DC motors will tend to be optimal only at a set speed/torque whereas BLDC motors do need a microcontroller to be driven, but are able to optimize the flow in a much wider range. Coils in a DC motor are basically ON or OFF whereas they can ramp up in a BLDC depending on the speed.

Careful: negative price ≠ negative cost. Below zero prices are a market artifact usually.

The fact that this happens during peak HVAC use is a nice thing though.

And yes, we need intermittent industries, but the problem is, when you invest money in hardware, even to mine bitcoin (I would rather sell GPU time to train deep learning models personally) or to produce hydrogen, every hour not spent running your capital-intensive hardware is considered a cost that is not really compensated by energy price unless you run on donated hardware.

Circuits breakers are an obvious solution and there seems to be reasons why these are not implemented. I am not knowledgeable enough about the question but there seems to be a lot of counter-intuitive incentives that makes the energy market drop sub-zero occasionally. It is more of a market artifact than the absence of circuit breakers.

I have seen people in France explain that this is Germany undercutting prices to ensure France can’t have profitable private solar power companies but this sounds a bit conspiracy-theory to me, as Germany is not the only one doing it (but the biggest one in terms of volume)

These are the prices on the European market for electricity exchange between countries. It has a whole can of worms when it comes to problematic incentives, but it is indeed not consumer prices and (IMO) designed to enrich useless intermediaries.

RTE (French national grid operator)'s realtime data. It is indeed awesome to have realtime trackers of that!

EDIT: looks like the link in english is dead right now, here it is in french: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-aux-frontieres

I’ll give another factoid:

In a sunny day, around noon, many EU countries have below-zero prices for electricity exports:

It comes with a different set of issues, but this is not prospective or a hypothetical: this is the world we are living in, with the operator of the French grid warning that we are currently at solar saturation.

Now we need the other part of the puzzle: energy storage. On a HUGE scale.

It took 40 years to have solar energy and batteries up to the task, and we are not there yet. Yes, it could have been a choice to more massively invest in R&D in these fields, but you still need electricity while you shut down nuclear plants. Don’t do it unless you are ready to replace them with something else than coal. We are not there yet. Germany relies on France’s nuclear capabilities to import electricity at night.

Yes, it is not a problem for the power plants, it is a problem for the fauna and it only impacts reactors without cooling towers (which I repeat, can actually cool down rivers). And I may add, this is a problem for the fauna caused in big part by the global warming which nuclear plants help prevent.

From the (translated article)

The measures were intended to protect the ecosystem of the Aare River and comply with strict environmental regulations.

…

According to EDF, throttling or shutting down nuclear power plants during heat waves has led to an average reduction in annual electricity production of 0.3 percent since 2000.

Its a type of energy that gets more expensive

We choose to make it so. Constantly adding security features and not financing research. It could have gone down as well if we had pushed for small reactors, helped the EPR more, not shut down the research into plutonium as a fuel…

Trash is not solved

It is inert and a lot of it has the potential to be a future fuel. “Put it in a hole below the water table” is pretty close to a solution.

A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe

It will be hard to be as impactful as coal or thermal engines, which are considered to be responsible for about 48 000 premature deaths yearly here in France. If nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could “afford” a Chernobyl per year and still save lives.

Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer

That’s simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it but here is a breakdown:

• Every year some plants undergo planned maintenance in summer, not because it is too hot but because there is less consumption (winter heating is when the peak is)
• Some plants do lower their outputs, the most they had to do it so far was by 0.2% of the total output of the country because of environmental regulations that basically forbid any heating of the water above certain temperatures.
• It only touches plants that don’t have the iconic cooling towers. Plants with cooling towers do not warm rivers, in some case they may even cool them down.

As long as there are liquid rivers, plants will be able to cool down. We will have much more serious problems before this becomes an issue.

Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability

It can. As I am writing that, it is 1pm here, we are at 33GW of nuclear production, mostly because there is a lot of solar power and Germany is flooding us with electricity with negative price. At 4am, we were at 42GW of nuclear.

Most fuel is produced by less reliable states.

Minerals are fungible, therefore consumers go for the cheapest. It usually means countries where semi-slavery is the norm and environmental regulations are not a thing. They do tend to be shitty countries yes. Non-fossil mineral resources however are found pretty uniformly over the globe (having mountains helps). There are uranium mines in France that we shut down because of labor cost.

No public backing

That’s the main problem. The above lies have been repeated ad nauseam and local opposition means that opening new nuclear plants is basically impossible. This is a policy and opinion problem mostly.

I am bitter about it. The sane plan was to go full nuclear in the 90s, double the electricity production, get rid of coal and thermal vehicles that way and slowly transition over 40 years into solar as we either get batteries costs down or develop space based solar power.

