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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I mean, if anything, the fact that the Oil & Gas industry uses hydrogen for refining means that there is a possible, robust market for green hydrogen to get into (don’t like this because it means oil is still the focus, when we need to consider green chemistry and stop with oil).

    The O&G industry also helped usher in solar PV at an early stage because of the needs of remote power in hazardous environments such as offshore rigs and near potential sources of release like oil tanks (I used to work as an engineer in O&G myself).

    There’s actually a lot of work by GE and Mitsubishi to start shipping new gas turbines to be capable of firing a non-zero amount of hydrogen in addition to natural gas. I think some plants are even capable of doing 50/50 hydrogen/natural gas, with that former number increasing year over year.

    Hydrogen could outstrip conventional fuels someday. The bottleneck has always been supply though.

    If renewables are so abundant and cheap, then we’ll finally have a reason to deploy hydrogen infrastructure on a massive scale (at least in the US). Hell, you look at the major inverter manufacturers for utility PV like Sungrow, and they have containerized electrolyzers ready for implementation. I haven’t done a market survey, but if they’re in the game, then so are other players.

    If you want to be convinced of the progress of hydrogen, I would look into the project that Sargent & Lundy is working on in Utah. They’re planning on using a salt cavern for hydrogen storage, and I believe there is a CCGT onsite as well to make use of the generation.

    Hydrogen is even on the minds of offshore wind developers like Siemens.

    The substance isn’t doomed like others in this thread make it out. There is active interest in the market to develop a supply chain and economy.

    Edit: The one thing I don’t see a lot of people talk about though is where the raw materials for this hydrogen will come from… Likely groundwater unfortunately. Since groundwater is already a highly sought after resource for consumption and agriculture, I’m not sure if hydrogen in this way will take off. This is why offshore hydrogen seems to be more promising, but as we see with wave and tidal power, the ocean environment just sucks for any commercialization.

    It’s an uphill battle, but the same can be said for the climate crisis in general. Hope we make enough progress before it’s too late.








  • I agree with all of this as an electrical engineer in the field. Base load is only base load because of the load profile of devices connected to the grid having either an on or off switch. Most of the time this means motors/HVACs, but the world of electronics is coming to that equipment just like how inverters have changed how we export solar PV and wind to the grid. VFDs, soft starters, and the like will make our industrial processes that much more efficient. We just need to spread awareness and ramp up implementation, just as much as for renewables themselves.








  • Yeah I thought OpenAI came out and said that they modeled the voice of a different actress, and they don’t want to share their identity out of a respect for privacy.

    It could just be a coincidence that Altman tweeted the image from Her, and people made the connection between the voice and ScarJo, especially since she did something extreme similar in that movie.

    Could be coincidental. Could not be. We don’t really have the evidence to say either way, but maybe ScarJo’s suit will affect change so that better rights are granted to people and their digital twins.


  • They’re referring to how Thomas Edison created the first electric vehicles back in the 1800s. They might have had a future until Ford introduced assembly lines. Then the rest is history.

    The EV1 was the first commercial development in the US following the World Wars, but even before then you had solar EVs being made for science and eclectic racing before then. Think of those weirdly shaped cars only made for 1 driver that have solar panels covering the entire body of the car.

    Funny thing is that we’re now seeing some commercial (or soon to be commercial) manufacturers add solar panels in the same way. Just look to Hyundai and Aptera.