Oil free for electricity generation. The media in my country (Finland) also likes to brag about 90+% fossil-free electricity generation. But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.
Finland has electricified 40% of primary energy which is pretty much world leading (Sweden and Norway are 50%). European average is 19%.
Largest chunk left is transport which can mostly be electrified now. Industrial and home heat too. There are hard to electrify sections in both but overall it's fairly obvious what to do next.
And the easy parts eliminate 3 or 4 units of primary energy for every one they replace, so even 40% primary energy is way over 50% toward the finish line of electrifying all the useful stuff.
I think it's also an interesting question as to whether countries that use a lot of electricity have lower per kWh prices because they spread the fixed costs further.
Yes, ground transport (except long distance trucks) can be electrified now. In principle, most homes could be heated with electricity if we had means to store all the "excess" wind energy or waste heat from e.g. datacenters and use it in district heating. The technology for heat storage is mostly ready but the capacity is not.
But would it be easy or obvious what to do next? Absolutely not. Everything is simple if you have pockets full of money, live in temperate climates and do not rely on energy intensive (and hard to electrify) industries like the Nordic countries.
For example, about 25 per cent of the total energy consumption in Finland is used to heat buildings. Wood burning is about half of the total heating in distric heating systems which account about half of the total heating for buildings. Also heat-storing fireplaces are still a small but a crucial part of the total picture. A lot of extra energy capacity is needed just make sure you stay alive during the coldest months even if some of the systems fail.
Nordic countries have cheap electricity mostly for two reasons: very stable interconnected electric grid and lots of different renewable energy sources. Arguably, hydropower is the most important because it can stabilize the intermittent wind power which in many places we have more than enough already. Nuclear energy is also a major part of electricity production in Sweden and Finland.
And yet our electric grid or electricity production capacity is far from ready to handle even the more realistic dreams of "full electrification" we are told in the media. It will take many years just to get the grid ready.
And what happens if the stablest renewable, hydropower, fails? We might find it out this year as hydropower reserves in Norway are at the lowest level in 20 years. Hydro generates about 90% of Norway's total electricity.
My exact area at the moment, the problem is not the distance but recharging because the infrastructure for fast charging Electric Trucks has not rolled out broadly enough yet. Other than that the technology is completely ready its literally just missing some infrastructure that is being built right now.
> But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.
The trick of course is that if you electrify heating and transportation they'll need much less energy. Your average car with an ICE has an efficiency of 20-40%, electric cars have 60-80%. Heating your house with gas has an efficiency of around 100%, heat pumps have 300%-500%.
In theory gas boilers for heating are above 90% efficient. Not 100% because to achieve 100% what you'd have to do is keep the exhaust gases (which are hot) inside, where the people are, and unfortunately the exhaust gases are poisonous so that's a terrible idea.
Not sure where you get your numbers but they are way off. Natural gas is 90% (nothing is 100%). Heat pumps are geothermal masquerading as electric. And the highest number I ever heard for a heat pump was 135% which was under nearly ideal circumstances. In Finland, heat pumps can't make nearly enough heat to handle a winter there so you need something else too or instead of.
Truth is that electricity is great for kinetic energy but terrible at making heat. Most forms of energy can be transformed into another form of energy at about 50%. Electricity is the weird one where its 90% to motion but only 10% to heat. So if you want heat, you want something that makes heat directly. That's why natural gas heating (for building and homes) is usually lower carbon any other method. When you try to switch to electric, it makes things worse because of these inefficiencies. And heat pumps are great when you are in the right environment for them (like say the UK down to say Spain or so). But in Finland, you are going to need more than just some pipes in the ground and a fan.
135% is quite low for an air source heat pump. For instance a Samsung HHSM-G600005-1 [0] claims to have been tested to be 485% efficient at heating water to 35°C and 283% efficient at heating water to 55°C, both with 7°C air temperature. For Finland you'd want to find a heat pump with a datasheet specifying SCOP for specifically the EN 14825 Northern Europe climate zone. I couldn't find one with some quick googling, but I found a Swedish site selling a air-to-air heat pump[1] claiming 222% efficiency at -25 °C.
> And the highest number I ever heard for a heat pump was 135% [...] Truth is that electricity is great for kinetic energy but terrible at making heat. Most forms of energy can be transformed into another form of energy at about 50%. Electricity is the weird one where its 90% to motion but only 10% to heat.
Sorry but absolutely not, that's wrong on several levels. First off, in its most basic form of resistive heating, electric heating is already close to 100%. Heat pumps are even better, and I'll just quote Wikipedia
> At a cost of 1 kWh of electricity, they can transfer 1 to 4.5 kWh of thermal energy into a building.
