Is the Pope catholic?

Shading degrades solar module performance, but I was thinking about thrown stones and sctatching with a hard metal bit which immediately destroys the prestressed glass pane only designed to withstand 30 mm hail.

And I live in a very nice neighborhood. Elsewhere, these things would be destroyed weekly.

Vertically mounted bifacials have better cooling so higher efficiency, harvest light from both sides and provide more during low winter sun and no snow cover on the panels/reflected light from the snow.

I could use some of them. But the power bill will make my eyes bleed.

Go back to the Ukraine. I hear fans of Bandera and Shukhevych need warm bodies to fertilize the rich chernosem, so go join https://en.wikipedia.org/...

Get ready to replace these a couple times a year if public-facing.

Ukraine has been too busy killing their own citizens since 2014 to now stop being a NATO proxy against Russia. Demographically, they are already dead.

Fuck you, Google.

You can buy a used Pixel. Motorola has some useful hardware, but this is about freedom, not best price performance.

GrapheneOS, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

I can tell you that keeping an existing decent ICE is better than buying a new EV. But once you have to buy a new car anyway, and an EV fits your usage pattern and operational environment there are no reasons not to buy one.

All I need is a baseline open hardware EV. Fat chance, of course. So I guess I have to buy something used, today older than 8 years and counting.

I also LOLd at that.

Interesting, thanks.

I could certainly see a use for HBM in consumer products again (my GPU has 8 GB HBM).

The fossil use in thermal and chemical inputs below is way beyond heat pumps so they count 1:1 in primary energy.

1. Iron, Steel, and Metal Processing

These processes require some of the highest temperatures in manufacturing to extract, melt, and purify metals.

Blast Furnace Smelting: 1,500 °C - 2,000 °C — Used to reduce iron ore into liquid pig iron.

Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) Steelmaking: 1,600 °C - 1,700 °C — Melts recycled scrap steel to produce new steel.

Metal Casting and Founding: 1,200 °C - 1,600 °C — Melting metals like aluminum, copper, and iron into molds.

Heat Treating (Annealing, Hardening, Tempering): 400 °C - 1,100 °C — Controlled heating and cooling processes to alter the physical and chemical properties of steel and alloys.

1. Ceramics, Glass, and Cement

These involve extreme heating to drive off moisture, chemically alter minerals, and melt raw materials into durable goods.

Cement Clinkering (Rotary Kilns): ~ 1,450 °C — Heats limestone and clay to form cement clinker.

Glass Melting: 1,200 °C - 1,600 °C — Melts silica sand, soda ash, and limestone into molten glass.

Ceramic Firing / Sintering: 1,000 °C - 1,400 °C — Hardens and bonds ceramic materials to produce brick, tiles, and advanced technical ceramics.

Lime Calcination: 850 °C - 950 °C — Decomposes limestone into calcium oxide (quicklime) and carbon dioxide.

1. Chemical Processing and Petroleum Refining

High temperatures are utilized in the petrochemical sector for cracking, reforming, and producing core industrial gases.

Steam Cracking: 750 °C - 900 °C — Breaks down heavy hydrocarbons into lighter, valuable alkenes (like ethylene).

Steam Methane Reforming: 700 °C - 1,000 °C — Reacts steam with natural gas to produce synthesis gas and hydrogen.

Ammonia Production (Haber-Bosch process): ~ 400 °C - 500 °C — Requires both high heat and high pressure to synthesize ammonia.

1. Refining and Mining

These processes are responsible for extracting precious metals and purifying chemical elements from mined ores.

Copper / Zinc Smelting: 1,100 °C - 1,300 °C — Melts copper and zinc ores to remove impurities.

Calcination of Alumina (Bayer Process): 1,000 °C - 1,200 °C — Removes water from aluminum hydroxide to produce alumina.

It's too bad we likely won't see used DC numeric accelerators on the market even after the AI bubble pops (cracks are showing already). Some of them are not just for small integers, so useful for scientific accelerators.

Interesting thing about FP8 https://www.hpcwire.com/...

You can't use heat pumps for high-temperature industrial processes. And heat pumps and EVs need grid upgrade and renewable infra which are energy-intensive.

World primary energy use shows an effectively constant fraction of fossil in the overall use. There is no "turning back" from something that doesn't exist.