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19 September
18 September
17 September
16 September
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korrents.com
Nervous credit-market sentiment around the AI datacenter buildout could suddenly reverse and collapse the boom.Their words
And when market opinion is nervous, it might turn and collapse the boom at any moment.
15 September
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korrents.com
Solar power's exponential growth will continue until all other energy sources are far below 0.1%.Their words
The solar power exponential will continue until all other energy sources are <<0.1%
From one piece The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formation 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
it was a chance to stand up to the oligarchs and this technology they've staked their future on.
The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com
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Their words
one way to understand a data center is that it's a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop.
The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com
14 September
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korrents.com
China scaled solar and batteries when America refused to because the CCP got scared of climate change.Their words
China scaled solar and batteries when America refused to, because the CCP got scared of climate change.
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Their words
AI data centers resulting in lower electricity prices for consumers
9 September
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Their words
data centers are nowhere near the biggest climate problem with artificial intelligence.
8 September
7 September
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Their words
there is actually one thing we do know how to do, and that is build out lots of cheap solar, wind, and batteries.
6 September
4 September
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Their words
This kind of thing will be exploited. Think Solar Winds–style supply chain attacks.
3 September
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korrents.com
Solar power combined with batteries has surpassed nuclear power as the superior energy technology for most uses.Their words
Because solar has, broadly speaking, won the technological race. Intermittency was the last big problem, and batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to make solar reliable.
2 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Stoke's reusable launch vehicles will be shipping Starcloud's data centers into orbit within a few yearsTheir words
In a few years, Stoke's reusable launch vehicles are going to be shipping Starcloud's data centers into orbit.
31 August
30 August
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Their words
But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change-replacing oil and gas with sun and wind-that is our best hope for limiting warming.
29 August
28 August
26 August
25 August
From one piece I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I have a long separate post here looking at the evidence we have, and I come away thinking the data center backlash is basically entirely homegrown.
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korrents.com
The data-centre backlash is about the buildings themselves, not about what people think of AI.Their words
All this combined with the survey data on Americans’ stated reasons for opposing data centers makes me think that attitudes toward AI are probably a meaningful factor for a minority of people opposed to data centers, but I don’t think the backlash overall is driven by people’s thoughts on AI.
22 August
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Their words
Preventing companies from building data centers in America wouldn't slow down the rate of progress in AI. It would merely slow down the rate of progress in AI in America.
21 August
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korrents.com
AI and the data-center buildout underlying it pose real and significant dangers to society.Their words
Its's clear by now that AI, and the data center development underlying it, pose real and significant dangers.
18 August
15 August
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Their words
Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.
14 August
13 August
12 August
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Their words
they found that Big Oil's use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI's data centers.
11 August
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Their words
The fastest-growing political movement in America is dead-set on stopping the construction of data centers, which are critical to the growth of the fastest-growing industry in America.
10 August
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korrents.com
Data centre opposition only pushes construction to the parts of America that regulate energy and pollution least.Their words
It seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
9 August
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korrents.com
Opposition to data center buildouts is fundamentally driven by public anger about money in politics.Their words
His Lansing rally with Bernie and AOC, more than anything else, crystallized the connection between data center opposition and voters' anger about money in politics.
8 August
5 August
4 August
3 August
24 July
20 July
11 July
7 July
30 June
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Their words
but I do think that in a future of probable energy constraint there will be a need for a more peopled agriculture, with populations spreading out to tap diffuse solar energy input.
26 May
13 May
From one piece Why Anthropic’s ultra-dirty deal shouldn’t surprise you at all 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change.
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Their words
The fundamental drivers of this change are panic and impatience, and that is what is behind the worst impacts of data centre growth, including a material risk to decarbonisation and climate action.
6 May
5 May
2 May
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Their words
This post is about whether data centers waste the land they’re on relative to what they compete with, and my claim is that they mostly don’t compete with things we need more of (housing) and mostly compete with things we need less of (farmland).
1 May
From one piece The exact wrong lesson to learn from data centre infrasound fears 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI data centres cannot be meaningfully reformed without a fundamental change of course and ideology in the industry.Their words
Reformation is impossible for AI data centres, at least, not without a massive change of course and an ideological reckoning.
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korrents.com
Data centres are being built in such number, size and speed that the industry cannot realistically be reformed.Their words
There are simply too many data centres being built, and they're too big, being built too fast.
30 April
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korrents.com
Data centres will become the majority driver of electricity demand growth in Australia's National Electricity Market.Their words
Even if a small fraction of this pipeline ends up operational, data centres will drive far more than 50% of demand growth in the NEM.
