> You ignore that solar on-site coupled with EV chargers on site eliminates a lot of grid transmission losses. In theory a residential complex, employer, retail, or commercial site could set up something like this, pumping most of the energy into the cars parked underneath, and have a fairly small connection to the grid.
How many square yards of panels would one EV charger need an a typical afternoon / evening?
A Solar panel produces about 250W peak per square meter. A parking spot can thus produce maybe three kW. A whole parking lot is probably enough for one or two chargers.
> A whole parking lot is probably enough for one or two chargers.
Super chargers, perhaps.
Most people drive so little that even just tiling the vehicles themselves will cover about 50-80% of the milage, albeit with the usual caveats like "seasons" and "who chooses to park in full sun?"
A non-grid tied charger cannot be depended on. You might get 40km worth of charge. You might also get zero if it's cloudy or the sun is behind a building.
You might say, oh this is fine, anything is better than nothing. But someone cheaper than you will think the same thing, and they will leave their car plugged into the charger all day long, because the cost of free surpasses everything. And it means that the charger will never be available.
> You might say, oh this is fine, anything is better than nothing. But someone cheaper than you will think the same thing, and they will leave their car plugged into the charger all day long, because the cost of free surpasses everything. And it means that the charger will never be available.
Two things:
1. Parking itself doesn't have to be free, even if the energy was. (Though I don't expect the energy would ever be free in a case like this, because sending it out to the grid isn't that big a deal, and neither is micro-billing).
2. You seem to be imagining a single isolated parking space in a bigger parking area, whereas the article (if you can call it that, it's the size and depth of a tweet) is saying it is mandatory, at a quoted rate of:
80 or more spaces must install solar power generation facilities with a capacity of at least 100 kilowatts
If this is to be a general requirement across all parking spaces, they don't get hogged, because there's always more parking.
Even better if we could somehow trunk my space’s 3500W of panels with the ones covering the combustion-driven car next to me. And the empty space to my other side…
As opposed me paying indirectly and directly for all the subsidies for the petroleum industry?
> Global explicit subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to around $1.5 trillion in 2022. […] The $7 trillion figure includes the social and environmental costs of fossil fuels.
The article you linked literally talks about fuel subsidies in the UK aimed at reducing the final cost of electricity for households and its vulnerability to rising of fissile fuel prices.
In the UK. A country that was one of the first to transition to renewable energy sources and which currently has one of the most expensive electricity prices. And then, to these "subsidies", losses from "road incidents" are added as other subsidies for fossil fuels.
Sorry, this is very difficult to perceive as an argument, it is literally designed for degenerates without education, who have difficulty understanding the meaning of words put together in sentences, and who, for this reason, evaluate any text by the presence of already familiar slogans in it
Why do you think anybody was operating under the assumption that this was free? But keeping your car topped up now is hardly free either, especially lately, so the question is really about cost comparison. And that's before you get into any externality costs.
They'd also be unhappy with a solar panel that only generated power when a car was plugged in. Fortunately it would still be connected to the grid, resolving both concerns.
Your car already has the battery built right into it, so a trickle charge for eight hours while you're busy at work might be enough to cover your commute.
2 kW over 8 hours would be enough for 100 km per day.
Why? The vast majority of cars spend most of the day stationary. I'd even venture to say most cars spend most of the day stationary in the same spot. If that spot has charging, slow or not, it would likely cover the daily energy used by that vehicle. Aside from road trips, that literally sounds like the perfect charging setup to cover most vehicle use-cases.
Going up thread a bit, I find "and have a fairly small connection to the grid."
Though even without that, so what? The typical commute is not half a battery's worth of kilometres.
And even for the exceptions, you're allowed to have a split between parking spaces labelled "this juice is completely free but slow at the best of times and depends on the weather" and others labelled "this juice costs ¥¥¥/kWh but is backed by that hydro plant and will fill your batteries in 30 minutes".
I would take the gamble somewhere there are 220+ days of sunshine per year, happy to pay occasionally and commute for free the rest of the time.
If anything all the panels can be connected together and charge the bosses cars up first and if there is any daylight left the charging can trickle down the org chart to the masses.
Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by highly concentrated power, limited political pluralism, and the suppression of dissent, often enforced by a charismatic leader or elite group
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A mandate is an authoritative command, order, or authorization to act, typically given by a higher authority, such as voters, a court, or a governing body
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So in the sense that a mandate is passed by government, and governments are sometimes authoritarian? If your logic is stronger than that you'll need to explain it to me. I'm not saying Asian countries are not authoritarian, I take no stance on that, I just genuinely don't understand how mandates imply authoritarianism.
> This is the kind of thing that every western ( or “rich” ) government should have mandated years ago.
If it's cost effective there's no need to mandate it.
