That is a very cool project and makes perfect sense.
Also I've just realized I am still using my Kindle 3 (the one with keyboard) to read books and it would feel strange to repurpose it to just display screenshots.
Anyhow, I wonder what problem does this actually solve. Almost all the money I spend is spent cash-less. Does this somehow allow to bypass Visa/Mastercard and thus be cheaper for merchant? What is the difference between digital euro and "paper cash"/normal euro in my account, being spent via card payments or wire transfers?
So we'll see at least 1-2 years of Apple Silicon being at least one node ahead of competition. I am curious for how long will be Apple able to pull this lead off, and what the perf/watt will look like when (if?) AMD has node parity with Apple in the near future. Or when perhaps Intel uses TSMC as well, and the same process node.
I think this was Apple's game for a LONG time. They have led in mobile chips to the point where they are sometimes 2 years ahead of the competition.
They do this using their monopsony power (they will buy all the fab capacity at TSMC and/or Samsung, and well before competition is aiming to do so either).
> They do this using their monopsony power (they will buy all the fab capacity at TSMC and/or Samsung, and well before competition is aiming to do so either).
It's not just buying power - Apple pays billions of dollars yearly to TSMC for R&D work itself. These nodes literally would not exist on the timelines they do without Apple writing big fat checks for blue-sky R&D, unless there's another big customer who would be willing to step up and play sugar-daddy.
Most of the other potential candidates either own their own fabs (intel, samsung, TI, etc), are working on stuff that doesn't really need cutting-edge nodes (TI, Asmedia, Renesas, etc), or simply lack the scale of production to ever make it work (NVIDIA, AMD, etc). Apple is unique in that they hit all three: fabless, cutting-edge, massive-scale, plus they're willing to pay a premium to not just secure access but to actually fund development of the nodes from scratch.
It would be a very interesting alt-history if Apple had not done this - TSMC 7nm would probably have been on timelines similar to Intel 10nm, AMD wouldn't have access to a node with absurd cache density and vastly superior efficiency compared to the alternatives (Intel 14nm was still a better-than-market node, compared to the GF/Samsung alternatives in 2019!), etc. I think AMD almost certainly goes under in this timeline, without Zen2/Zen3/Zen3D having huge caches and Rome making a huge splash in the server market, and without TSMC styling on GF so badly that GF leaves the market and lets AMD out of the WSA, Zen2 probably would have been on a failing GF 7nm node with much lower cache density, and would just have been far less impressive.
AMD of course did a ton of work too, they came up with the interconnect and the topology, but it still rather directly owes its continued existence to Apple and those big fat R&D check. You can't have AMD building efficient, scalable cache monsters (CPU and GPU) without TSMC being 2 nodes ahead of market on cache density and 1 node ahead of the market on efficiency. And they wouldn't have been there without Apple writing a blank check for node R&D.
They absolutely use their power (aka money) to buy fab capacity but they are also responsible for a ton of investment in fabs (new fabs and new nodes). Because of that investment they get first dibs and the new node. In the end it's up to the the reader to decide if this is a net positive for the industry (would we be moving as fast without Apple's investment? Even accounting for the delay in getting fab time until after Apple gets a taste).
What would motivate TSMC to choose to only have 1 customer?
TSMC is known as "huguo shenshan" or “magic mountain that protects the nation”. What would motivate TSMC to choose to have their geopolitical security represented by only 2 senators?
IIRC they were using TSMC before TSMC had a material process lead and supported them (and moved away from Samsung) with big contracts and a long term commitment. Hardly surprising that they have first go a new process. Not a risk less bet but one that has paid off.
Exactly. You cannot look at that as if they decided 2 years ago to just buy all the capacity. Their relationship with TSMC goes back way further than that, and there have been several ups and downs along the way.
Yea this is what I am wondering as well. If nobody else ends up switching to ARM in the laptop/desktop space and eventually AMD and Intel are making 5 or 3nm chips then surely this massive lead in power efficiency is going to close. At the current levels the new apple computers seem awesome - but if they are only 10-20% more efficient?
You do have ARM in Chromebooks. Any wholesale switch for Windows seems problematic given software support. But beyond gaming, a decent chunk of development, and multimdeia, a lot of people mostly live in a browser these days.
The problem is scale and availability of materials to make batteries.
Right now almost all the batteries are produced for and used in electric cars, however electric cars only make around 10% of all the cars consumed.
Now you wanna store enough solar-generated electricity for when the sun doesn't shine, worldwide? My napkin math says that either the price per kWh will go up, or that some poor country with enough lithium will be "politically destabilized" soon.
There's plenty of capacity for grid connected batteries.
For one thing they can use a bunch of tech that doesn't work well in cars (flow batteries for example).
And the price goes down because the primary constraint is production capacity. More demand means more factories mean cheaper prices. See eg the growth in manufacturing capacity in batteries and their price decreasing:
If you look at 2008, there was 6GWh of battery manufacturing in the world and 97% of it was in China.
