I love this! I appreciate regen breaking will be hard to add without picking a new controller and so on but perhaps you could add a DPDT switch wired into the break that adds in a string of 3 old incandescent 12v break lights.
(DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current standard practice.
It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very little space and if you're consuming the heat, you don't need the noisy cooling towers (Ok maybe a little in summer).
Similarly if you stick your datacentre right next to a big nuclear power plant, nobody is even going to notice let alone care.
- You have to size your cooling towers for your hottest hour. Doing this saves you no capital costs.
- You barely have to run the fans on your cooling towers in the winter because the air is so cold. So often this also won’t save you much operating costs.
- Already there is an essentially unlimited amount of so called “waste heat” from power plants and factories. Building district heating systems is extremely capital intensive, which is why this isn’t done more.
- As a municipality it’s just a horrible idea to make the heating system of your whole city rely on a random company continuing to operate (even worse if said company is in a potential bubble). This is why most district heating systems work with power plants - they already have the government involved in ensuring their continuing operations.
I don't think I ever said it reduced capital cost. I agree (though you might be willing to take more risk on reducing redundancy e.g instead of 2+1 cooling towers you may be more willing to just buy 2).
You cannot put a power station in the middle of a city centre, you can put a datacentre there. The main reason this isn't done more is that it's expensive to build heat network between the 'far out of town industrial area' where they put the heat sources and the city centre where the heat consumers are.
I don't know why a municipality is involved, but regardless you can simply install a backup heat source and/or add a mix of heat suppliers to the network. Backup gas boiler or similar is not that problematic or expensive to add particularly because you don't need to add redundancy as it's just there for a backup scenario.
Resistive heating is a tremendously inefficient way to generate heat. Sometimes it's worth it if you get something useful in exchange (such as full spectrum light in the winter). But it's not all upsides.
Heat pumps are magic. They're something like 300% efficient. Each watt generates 3 watts of useful heat.
I share your enthusiasm about heat pumps, but I wonder what the efficiency of using waste heat is. Couldn't it be competitive with heat pumps? As it's a waste product, isn't it reasonable to also expect it to be more than 100% efficient?
As a rule of thumb (obviously it varies) you spend about 1% pumping water round a heat network. So your CoP is around 99 if you consider heat truly free. It's actually higher as pump energy largely is converted to friction/heat.
You can’t extract energy from heat by itself. Only from a heat delta.
Think of heat like flowing water or charge. Only an altitude or voltage delta creates the flow needed to harvest energy.
You get no useful energy from heat you are already trying to shed because you have no delta to work with. (The entire problem exists because there is no surrounding environment with high heat capacity and lower heat.)
Yes, because there is a heat delta. A heat difference.
Using higher heat to raise lower heat is just the most simple case.
But purpose isn't relevant to this constraint, it is a physics constraint. Regardless of purpose, you can't extract useful energy from heat without a heat difference to work with. (And without a heat difference, even "heating" with heat doesn't do anything.)
Yes you can, that is exactly what heat pumps do. As long as the total entropy increases it is not in violation of the laws of thermodynamics.
But I don't really see how that is relevant to the question of using waste energy to heat homes. We don't have ideal Carnot machines so there's always energy wasted, which most of the time is still good enough for residential heating.
The conversation was about harnessing energy, from heat, in orbit.
Heat pumps take energy to move energy. But you can't power the heat pump from the heat it is already pushing against the heat gradient.
Waste heat can be used, if there is a difference in heat to work across, but not if there isn't. A datacenter in Antarctica could recover energy from waste heat, against the freezing outdoor temperatures.
In orbital systems, the problem is getting rid of heat, so there isn't some cold place to use to create a heat gradient and harvest energy. Space is cold, but particles are so diffuse they have little heat energy capacity, so essentially a heat insulator, and not useful to create a gradient. Thus the use of radiators.
