I work in the industry. Removing the tax breaks is having a material impact because we look at after tax cash flow. Next year installations are going to reduce meaningfully.
Its probably referring to the price at which solar can sell power. In the middle of the day, its actually effectively $0 (no marginal cost). In nighttime, its infinite cost. Fossil fuels marginal cost is effectively the cost of fuel per MWh.
Taxes are far too complex to figure that our. In the case of other there are a lot of different players and most do things other than oil and so it isn't possible to figure out what tax/subsidy is from oil.
Was wondering if anybody just took raw manufacturing/operating costs, and energy output, and compared. Removing all taxes and subsidies from the equation. If we are going to say Solar is now cheaper, I'd think it would have to be without subsidies.
Accounting is a big issue for renewables because almost all the cost is upfront. You pay a capital cost for X years (say, 30) of electricity. Maintenance is a much smaller fraction of the cost. Therefore the question of profitability depends on all sorts of non-power things: amortization, interest rates, how the tax-deductibility of a capital investment is handled, what future electricity costs are, and so on.
Optimally, I'd like to see both calculated with zero subsidies.
Some people also complain about Solar being front loaded. But a power plant is also paid for up front. I'd like to see life time costs, minus subsidies.
It might not be a government-enforced thing but there isn’t much reason to go to the effort of putting a red metal octagon somewhere if it didn’t mean stop, in some way. The things don’t just fall of trees and land on the side of buildings.
I've looked at this space from an infrastructure investment perspective. Its really tough, and generally not considered "infrastructure" by most infra folks because of the lack of long term revenue contracts. There is not a great way to underwrite the risk of utilization of the chargers. The customers need to show up. Unless you can guarantee some of the revenue, you have a lot of capex with no clear path to repay it. The chargers also require a lot of maintenance and the grid connection is challenging with low consumption and high peak load, and long wait to get connected... Investors have been staying away.
Gas stations are a tough business, too. But they've had a century to develop a working business model. A charging station is different enough that the business has entered the race to the bottom before they figured out how to adapt the gas station business model profitably.
3D printers don't have anywhere near the resolution of 2D printers. Take something like a $300 Epson photo printer [1]. It has 5760 x 1440 dpi with 6 colours!
A Creality Ender 3 Pro, a common budget 3D printer, has an accuracy of 0.1mm. That's an equivalent of about 254 DPI.
Of course, that's just the positioning. If you're 2D printing on a 3D printer by mounting a pen to the end, you're also limited by the thickness of the pen tip.
In any case, you could certainly draw text, but you'd only want to use a font that relies on thin lines, nothing thick. Filled in spaces would be difficult, and of course, photos are just completely out of the question.
As mentioned in a sibling comment, really you'd have just reinvented plotters which have existed for decades.
Yes but it is expensive and slow, rarely big enough for A4 (or Letter) and would be plastic. Additionally it would be maybe up to 4 colours. Not as in CYMK but as in 4 colours total no mixing.
Unless you do a lithographic print but they need a light source to be seen.
Also you can print pixels. You convert to G code so it is made up of lines.
To even consider for enterprise M365 use, it needs to be 1:1 with Power automate/Flows/Apps, Entra, Intune, Graph API, PowerShell, AAD/Azure, etc. If I need to create a new user, it's going to involve every corner of M365/Azure. Maybe getting full functionality with Flows and PowerApps would be a starting point.
AI will help us develop technology to explore the universe and solve climate change, and access virtually unlimited energy. Everyone will have superpowers. Sounds awesome and very fun.
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