24 April
23 March
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Their words
Now, the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade.
22 March
13 March
From one piece Dylan Patel — The single biggest bottleneck to scaling AI compute 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
um humanoid robots maybe start to or robotics at least start to but the main factor is going to be for reducing the number of people is modularizing things and making them in factories in Asia
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Their words
Yeah, I think the biggest bottleneck is compute and for that the longest lead time supply chains are not power or data centers. They're actually the semiconductor supply chain themselves, right? It switches back from being power and data center uh as a major bottleneck to chips.
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Their words
oh 50 gigawatts of economic you know sort of capex in in the data center and what gets built on top of that in terms of tokens is even larger right it might be hundred billion dollars worth of AI value into the supply chain is held up by this $1.2 two billion dollars worth of tooling that simply just cannot expand its supply chain quickly.
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korrents.com
Getting a data centre permitted in the empty middle of America is far easier than putting one in orbit.Their words
And so I think people are figuring out how to build these things and permitting like I I just like ultimately like permitting and red tape in middle of nowhere Texas or middle of nowhere Wyoming or middle of nowhere like New Mexico is probably a hell of a lot easier than sending stuff into space
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Their words
So, space data centers effectively are not li limited by, you know, hey, we have this energy advantage. It's actually just limited by the same contended resource. We can only make 200 gawatts of chips a year by the end of the decade.
7 March
5 March
22 February
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korrents.com
Third-party frontier AI auditing is urgently needed and would help prevent extreme concentration of power.Their words
I think frontier AI auditing (covering both safety and security) is both urgently needed and doable, and can help avoid extreme concentration of power, since it introduces external oversight into the decision-making of people with a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" at their disposal.
We're in Triage Mode for AI Policymilesbrundage.substack.com
13 February
From one piece Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential” 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
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Their words
I actually think profitability happens when you underestimated the amount of demand you were going to get and loss happens when you overestimated the amount of demand you were going to get because you're buying the data centers ahead of time.
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Their words
but it's not an infinitely compelling product, and I don't think even AGI or powerful AI or country of geniuses in a data center will be an infinitely compelling product. It will be a compelling product enough maybe to get three or five or 10x a year growth even when you're in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is extremely hard to do and has never been done in history before, but not infinitely fast.
+ 1 more
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Their words
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
12 February
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Their words
But then you actually sit down and do the maths, and then for most people if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the, the CO2 output, or, like, the water use in equivalent of tokens.
10 February
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Their words
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories nowcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
6 February
From one piece Why I joined OpenAI 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I've realized that performance engineering as we know it may not be enough - I'm thinking of new engineering methods so that we can find bigger optimizations than we have before, and find them faster.
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korrents.com
eBPF, Ftrace, and hardware performance counters are proven tools for finding datacenter performance wins.Their words
given those technologies are proven for finding datacenter performance wins, it seems likely
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korrents.com
AI datacenter growth makes performance engineering critical for saving the planet, not just cutting costs.Their words
The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs - it's about saving the planet.
3 February
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Their words
I believe this is the watch great watchmakers would make today, given that back in the 1800s they were using all available technology.
5 January
23 December 2025
8 December 2025
From one piece Energy Predictions 2025 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
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Their words
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
31 October 2025
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Their words
It’s also a capsule to nowhere, designed without reference to any mission architecture that resembles our actual solar system.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
11 October 2025
From one piece The AI water issue is fake 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A data centre earns its county far more tax revenue per gallon of water than a golf course does.Their words
Data centers are so much more efficient with their water that they generate 50x as much tax revenue per unit of water used than golf courses in the county:
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Their words
It’s very common that I’m told that data centers poison the water around them.
30 September 2025
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korrents.com
Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, governments and intelligence services included.Their words
No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it's all encrypted.
30 August 2025
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korrents.com
American data centres consume about 66 million gallons of water a day, a small fraction of what they withdraw.Their words, before
Taking this into account, actual water consumed by data centers is around 66 million gallons per day.
Their words now
So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption.
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Their words
However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption.
I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumptionconstruction-physics.com
29 August 2025
18 August 2025
15 August 2025
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korrents.com
Solar's growth is not merely continuing but accelerating, and the rate of that acceleration is itself still rising.Their words
It is not only the case that solar adoption, production, price decreases are continuing. They're accelerating. And the rate that they're accelerating is still accelerating.
23 July 2025
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Their words
I think fusion and solar are the two that I would bet on. Solar, I mean it's the fusion reactor in the sky of course, and I think really the problem there is batteries and transmission.