In 2019, there was around 365GWh worldwide, split into: China (75%), US (9%), South Korea (7%) Europe (5%)
By 2023 we estimate there will be 1,230GWh worldwide: China (65%), Europe (10%), US (10%) and rest of the world (15%).
Iron redox flow batteries are made from abundant materials and cost less than lithium batteries. Sodium batteries have many of the upsides of lithium and don't require it (they require some other scarce materials). There are enough empty salt mines and similar to build weeks' worth of storage in CAES for less than the cost of either.
But none of these solve the issue of months long weather fluctuations and disasters entirely in regions where pumped hydro isn't viable. For that, grid flexibility (such as variable rate Al production and electrified steel smelting), gas or hybrid heating/cooling, generator backup for essential uses (minimal heating and medical facilities), and methane produced from electricity and biomass is the answer and the only reason it hasn't happened on its own is we don't price in the (absolutely massive) externalities of fossil fuels so they're marginally cheaper. We also need to cut the low hanging fruit that are responsible for most of the emissions either directly or indirectly (poorly insulated, overly large detached homes, cars, and cows).
Are detached homes really responsible for the majority of emissions, and how is that low-hanging fruit? That seems like one of the most expensive options per unit emissions reduced. I’m pretty sure industry and logistics are some of the most intensive, particularly if you don’t pretend that goods imported from China or other countries are emissions free simply because the emissions weren’t emitted domestically.
Detached homes are just one of the simpler low hanging fruit to fix -- subsidies on insulation and regulation rentals and on new homes -- rather than a huge part of the whole. It's an easy 5-10% depending on area (with side effects of helping the poor and reducing strain on infrastructure during extreme weather events) rather than a large part of the whole.
About half for heating and cooling in EU, https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-efficiency/heating... iirc 40% of that or around 20% of total was domestic -- it often looks small because it is broken dowm into two subsets of electricity and two subsets of methane use (and decreasingly kerosene) being for water and space heating. Detached homes use at least double compared to a row house (twice as many walls, but they also tend to be larger and have more windows) or far more than a similarly built apartment with one wall, and tend to be poorly insulated in places like the US.
Heating and cooling represents a lower proportion in the US for a variety of reasons (primarily driving/trucking and some differences in industry as well as a colossally wasteful military), but a huge amount is caused by cows, clearing land for cows, moving cows, cooling cow products, moving feed for cows, and producing fertilizer to grow feed for cows.
Unrelated, but detached home suburb design is also responsible for a lot of other emissions indirectly. Larger living space and fewer communal areas leads to more travel and more stuff. Things being spread out leads to low labour high emissions big box store stuff rather than local hand crafted and second hand markets and local in season produce. Transit and pedestrian hostile layout leads to more driving (and one car per person). Car dependent infrastructure leads to more trucking and less freight trains. Large centralised shopping centers like walmart leads to more uniform goods and just in time logistics which depemd on planes. Flight, trucking, driving and fossil fuel heating leads to more dependence on oil and gas. Oil and gas security is maintained by military activity which is responsible for a huge portion of emissions. None of this stops if you build a 5 over 1 and a train line or a medium density village instead of a suburb of course, but you make a small dent in every step.
> almost all the batteries are produced for and used in electric cars
I'm not convinced. I tried a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but there were a few too many variables, but I think the 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year edge out EVs (my main difficulty was comparing smartphone battery EV battery)
From a little Googling, it seems like an EV battery is four orders of magnitude larger than a smart phone battery, so about 150,000 EVs sold per year is the rough equilibrium point (that’s four orders of magnitude lower than your 1.5B figure), and it seems like we’re selling about a million EVs per month, at least as of the end of 2021.
Olkiluoto isn't fully online yet, that's expected to happen in December after it didn't pass trials and required repairs. It would then be 13 years late and cost about four times what was planned. The other two are looking like they're going in a similar direction.
Thirteen years late and four times over budget for the first new plant in Finland in 42 years. I bet if they build a second one, it won’t take so long nor be so over-budget.
In the UK, the Hinkley Point C project is over-budget and late, partly because they had problems with their initial concrete pours that necessitated exceptionally costly and time-consuming rebuilds. But as Hinkley gets closer to completion, the lessons learned are being transferred to Sizewell C, another EDF plant. [1]
The world needs these large nuclear plants and we can’t just give up because the first few constructed went over budget and took too long.
The lesson learned is there are sizeable overruns to be reaped on Sizewell, too, and not to be passed up.
The world is notably worse for these projects diverting money away from renewables that would have already been displacing carbon emissions for a decade by now.
> Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better.
In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over.
All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put the waste for millenia.
And that only if you're on the short list of countries that the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.
>CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over
None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually cost after construction" - which in some countries like Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.
The price difference between wind energy when the supply is high and nuclear when the supply is low is well over 10 times here in northern Europe.
If I can choose the time and place for when to do the trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c when I specific it would be massive profit.
Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10 times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up. I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want energy when demand is high and supply is low.
The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to produce. It is determined by the time and place it is delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how much they cost to produce.