Now we are getting the transition but it was oil-fueled instead of nuclear-fueled and this choice was made by people misled into believing they defended the environment by fighting nuclear power.

Yes, wind/solar + batteries is the future (though I don’t think these are cost competitive with nuclear yet. Solar alone is, batteries not) but opting out of nuclear was a very costly option for the climate.

Yeah, that kind of stuff. Any you’d recommend?

A bit dated but Cousteau’s documentaries, while it mentions environmental problems, do that from a discovery point of view.

0.7 on the Kardashev scale. En route to 1.0!

Here in France it is totally legal to produce your own electricity as you wish and consume it. You have regulations if you try to connect your installation to the grid but you can totally have different circuits.

Waste water is more problematic, with a strong push for new constructions to be connected to the waste management system when doable. Off the grid system here are allowed to but have to follow some regulations, basically to prevent flooding your neighbors with fecal matter when it rains.

I keep seeing these titles and it pisses me off.

Mass-tourism is a problem, but this is not what the Louvre strike (dare that word in the title, even if it pisses your owner) was about.

It was a regular strike over working conditions. Yes, mass tourism, but the Louvre has been the most visited museum in the world for a very long time with no problem. The problem is that 200 staff are currently missing and the rest is overworked, in the management’s indifference.

So let’s go with all the swear words: After a worker’s unions meeting about the degrading working conditions, a strike was decided to protest and gain a leverage in negotiation with management.

BLDC motors, also called brushless, is the silent geeky revolution that brought us lighter, cheaper and more efficient robotics. It also allowed to make battery-powered electric version of many gardening equipment. More precisely, it is the design of cheap lighter controllers that made all of this possible (a good controller will require a fast-ish microcontroller on board)

Kind of a niche subject but happy to see it here!

They enrich uranium up to 60%. It is very costly and there is no civilian need for that. No one believes it is a civilian program.

I am very critical of Israel on Gaza, but on the Iranian nuclear program, there has been decades of procrastination, ambivalence and, since the last Trump episode, downright idiocy, in the handling of the diplomatic discussion. I kinda believe it when they say we were at the point where strikes were the only option to avoid a nuclear Iran.

Then again, the world pretends that Israel has no nukes whereas it is an open secret. All the other nuclear nations, including Pakistan and India, consider that the only way to be safe in such a situation is the MAD doctrine. Yet we expect Iran to stop its nuclear program and pretend its main enemy has none. I am not sure how idiotic we thought they are but even to religious fanatics it was pretty obvious that the only way for them was to have their own secret program.

This is a complex clusterfuck where you can’t easily split the actors as good guys/bad guys. There are lots of rational decisions and lots of totally idiotic religion-fueled ethnic hatred.

Ban ads and close source.

If you ban smartphones, make sur to make it in a way that would not prevent us to reinvent them in the way they should have existed in the first place.

Yes, it changes the criterion from “uptime of a server” to “uptime of a service” and that’s why I mention that the fediverse and even the old discussions on slrpnk.net kept being accessible.

But if we went to let go of the old world, we can’t have the back thought of “you know, worst case I’ll host that on a google drive, I know that one will be up”. We need to get to this last mile.

Really this is just a general remark, not something specially related to slrpnk.net and you are doing an awesome job, that I am grateful I don’t have to do. Please don’t see it in any form as a criticism of this server!

I am just saying that we should not embrace downtimes as an unavoidable thing or a problem we need to live in order to have a sustainable world. Resilience is also an important aspect of solarpunk.

I love the lemonaut.

Also, there is an advice I love, that can be applied to any genre: Do not write with the genre X in mind. Write what you want, pour your love in it, and let others label it. Maybe ‘solarpunk’ will end up not existing and will instead be dwarfed by a similar but different style, tidal romance, alt-earth utopians, skyships lesbian pirate slashfiction, whatever. Do not try too hard to shoehorn the themes of sustainability, it can simply be a background for the things you love.

Gibson hated the term “cyberpunk”: he said he was just writing the science fiction that made sense to him.

If you are attracted to solarpunk, you have some thoughts and hope about the future but you are probably also into other things that you love. Make it about that.

First of all, I love you, slrpnk admins.

First, yes, <3 to all.

Then:

Meh, I consider that resilience is not opposed to sustainability.

We don’t have to prioritize it right now, and I will always be grateful of volunteers who do the best they can with what they have.

And to me the lesson was that several communities (french-speaking jlai.lu) still worked and I just used an alt there to continue the conversations I had, and that I could still access through them the past conversations in slrpnk.net. This is a testament to the resilience of the fediverse architecture.

I just disagree with the sentiment that we should somehow romanticize power outages. Some people need a reliable power sources to survive, and it is a totally preventable thing. We can route around them in a radically different way though.

But thinking “this could be down for a week with no warning” also implies that I need to keep a fallback mechanism if I am using it to organize any sort of event with people.