everywhere and they weren't all well tested and there are a lot of different types.
The result is that each station is basically bespoke and they have to find just the right replacement parts to fix a broken station. The result is that you have to send a technician out to find the broken part and then wait to get a replacement instead of the technician having replacement parts on hand (because there are too many that it might be).
That's why they are ripping out old stations and replacing them with new ones.
Contrast this with Tesla who built everything in-house and has an exceptional service record with their charging network. Vertical integration has its perks.
In only 11 years Tesla built the world's best EV charging network to cover the entire US interstate system, highways, major cities, important destinations, and more recently even medium and small cities.
I'm confident Tesla can expand their network to cope with additional demand and in a relatively short amount of time. Expanding an existing site is usually a lot faster and cheaper as well.
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