Storage that has a reliable 365 charge/discharge cycles each year can be economical viable, especially when the discharge window of peak price is just a few hours. Solar + lithium battery work great in countries where the primary source of energy can be solar every day of the year.
Wind power doesn't work like that. Instead of a daily pattern of high and low supply, you get random amount of weeks and days of high supply followed by random amount of weeks and days of low supply.
Storage need to discharge in order to generate profits. If you get 30-50 discharge cycles each year, then those periods need to provide profits for the cost of 365 days of operations and it also need to repay the original investment.
One way to get around this is with subsidies. This is how some fossil fuel plants operate, called "reserve energy". When the wind blow they don't run the generator, but they still get paid through tax money. Then they start the engines when the wind isn't blowing and demand exceed supply. This scheme helps to reduce the peak price in northern Europe, through obviously it isn't really that cheap. It mostly just hide the true price behind subsidies.
Yes, the fact that such a strong incentive exists, and yet it hasn't been done, shows that cost is so much that even a 10x price difference isn't enough to pay for it.
I'm pretty sure it's done quite frequently. It's a pretty simple battery system with--apparently--an 80+% round-trip efficiency to it.
The biggest problem is getting permission to move that much water around. I live next to a lake and shudder at the regulatory hurdles I'd encounter building something like this. There'd be at least 4 government agencies before I even negotiated to sell to the public utility.
It would be obviously stupid to build storage that there is not enough renewable power to charge up from, yet. So, its not having been built yet only proves money is better spent on generating capacity.
Makes no difference what generates it. OP said that power prices vary by 10x from peak to trough. If you charge from the grid when cheap you can make 10x per cycle selling it back.
Can you show any sources for "same price = double the capacity in <renewable> + CAES storage"?
That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a stealthy rocketship here, who is it?
The reason you don't see "rocketship" investment is because the problem isn't hard enough, no matter how well you solve it you wouldn't be anywhere close to virtual monopoly. But despite that, hydrostor.ca got an investment of a quarter billion earlier this year, and they already started projects for A-CAES facilities in the GWh range (comparable to smaller pumped hydro) when their funding was less than a tenth of that (I suppose actual projects wouldn't be included in that funding, I think they see themselves as a project specialist, not as an owner/operator even if some/most/all current projects seem to be subsidiaries, perhaps a bit like spacex/starlink if you like space analogies).
Finland’s low population density means the amount of economically viable wind is more than enough to meet annual power demand.
Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been without subsides.
The point was the resource is available and cheaper than any alternative, not that they are actually going to say replace everything else.
Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so much rain per year, but you have a great deal of flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.
Heeeeyy, don't make reasonable judgment. This is solar and wind we're talking about, the solution to every climate problem. Even if there's no wind or no sunlight
you are aware that you are posting on an article about Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct?
How about you go review the tables showing how little solar energy these provinces receive in the winter?
So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced?
Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all year round, but in the north we need reliable power all year long, including our cold and dark winters.
It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.
So the best place in canada for solar and one of the better places. Where capacity factor in mid winter is still above 10% and cost per installed watt of output capacity during mid winter is less than the present value of the sticker cost of this nuclear project (excluding running costs and overruns and associated infrastructure and security costs) which won't even be running during the most important decade for stopping climate change? That Saskatchewan?
this will be the case when we transition from natural gas for heating. as it currently stands, electrical demand--with the exception of Quebec--generally is dramatically lower in the winter than the summer.
Using rather bullish on wind+solar+storage https://model.energy, to get stable baseline we need overbuilding of 10x the output power, so 2x + storage gets us nowhere, at least for Polish weather and sunlight data.
> you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar
And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much:
You've only quoted half of what you're replying to. You can get the solar, and the wind, and the storage, all for less than the cost of building nuclear once accounting for cost overruns.
It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity factor, but it's not 100%.
And that's priced into the LCOE which is a tiny fraction of nuclear -- especially once you factor in the costs of security and infrastructure, and the public being left holding the ball during decomissioning and waste storage, and of being the USA's and the next Kochs' patsy because now your entire energy infrastructure depends on them for fuel.
And then LCOE isn't even the right metric, because what matters is the CO2 produced by 2040, not the CO2 produced between 2040 and 2100 as we have to solve this now, or the world will be too unstable to finish a nuc.ear reactor, let alone run one until decomissioning. This makes the LCOE of renewables a little higher, but for nuclear it is between 10x and infinity times the cost per unit carbon.
Gave me smile because I have a little anecdote that happened recently.
My friend showed up for a B-day party, and after some time invited me and few other friends to have a look at his new car. I was thinking he must have gotten a raise at work, because the car was brand new Volvo V40, which is above average expensive in my country and also our income bracket.
Then it turned out he bought a new collar for his dog, and that the producer of the collar organized a prize lottery, where you could win a really nice backpack, and a car. And that my friend won the main prize, which was the brand new Volvo.
Now I know someone who won something really valuable, and also that these prize lotteries can sometime work.
I hate using messenger but some people I communicate with still prefer it. If this is rolled out, they will surely move to other platforms.