And what was the storage requirement? I just ran those parameters myself with China's 2.9 TW of constant electricity demand, and the storage requirement was over 70,000 GWh of battery storage.
By comparison, global battery production is around 1,000 GWh per year.
Battery production capacity grows by 10x every five years. In 2021 there was ~100 GWh of batteries produced a year. In 2031, it's going to be 20-30TWh per year. Current batteries have 10+ year warranties, and last 20-25 years. We're likely to see 30 years+ for the newer sodium ion batteries.
For something like 20 years, people have been looking at the exponential growth in the annual solar deployments and saying "well that's it, starting next year we're only going to deploy exactly as much as last year, plus 5%-30%". And every year these predictions are proven wrong. And every year they do the same dumb thing again:
It was around 14 hours of battery storage. Seems reasonable.
Realize that replacing all ICE road vehicles in the US with 70 kWh BEVs would require storage equal to ~40 hours of our average grid usage. The future is going to need large numbers of batteries, which is why China has been all in on this.
14 hours of battery (~40 TWh for China) with the hydrogen storage or without? Because the calculator was reporting ~78,000 GWh battery storage with China's weather selected, and 2030 technology assumptions. I changed the spatial capacity factor from 1 to 2 and the battery storage requirement dropped down to 68 TWh, but still well above 40 TWH.
Regardless, 14 hours of China's electricity demand is a whopping 40,600 GWh. By comparison, 2024's lithium ion battery production figure was 1.5 TWh [1]. Even assuming 100% of this went to EV's we're still talking about roughly 25 years worth of global battery production to fulfill only China's demand for storage in this model. As you point out, we still have loads of battery demand for EV adoption, so nowhere near 100% of production will be able to be diverted to grid storage.
The scale of storage required to make intermittent sources viable without being backed by a dispatchable energy source really is tremendous, and this often gets overlooked in pushes for a fully renewable grid.
Battery production capacity grows by 10x every five years. It was four years ago when I first heard that, and we are exactly on track still. In 2031 we will be at 20-30 TWh/year production capacity.
There are few things that grow this fast when it comes to manufactured things, atoms are far harder to arrange and scale than bits. But it's happening at a tremendous scale. Natural gas turbine production capacity is tapped out with long order queues, and so is battery production well into 2026, but only battery production capacity is expanding at breakneck speed.
Understand that only ~6 TWh of lithium batteries have been produced to date. As in, every single year of production combined adds up to less than 6 Twh. Moore's law largely stemmed from the fact that making a processer faster also meant making transistors smaller. Reducing the width of a transistor to a half, a quarter, etc. increased compute per cm^2 by double, quadruple, etc. Chemistry doesn't obtain that kind of exponential growth - we have hard limits on the number of joules we can store per gram of anode and cathode, so scaling up production means digging up more anode and cathode material out of the ground. The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves.
Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out.
Regardless of your confidence in battery production's continued growth, I think you'd agree that if someone is making a calculation about the required amount of overproduction required to maintain a stable grid, they should at least mention that their calculation is contingent on provisioning tens of terawatt hours worth of grid storage.
Getting to 10x production capacity doesn't require improving battery tech, it just requires building more factories. The equivalent here isn't Moore's Law, it's fab capacity. If battery tech stalled out today at the same pricing (it won't), we could still 10x the battery production capacity every 5 years just on this pace.
The learning rate for batteries has not been as steep as Moore's Law for ICs. But the value of being able to store mass quantities of electricity at low cost is so incredibly valuable that it's going to blow up into a huuuuge number of factories.
You look at the 6TWh of all time and see that as a limitation. I haven't seen that stat before but I trust you, because with the growth rate of battery production it has to be a tiny number, because it's exponential growth. In 2024, 1.2 TWh of batteries were produced, 20% of all storage capacity ever. That was a single year! What if, in 2024, we produced 20% of all CPU capacity every produced? That's obviously a hugely growing market.
> The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves. Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out.
If you spend a small amount of time diving into the industry, you'll see that there's a massive number of very smart people solving all these resource constraint problems, securing supply chains years in advance, and building like fucking mad. Sure, there's a lot of people that don't want to get involved, but they will be left in the dust.
We are witnessing a massive energy interchange. This is like when the PC came along, but much bigger in terms of quantity and speed. Sure, there are those who are still skeptical of energy storage, 5-10 years after it became blazingly obvious that batteries are cheap and getting cheaper and will take over the enery world. But they are the same people who saw the iPhone and said "it will never catch up to my BlackBerry."
Electricity storage in batteries is a swiss-army knife for the grid that never existed until recently. We couldn't do time arbitrage, always had to match supply and demand instantaneously, across grids spanning hundreds and thousands of miles. No more, that's all gone. We can do tiny microgrids, we can do single houses, we can do 10 TWh installs across grids, because batteries scale small, scale big, are cheap, getting cheaper, and are being produced on a growing scale that most people do not understand.
That was about the amount in both cases. Slightly more in the no-hydrogen case than otherwise. Hydrogen contributed only marginally.
Yes, it's a lot of batteries. So what? It's not like the current battery production is some firm limit. If anything, the very large future demand ensures batteries will be driven down their experience curve, so the cost will be even lower than assumed.
The world spends something like $10T per year on energy. Any replacement energy system is going to be a big thing.
You need to make an argument that is more than you expressing fear of large numbers.
For us, it looks like most services are still working (eastus and eastus2). Our AKS cluster is still running and taking requests. Failures seem limited to management portal.