Are you saying that, for a given amount of electricity, you can only convert 10% to heat? I can't even think of a way to make this correct, since all forms of energy end up as 100% heat, the question is just whether the heat ends up in your home or not.
Tell "doesn't match reality" to cable television. All channels ended having ads. This is Capitalism in a American society that is looking more of a plutocracy than a democracy.
Please for the love of all that is holy stop with the completely false outdated meme that “at one point cable didn’t have ads”
Cable was first introduced as a means to get over the air channels for remote places that couldn’t get a signal to get network tv. These channels always had ads.
Then came the “Superstations”. They were local independent ad supported channels like TBS in Atlanta and WGN in Chicago that went national. They always had ads.
Then the early cable channels like ESPN, the precursor to Lifetime, CNN etc and they always had ads. The other early cable channels were trying to sell ads to advertisers from day one but they didn’t have enough viewers.
Yes channels that you paid extra for like HBO didn’t have ads and still don’t.
A quick bit of Googling shows that by the time cable got to be standardized with anything worthwhile in Brazil, ads came along with it. Before then it was mostly premium channels that also don’t and never had ads in the US.
It's so mind-boggling that they have control over the default browser home page and the news feed on everyone's taskbar and they choose to show gossip and one weird trick that doctors hate. Don't they feel embarrassed that they pollute their brand like this? Is the revenue from the clicks really worth it, or do they just not care?
While crazy to us, I bet we're in the minority. Average computer user might actually like it or at worse (to MSFT) not even notice it. Their web experience is bombarded with "1 weird trick" ads everywhere.
I don't think it's about revenue from clicks; they probably believe that it is what customers want, because those customers click on it. That surely means that they want it.
No worries, this is just how manipulative relationships work: they always aim for unidirectional communication.
You're obliged to consume the most important news from the most important entity on the planet Earth (Microsoft/Facebook/X/...), eat piles of informational crap that get dumped onto you, waste you emotional energy on processing the whole thing, participate in drama and show your admiration. Why? Because you're very convenient when in this state, you're mendable and coercible for whatever action the entity wants you to do without saying it directly.
But when it's time to listen to you and your concerns - surprise-surprise, nobody's home. It's one way only, see you next time, maybe.
P.S. Forcefully installing an attention-pollutve app like News in the Start Menu is nothing less than a way to control you. And for an insatiable ego, the sense of control is everything. This is why it keeps coming back, again and again, as if it's a lucky reoccurring coincidence. A Windows Update repairs the system? Yes, plus it repairs the system of control. Security patches are very convenient vehicle for that - once you eat it, you'll be served special dishes you never asked for.
I presume that it's a difference between Windows OS editions. I turned it off too, but it wasn't as easy as one click, I had to use Group Policies to decrapify the adjacent aspects of the system. Group policies are not available in Windows Home edition, for example.
I just went into the settings for the widgets, turned off the "Start" or "News" experience or whatever it is and it's never come back. Just using the toggle it offers in settings. While I was at it I went into the taskbar settings and just turned off the widgets altogether, never came back. I wonder if sometimes we just assume the worst and resort first to "hack" ways to disable some of these things and when a new update comes along from your company or whoever, it gets re-enabled. Instead of just using the built-in functionality for turning things off.
Use this https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 or something similar, unfortunately without this level of tweaking it will be a shit show, not deeply modified windows feels like browsing the internet without an ad blocker.
No no you don't understand. "Here's a picture of some gross toenails" is the sincere best most valuable advertisement that the fourth most valuable company in the united states is capable of delivering. If anything better existed, they would be using it.
You really have no clue how this works. Microsoft is just the intermediary. They take money from whoever pays to shove you ads, sometimes malicious ads that could infect your machine (if you're not heavily protecting yourself from that). And it's not only Microsoft that's the culprit, they all do it. Google does it, Meta does it, Microsoft does it.
Yep, providing front line comms to Russia in the Ukraine war as well as being gifted a virtual oligopoly by the US government is quite the win for their profits.
uv has a lot of sensible defaults that prevent clueless developers to shoot their own feet. Uv sync, for example, would uninstall packages not in pyproject.toml
i kind of disagree with this. uv run is clunky, i don't want that. i want to keep the activate the venv and do shit model. i hate uv run as a primitive.
Don't understate its importance. I've been using Python for more than 30 years. They solved a problem that a lot of smart people didn't solve (). Python developer experience improved an order of magnitude.
Brazil, a continental country, has more than 80% of its energy from renewables
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