Exergy Lab

We treat all joules as equal and it's slowing down the energy transition. We just open sourced The Exergy Imperative — a complete guide to the most underused concept in energy. It explains why measuring Exergy transforms how we make energy decisions. github.com/cdimurro/the-e…

@bscholl We need to burn less natural gas not more.

Boom is building a new factory which will produce 1-2GW of turbines annually. Location and details to be shared later.

@MarkJCarney Smart. Way better than the U.S. strategy.

We will power Canada strong with clean, affordable, reliable energy.

@sama Limitless clean energy

what problem do you most hope AI will solve in the future? maybe we can help!

@Will52773T @AkshatRathi That’s because primary energy is the wrong metric to use. It includes wasted energy. The right metric needs to measure how much energy was actually delivered to society not include how much energy was wasted.

@AkshatRathi Sure. But your figure is meaningless and needs to show absolute numbers not "share". Fossil fuels will supply the bulk of primary energy in 2050.

Renewables are unstoppable. BNEF's New Energy Outlook for this year says solar is set to be biggest source of electricity in 2032 and wind second biggest in 2034. Both coal and gas displaced from those thrones. This is the business-as-usual scenario. 🎁🔗 bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@mattyglesias Make electricity out of sunlight instead

Making gasoline out of corn: — Raises gasoline prices — Raises the global price of food — Ambiguous impact on CO2 emissions — Definitely leads to more use of pesticides and other toxins slowboring.com/p/the-dumb-pol…

@emollick Good use of water and electricity.

If this is true, using the best public estimates we have of LLM resource use, solving this Erdos problem took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity and about 3–31 liters of water. So that is less than three almonds worth of water and the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving.

@CoreAutoAI The best path is not to slowly reform academia. It is to build a financial mechanism that makes funding breakthrough research bankable.

Research is still undervalued

@GoogleDeepMind This is amazing!

We want to help scientists discover their next breakthrough with AI. Gemini for Science is our new suite of experimental tools to help them explore more hypotheses, validate work at scale, unpack literature with ease, and more 🧵

@business @TrackOilPACs Use nuclear, geothermal or solar+storage instead. It’s cleaner

Meta is building one of the largest AI data centers in Louisiana, in one of the poorest counties in the US. The project could reach 7.5 gigawatts and be powered by 10 new natural gas plants, and in a region searching for economic revival, development of the data center has become a lifeline bloom.bg/4ePRT6j

@unusual_whales Measuring government waste, fraud and abuse per MW is uninformative.

Government waste, fraud and abuse rose 13% last year, per MW

@MarkJCarney Clean, reliable, and affordable is the correct goal. Reliable, affordable and secure is not.

When we master energy, we master our destiny.   We’re going to double the capacity of our grid by 2050 — to supply clean, reliable, affordable power across the country.

@JEBistline The good news is scientific innovations like modifying the DNA of these plants and storing their seeds in vaults can help protect them.

Bad news: Climate change could eliminate more than 90% of the range of 1 in 10 plant species by 2100. Good news: Well... technically there isn't any. But this paper does have terrific figures!

@SpaceElevator7 @ErikSTownsend Build an orbital ring space elevator? How are you going to get the funding needed for that?

You don't have to beam the power. One of the reasons to build an orbital ring space elevator is that it allows you to run wires from solar panels that are located in space down to the surface, so you dramatically reduce transmission losses. If you're concerned about heating the earth, against space-based solutions are pretty simple. The heat from the sun is, by far, the biggest thing heating the earth. And you can reduce that heat by deploying solar shades. Wouldn't even be expensive with a space elevator.

I just can't say this loudly enough: The global balance of power for the next 50-100 years will be determined by who is first to make nuclear energy cost less than coal and gas. Energy dominance directly leads to geopolitical dominance; history is crystal clear on that. China is quietly kicking the West's ass down the street. America's present nuclear renaissance is exactly the right recipe, but it's going to prove too little too late at the rate we're going. China will assume the role of global dominance USA enjoyed for the last 80 years for the next 100 years, and it will have been our failure to modernize and economize our nuclear energy strategy that cause the West to lose our dominance. This story will take decades to play out, but the handwriting on the wall couldn't be more clear: China is kicking our ass and we're too goddamned stupid and complacent to realize it. DOE's nuclear leadership under @SecretaryWright and companies like @AaloAtomics are fantastic news for America. But compared to China's nuclear energy program, we're so far behind that it will be nearly impossible to catch up. And we handed China all the American-made technology they needed on a silver platter. It sickens me to see what's coming so clearly and have so many around me completely blind to it.

Baseload power plants like nuclear can't ramp up to meet peak load so you need something else to fill the gap. Also space-based solar is not the magic solution you think it is. It will be great for in-space data centers and in-space manufacturing but that's about it. Beaming the power bank down to Earth is impractical. It's uneconomic on small scales and would cook the Earth on a large scale. We already have a global energy imbalance. We don't need to be beaming any more energy at the planet. We need to be reflecting more energy away from it.

It's the exact opposite of this. You don't know whether it's going to be windy when the daytime power spike comes. So, you have to build base load to be able to handle all of your peak demand in case the intermittent sources aren't working. Otherwise it is a mathematical certainty that you will have power outages.

@SpaceElevator7 @ErikSTownsend If demand was a flat line, then we could meet it with just nuclear plants. But demand is variable so we need a bunch of different sources working together to meet it.

No you have a misconception of how the grid works. It doesn't matter how much baseload power plants you have, they'll never be able to meet demand on their own. Meeting peak demand requires flexible power plants that ramp up and down. Today that flexibility comes from a combination of natural gas, solar, wind, hydro, coal, geothermal, and energy storage. These sources fill in area under the demand curve and above the baseload generation line. This is not "multiple power systems." It's just one system made up of 10 different sources that all work together to meet demand at any given time. Hear's an overly simplistic view of what it looks like:

@SpaceElevator7 @ErikSTownsend That’s what energy storage and the other 9 energy sources are for. No one is suggesting that all of our energy needs to come from solar panels all the time. Energy can come from any combination of about 10 different sources at any given point in time.

@ExergyLab @ErikSTownsend Solar panels could be free, and installing them on every square inch of free ground wouldn't solve the intermittency problem and make them capable of running a power grid. The only way to do that is putting them in space, where there's no clouds or night time.

@SpaceElevator7 @ErikSTownsend That’s what people used to think yeah. That’s no longer true anymore though.

Intermittent sources like wind and solar can be good for a small percentage of your energy mix. But they can't run a power grid because you don't know when they'll produce power. The only way to make solar work for actually running a whole power grid is to put the panels in space.

@tszzl Imagine what would be possible if more people studied science and engineering.

it’s really just amazing what our civilizations’ technological capabilities are now just absurd

@thsottiaux @kr0der Unlimited token limits.

@kr0der What would you like to see in a > $1000 plan

who’s gonna pull the trigger on $500/$1000/$2000 AI subscription plans first? everyone who needs those plans is just buying multiple $200 plans anyway 👀