This exists because otherwise someone could just create a bunch of alts and share folders with a main account to get infinite storage. If someone just wants to share content, they can share it as a downloadable folder. As in, users can download files or a Zip of the whole folder to their device. That does not count against quota.
This is a characterization of fraternities that reeks of stereotype. What can you offer to substantiate the list of negative claims you're making about Stanford fraternities? Eitan Weiner died due to fentanyl laced drugs. This death occurred in the new year, outside of the rush time frame so hazing is not a likely cause.
Furthermore, it also ignores that plenty of other theme houses outside of greek life were also eliminated.
To be clear, these are all things that I personally watched happen and had happen to friends in fraternities. Not technically any Stanford ones, so I guess you got me there - maybe they were all squeaky clean.
Google "hazing death" if you want to learn about the fun-time rituals of drinking, drugs, and abuse.
Google "fraternity sexual assault" to learn why girls I knew avoided the "handsy house" -- careful, your computer might not be able to handle that many search results.
As for institutionalized discrimination -- what exactly do you think goes on at rush deliberations? Why else would fraternities be so overwhelmingly white and rich?
And Greek houses aren't the only ones who do these things. See my other comments.
> To be clear, these are all things that I personally watched happen and had happen to friends in fraternities. Not technically any Stanford ones, so I guess you got me there - maybe they were all squeaky clean.
Not technically any Stanford ones? Can you elaborate on what you mean by "technically"?
Because it sounds like those statements you wrote are not based on any experience whatsoever with the fraternities and other group houses covered in the article. Just your own personal experiences with other fraternities, and an assumption that they're all the same.
"technically not Stanford" meaning I have heard horror stories from 15+ fraternities at 5+ schools -- but not Stanford.
So hopefully you'll forgive me if I generalize. Especially when one of the most widely-storied campus sexual assault cases in recent years happened at the Stanford Kappa Alpha house [1] -- the first fraternity house mentioned in the linked article.
Please read your sources, Turner did not carry out the assault at KA. He and the victims met at a part at KA and Turner assaulted after leaving the fraternity. The article writes that it was "just outside" but it was out of sight of the fraternity house, some ways away.
The fact that the rape didn't occur at the fraternity makes no difference? The previous commenter makes it sound like a rape was perpetrated inside the fraternity in clear view. In reality no one at the fraternity would have been able to observe the crime.
Imagine someone says, "a man was murdered at your house and you did nothing!" when in reality the murder took place a couple minutes walk away, where you had no ability to observe the crime. Seems like a very big distinction to me.
Turner allegedly tried to sexually assault other people AT the frat house party. It’s also where they both consumed large amounts of alcohol (isn’t turner under age in the Us?).
Also, you argue that didn’t take place at the frat house but as far as I can tell, it took place behind a dumpster RIGHT next to house, and maybe still on the house’s property (hardly a couple of minutes walk away)
And, in response to your last point (“no one at the frat would have been able to observe the crime ”), he was literally stopped by two grad students cycling by.
Regardless, I agree with the other commenter — distinction without difference.
It's a list of classes. At least the way it worked when I attended, CS students chose a particular track (Theory, AI, Systems, Graphics, HCI, etc.). The core curriculum was 3 theory classes and 3 coding classes. Each track has 2 or 3 mandatory classes (for systems it was operating systems, and either compilers or computer hardware). And on top of that there's general requirements.
Bear in mind this cuts both ways. Replacing a gas heater (which directly produces thermal energy from chemical reaction) with an electric heater now means this energy has to be produced, transmitted, and run through a heating element. If this heater is being run at night, it likely has to go through an energy storage system, too.
Overall quality of life is highly correlated with energy consumption. There's some nuance to it: higher population density countries often use less energy to deliver the same quality of life are more dispersed populations. But in general the better life is in a country, the more energy it consumes. Here's per-capita energy consumption plotted out on a map [1] and the correlation is crystal clear.
This part of why I think plans to decarbonize through the reduction of energy consumption are doomed to fail. People aren't going to reject a good standard of living, and countries that don't yet have a good standard of living aren't going to stop striving to achieve it.
I have relatively low expectation for this suit to lead to anything substantial. This line of argument surrounding Google being the default search for devices largely mirrors the situation with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. I envision Google being told to stop paying to be the default browser, but that will likely do less to change Google's dominant role in search than it did for IE. People have proven to be willing to change their search option to use google when it gets defaulted to Bing or Yahoo.
More broadly, I find that people's frustrations with large tech platforms aren't really related to monopoly at all. Concern is more about the growing reach and prevalence of tech companies. When I talk to people who are pretty heavily aligned with the "tech-lash" they're rarely talking about market share or leveraging dominance in one market for an advantage in another market. More often they're talking about capricious moderation and enforcement of content policies, and the general increase in the influence of tech companies on the products and media we consume.
Anti-trust has limited ability alter the issues that most people have with big tech companies. Serving a broad customer base invariably leads to appealing to the lowest common denominator: no one set of rules will appease everybody, instead you try to develop rules to maximize the set of happy users and minimize the set of unhappy users. The scale of these tech companies necessitate automated rules enforcement, and this inevitably leads to false positives. I find it hard to see why breaking up tech companies would change this. Sure, if a big social media site was broken up into 4 different sites then each one would have a smaller population to manage. But they'd have commensurately less resources to dedicate to that community management, so they'll probably lean on automation just as much.
By comparison, global battery production is around 1,000 GWh per year.