16 July 2025
16 June 2025
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Their words
Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior.
19 May 2025
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korrents.com
The failure of wind or solar power to show up has never been the primary cause of a major grid blackout.Their words
While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.
15 May 2025
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Their words
But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.
12 May 2025
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Their words
this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.
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Their words
The technology powering ChatGPT had already launched prior to November 30th, 2022. It was just wrapped in a different interface. Very few people paid attention. Why did ChatGPT explode in popularity? Because of its obvious chat interface, which everyone intuitively already knew how to use it.
6 May 2025
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Their words
Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your total electricity footprint.
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?hannahritchie.substack.com
5 May 2025
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Their words
It becomes impossible to imagine that life was not sparked somewhere else, in our Milky Way galaxy, and maybe even in our local neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, maybe within a few hundred light years of our solar system.
13 January 2025
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korrents.com
If the AI build-out does become a bubble, power and data centres are the assets that will carry it.Their words
In today’s world, I think the increase in self-fulfilling asset prices will be due to power and data centers.
31 December 2024
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Their words
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
10 June 2024
From one piece How to Build an AI Data Center 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But many of these gains have already been achieved: the best data centers already use just 10% of their electricity for cooling and other non-IT equipment.
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korrents.com
Available power, not land or capital, is what now limits how many data centres get built.Their words
In particular, operating a data center requires large amounts of electricity, and available power is fast becoming the binding constraint on data center construction.
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Their words
But there's also reason to believe that data center power consumption will nevertheless rise substantially.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Utility companies see major electrical infrastructure as a long-term investment to be built in response to sustained demand growth.
22 April 2024
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Their words
This is the 2001 monolith hypothesis. I would be less surprised to find a quiescent alien artifact in our solar system than I would to catch a radio signal from an intelligent civilization.
18 April 2024
From one piece How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordable 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The cooling systems in most data centers are energy hogs and contribute no direct value.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Efforts to improve efficiency and remove vestigial features pay off handsomely.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Deleting the UPSs could knock off ~$750/kW after considering equipment, installation, and square footage reduction.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
The 100-megawatt facility might have ten 10-megawatt blocks served directly by a 1500V DC feeder line without connections to other blocks that would require extra switches and routing.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Some efforts, like nuclear-powered data centers, are reminiscent of Toyota's hydrogen push.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
4 April 2024
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Their words
The copper backplane in the data center rack is effectively the new advanced packaging in the system-level Moore’s Law race.
25 March 2024
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Their words
If a Chinese spacecraft can dock with a friendly satellite to refuel, repair, or transport it, the same robotic arm can also disable a US satellite’s solar panels and antennas. Alternatively, China can use these spacecraft to tow satellites into locations where they can, at best, only sub-optimally perform intended duties such as early warning, surveillance, or geolocation.
14 December 2023
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Their words
I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins. That our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.
5 September 2023
From one piece Biofuels: the US could switch to electric cars and solar power on just a fraction of the land 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
You can drive about 150 times as far from a solar-powered electric car compared to using corn bioethanol.
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korrents.com
We worry about the land solar needs while ignoring how wastefully the world already uses its farmland.Their words
While we fret over the amount of land needed for solar, we are often blind to how inefficiently we have used the world’s farmland.
6 June 2023
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Their words
an acre of solar panels generates as much energy as 100 acres of corn grown for ethanol.
A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com
4 March 2023
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Their words
Consider the solar industry, for which the US laid the scientific groundwork, only for Chinese firms to make all the photovoltaic cells.
7 December 2022
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Their words
It terrifies me, because these data repositories are not only a risk to individual user privacy, they’re effectively a surveillance super-weapon.
Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com
14 May 2020
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Their words, before
And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.
Their words now
Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.
From one piece Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020) 5 beliefs · rameznaam.com
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korrents.com
Solar's future price should be predicted from how much has been built, not from how much time has passed.Their words
We can use the last decade to predict the future prices of solar power. Not by looking at the cost of solar as a function of time, but by looking at the cost of solar as a function of cumulative scale of the solar industry.
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Their words
In short solar prices have dropped faster and lower than almost anyone has expected.
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korrents.com
Demand for electricity will rise to absorb far more solar than is currently considered feasible.Their words
Add these up, and it’s plausible that solar’s contribution to the energy system could double or triple the amount currently considered feasible for solar to provide.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
Average solar electricity prices in sunny parts of the world will fall to one or two cents per kwh by 2030 or 2035.Their words
This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable.
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Their words
The data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.
2 April 2019
5 January 2018
13 November 2017
22 September 2016
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
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Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.