If it's not cost effective but you want it anyway, you can explicitly subsidize it instead of mandating it.
Does South Korea do mandated parking minimums like I hear is common here in the US? That would tell whether this is a tax on business property in general, or a tax on driving / personal mobility specifically.
Should we explicitly subsidize the kitchen equipment restaurants need in order to comply with food-safety regulations instead of mandating it? How about the mandatory sinks in the bathrooms of businesses (or even the mandatory toilets) - subsidize those instead of mandating them e.g. through OSHA?
> If it's cost effective there's no need to mandate it.
You should see how hard PG&E is working to prevent commercial and multifamily buildings from going solar. If the legislature voted to force PG&E to get out of the way, to allow property owners to do obviously cost-effective upgrades to their own properties, plenty of people would call it a “mandate”
Thinking about it from an individual (not business) point of view, the upfront capital won’t be repaid for 10-years or more and does little to change the value of the lot. The lot value is probably most dictated by location and capacity. Solar does nothing to affect location, and may even harm capacity. Parking lot customers might choose a lot of its shaded, but ultimately it’s a captive market due to location.
If I owned the lot, I could take on no-risk (which may be why the lot was purchased to begin with), or take on a 6-figure investment that could bankrupt me if the demand for the lot vanished. (I suppose in that case you’d at least be making money on selling power back to the grid.)
Electric utilities are "natural monopolies" that get to monopolize territory in exchange for being well regulated. It's preferable to having 3, 4, 5 utility poles stuck at the same corner all running wire for competitors. But it means you don't have market conditions driving optimization between competitors.
Moreover electric transmission and distribution gains from limiting solar investment and there's a history of utilities being in tension with solar power and lobbying against it. Solar skips the power lines and utilities need people to need power lines.
> If it's not cost effective but you want it anyway, you can explicitly subsidize it instead of mandating it.
Or, as happened in actual reality, you tell the owners they have to put it in place. Imagine that - the two weirdly specific things you came up with aren’t actually the only two options. Who would’ve thunk.
> What do low income people have to do with it, when AI companies and research is borne out of Silicon Valley culture of rich, liberal Californians?
RLHF is "ask a human to score lots of LLM answers". So the claim is that the AI companies are hiring cheap (~poor) people from convenient locations (CA, since that's where the rest of the company is).
Yes, this precisely it. There isn't going to be hard evidence to prove it though. Survey data that underpins some empirical studies have similar transparency issues too. This is far from a new problem.
If you adjust your mindset slightly when searching online, it's not hard to find communities of people looking for quick side work and this was huge during the covid lockdown era. There were people helping train LLMs for all kinds of purposes from education to customer service. Those startups quickly cashed out a few years ago and sold to the big players we have now.
I don't get why this is hard for people to believe (or remember)?
"Poor" in California means earning $80k/year, so they probably are not doing that. Africa / Indonesia / Philippines are better places to find English speaking RLHF workers.
The military is using Palantir's Maven Smart System, which uses Claude, to identify targets to attack.
From here[1]:
> The targets for Operation Epic Fury were identified with the aid of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven Smart System, which folds in data from surveillance and intelligence, among other data points, and can lay out the information on a dashboard to support officials in their decision-making.
> Maven, created by Palantir, has been coupled with Anthropic’s Claude, a large language model that can vastly speed up that processing.
And here[2], it's still being used despite being "banned":
> But given the government’s extensive use of the company’s chatbot Claude during its deadly offensive in Iran, it’s clearly having trouble making do without it. As The Washington Post reports, the US military is extensively using Palantir’s Maven Smart System in the conflict, which has had Anthropic’s Claude chatbot integrated since 2024.
> Last week, the Wall Street Journal first reported on the Pentagon’s use of Claude to select attack targets in Iran, hours after the White House announced its ban.
> According to WaPo‘s sources, the system spits out precise location coordinates for missile strikes and prioritizes them by importance. Maven was also used during the US military’s invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro.
> Center Command is “heavily using” the Maven system, Navy admiral Liam Hulin told WaPo.
> Military commanders told the newspaper that the military will continue using Anthropic’s tech, regardless of the president ordering them not to, until a viable replacement emerges.
> I know the US already has a different 240V plug shape, so it might have to be an unlicensed installation, but surely someone wanted hot tea faster and did that calculus before?
How expensive would a proper AC->DC->AC brick for that power level be?
Not so simple, you'd have to use a 'drier' or 'welder' socket for that otherwise you won't have enough power. A single circuit in Europe is 240V 16A or 3840W!
A pure sinewave inverter for that kind of power is maybe 600 to 1000 bucks or so, then you'd still need the other side and maybe a smallish battery in the middle t stabilize the whole thing. Or you could use one of those single phase inverters they use for motors.
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