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Cake day: July 10th, 2025

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  • Womble@piefed.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldJust saying
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    16 hours ago

    While grid interconnections help, there is still a problem of weather not drastically changing at country boundaries. So for example Europe currently looks like this:

    image

    and has looked pretty much the same since the start of the year.

    So very little solar production is going on anywhere, that leaves wind as the only active intermittance source, so places that have a lot of wind production like UK and Denmark use all the wind they produce, and countries that make less power from wind and more from solar have nowhere to import significant amounts from.

    You need either dispatchable power (gas/nuclear) or long term grid scale storage (multiple weeks worth) to make a power grid work. Currently the latter is prohibitavely expensive so the former is needed.










  • CO2 doesn’t vary much in concentration by how close you are to an emission source unless you are literally sucking air out of a tailpipe. You might get a 10-20% increase in the centre of a city instead of the countryside, hardly enough to make up for being somewhere with so much energy coming in that they frequently have to curtail it (which could then be used for this instead).

    This isnt CCS which cheaply turns CO2 into an inert form of carbon, its an expensive process for turning CO2 into a very useful form.


  • Sure, but you cant store that electricity as electricity. IMO this is most interesting as a energy storage technology, so the comparison isnt what that gasoline would do in an ICE car compared to an EV, its to what it would cost compared to battery storage (or compressed air or whatever other technology) to store a few weeks of output on the order of months. The big advantage I see here is that unlike those other technologies capacity is dirt cheap to build, its just a metal tank. So whenever a renewable plant would curtail its output it can instead redirect to creating gasoline to burn when the renewables arent producing much electricity.




  • Google promises(new window) that Gmail’s 3 billion users will benefit from a “personal, proactive inbox assistant”. But given that these features are free, what’s the catch? Make no mistake, Google isn’t doing this out of generosity. The contents of your inbox are valuable to the company.

    Email used to be a more private space where your communications could potentially be intercepted by bad actors, but largely your data was your own.

    I dont think that is true wrt gmail is it? Google have been scanning your messages and using that for machine learning based ad targeting since it was released.