A problem with this argument is that it actually doesn't help most people on the HS2 route. If you live in a village on the outskirts of Aylesbury say, it's not much good to you personally that there's more local services on the WCML, because it's a 40-50 minute drive to the nearest WCML station; your local line will see no improvement. Freeing up space on the M1 has no impact either for the same reason.
It would of perhaps been an easier sell if we could of built it much closer to the WCML and told people, look this is to get rid of those horrible fast trains that wizz though your local station at 125mph.We'll use the space for more services so your commute to London from say Leighton buzzard is faster and less busy.
Knocking down half the towns that the WCML runs through to build more tracks carrying trains that aren't going to stop there would be neither easier nor cheaper than HS2.
Do you think the people who designed HS2 have not considered these aspects?
You analysis is very narrow and only considered the benefits to a certain set of people.
HS2 actually follows reasonably closely to the old GCML. And for the same reason, its the best route to build a fast rail-line along.
I think your proposal complete ignores the additional cost of such a route change. And the cost alone, aside from anything else would make it unreasonable.
Many things go into selecting a route and in most cases where I think they made the wrong choice its usually because of cost concerns, like not building the needed tunnels into cities.
The reason HS2 route cost so much money is because so much is tunneled. Why is so much tunnelled? Because rich people live there and won't accept a blot on the landscape, partially because they don't see a personal benefit.
If you can remove the tunnels it doesn't really matter that the route is slightly longer or has slowly less optimal geometry.
That not totally true. Yes, HS2 spend additional billions on tunneling. But even without that you don't magically solve all the issues and in some places where they do tunneling its actually not completely stupid. Tunneling accounts for a few billions, not many 10s of billions.
And you don't get magically rid of all issues with people complaining, because guess what, other people live on that other imaginary route that lives in your head, and they would demand tunnels too.
And its really the politicians fault, a few people who don't like the look of the train should not have the power to stop it, specially not in a place as centralized as England.
The reason you can't run as many other trains on WCML and other lines is because high-speed non-stop trains take so much capacity. Once you remove them, you can run many more local/regional trains with more stops and higher frequency.
The whole way HS2 is designed is to maximally reduce the amount of fast trains going north south on the existing network. Leading to a massive capacity upgrade on the existing lines. You can still run some express lines but likely much more lines that stop at more station, making it fast for you to go to next HS2 stop and from there to the further distance destination.
HS2 connection to Leeds was designed to help the ECML, the whole HS2 system was designed by experts to help with WCML and ECML.
Of course now that the former car brained fucking moron of a prime minister in his last attempt to safe himself canceled most of HS2 all those benefits are gone. And labor is to cowardly and ignorant to bring it back.
We have 400Gbe which is certainly faster than USB.. but;
On consumer devices, I think part of the issue is that we’re still wedded to four-pair twisted copper as the physical medium. That worked well for Gigabit Ethernet, but once you push to 5 or 10 Gb/s it becomes inherently expensive. Twisted pair is simply a poor medium at those data rates, so you end up needing a large amount of complex silicon to compensate for attenuation, crosstalk, and noise.
That's doable but the double whammy is that most people use the network for 'internet' and 1G is simply more than enough, 10G therefore becomes quite niche so there's no enormous volume to overcome the inherent issues at low cost.
Could just be local loop latency, in VDSL or DOCSIS you can get 5-15ms of latency just in your first 1KM. London (e.g Telehouse) > Amsterdam is only about 7ms.
I think it depends, honestly. As a startup you could be using civo or katapult as clouds and be getting almost everything you need. I think the main issue is actually network effect; easy to hire people who know AWS, easy to explain AWS architecture to a auditor who's seen it 100x before and it's easy to explain to customers that you use AWS like them, so easy to do VPC peering, or BYOC with them if needed..
If you just want dedicated servers/VPS the choice is much wider still and plenty of providers on comparison sites and so on.
Sadly, I agree until we get SMRs (I think we are few years off). Obviously it would be more ideal to use grid+solar with curtailment but not super realistic.
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