This may be a cultural trait too. Erin Meyer in her "Culture Map" Book mentions this idea that every culture approach persuading others differently from theory-first to examples-first.
There are plenty of dense cities around the world where I'm sure the owners of apartments in the (walkable) center would have enough money to buy a house/McMansion in a nice suburb.
And some do. But plenty don't. And building dense walkable cities with nice public transportation works very well and does not make these cities less attractive as far as I can tell.
I think Paris has a very good pool of scientists/engineers specialized in AI, it's not just a trend. It's probably linked to the engineering schools ecosystem.
It started with AdTech 15 years ago, then Google/Meta opening labs there.
If you think Google and metal started that I’ve got a bridge to sell you. To world class engineers produced there just used to become expats or work for big industrial players. They now have a (small) playground with the French tech.
Good question - we have a rating system where we compare companies on a variety of dimensions. If we find areas that need help post close, our clients engage us to work with the company.
We had an interesting incident where one of our datacenter temperature sensors kept on rising, and operators on site could clearly hear the noise increase of all servers going to max fan speed following a BMC "crash" triggered by a network loop on our IPMI lan.
It took us a while to identify the issue and all systems were running fine, but we had to shut down many racks to avoid the temperature to rise too high.
A recent study on Germany based upon 35 years of weather data [0] shows that we would need about 24 days worth of storage to cope with this weather conditions.
It's always interesting to see what ridiculous limitation they place on these to make them not work out.
Popular ones are:
Refusing to allow energy to be traded with neighbours.
Refusing to allow demand response.
Refusing to allow over building (so the installed capacity exactly matches the yearly required energy and storage needs multiply).
Refusing to target efficiency measures.
Refusing to use existing low carbon power sources (hydro, biogas).
Often they use low volume prices for a massive rollout but at least in this case they're estimating storage capacity rather than price so they won't have done that one.
edit: reading through it now, they cite other people who didn't do the above, and then state that they know some of their choices will overstate things:
> the fact that we model Germany as an island may lead to an overestimation
Guess that bit didn't fit in the tweet.
I don't fully understand this next one, but their headline number is based on running biogas as a constant baseload, which seems utterly ridiculous. They also claim that allowing that to flex with supply and demand has this impact:
> "Adding other sources of flexibility for the example of
bioenergy, the duration of period that defines storage requirements lengthens to more than one year."
That's a very strangely worded sentence, with a very counterintuitive plain reading. Are they trying to intentionally confuse people? I'm not sure, can't figure out anything reasonable from the article. How can adding 8GW of flexible biogas generation increase storage requirements? Are they counting the storage of biogas?
I am not trying to defend the study, but I don't think any of your points actually mitigate the issue of volatility.
1. trades with neighbours: most european countries face similar weather conditions at the same time. The french will need their own nuclear capacity to make up for their own lack of wind.
2. demand response: switching off factories or heating when you need it? That's no solution
3. over building: the problem is that the volatility of wind is massive, if you look at the uk grid website [1], it can go to nearly zero for more than a week. If the volatility was smaller, over provisioning could be a solution (provided the economics work).
4. efficiency measures: you only make the size of the problem slightly smaller, but you still have a volatility problem. And with cars going electric and us not relying on russian gas for heating, I don't see the demand for electricity going down
5. hydro, biogas: there is only so much hydro you can build. And the places where you can build some (Sweden, Norway) leave you at the mercy of a russian submarine cutting the cable. Biogas: isn't that co2 emitting?
Biogas is carbon negative, since you make it with manure and food waste that would otherwise give off methane.
EVs and heat pumps are over 4x the efficiency. 75% of your energy just not needed anymore to do the exact same work.
The real clincher is that most of the storage they predict is hydrogen and at the end they calculate that the crazy amount of storage required for Germany as an island is in fact, the same size as the existing gas storage facilities which can be reused for that purpose.
Which I think really rams home how utterly boring this allegedly insurmountable challenge is.
I am so tired of pretending things that aren't impossible aren't. Just do it and then reach the next level of civilization. Honestly the only reasoning I can come up with is that a handful of individuals would rather be kings than let everyone live a more advanced life.
Ireland and Britain has massive offshore wind potential that is only being slowly ramped up, for example. Macron has announced a new nuclear reactor building program, so potentially more carbon-free electricity to nuclear-adverse Germany. The massive Danish offshore wind park/energy island has yet to come online but will supply northern Germany.
And if you want to go even more exotic, you could get 24/7/365 renewable energy by piping geothermal to continental Europe from Iceland which has an oversupply. Or even building enormous solar parks in the Sahara (geopolitical risks notwithstanding).
There are plenty of options enabled by geographic distribution of supply without even looking at storage. The main problem is the lack of political will until now, which is changing with the realisation in Germany that Russia isn’t a reliable partner.
Edit: none of these rely on any technical breakthroughs either, merely ramping up the interconnection of grids and renewable sources of electricity.
Couldn't you just burn fossil fuels for those 24 days, and then do atmospheric carbon capture for the other 341?
Even if pulling the carbon out of the air takes 10 times as much energy as was released during those 24 days, that could still be achieved over the course of the year, with a reasonable amount of over provisioning.
It depends how you measure. But my company runs .NET at a much bigger scale (in terms of http requests and infrastructure footprint) than SO and I doubt that we are the only ones.
