[ExI] alpha customer

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 



 

 

>.Well damn.  My calcs indicate this won't work.  The engineering is a go,
but the economic factors are a stop.  Idear is idead.  Idamn.

 

spike

 

 

I missed something important yesterday while I was doing the initial
estimates on that calculation station notion.  I am surprised no one pointed
out two big mistakes, never mind the economies of scale available to Bill,
Elon, Larry, etc.  They can build a power plant not connected to the grid,
use that to power their server farms.  Even if we ignore that, I made two
big engineering mistakes no one caught.

 

When one charges an EV, there is heat from the batteries warming, but it
isn't huge.  But running a bunch of processors isn't the same as charging
batteries.  In the latter case, ninety some percent of the energy from the
charger goes into the batteries.  In the former case, all of it turns into
heat.  So the amount of heat dumped into the van or truck might be twenty
times as high as it would have been had the van contained a bunch of
batteries.

 

I started doing the calcs and wondered how the hell it was getting so hot in
there.  I forgot something important: with battery charging you take into
account efficiency.  With processors, they are the equivalent of a zero
percent efficiency battery: all the input power turns into heat.

 

The other factor I forgot is that batteries charge fast at first, then their
power use (and heating) decreases as they approach full charge.  Processors
start at full and stay there.

 

But it probably wouldn't matter.  With a two-stage heat pump, we could
theoretically still take off all the heat.  But generating power using coal
or nat-gas in Nevada off grid is going to be way cheaper than we can buy
power where I live (California) by closer to a factor of 3 than a factor of
2.  California pays for so many expenses which wouldn't apply to the lone
wolf power station investor: distribution networks, billing etc.  We would
need to buy power at triple the cost going in, then still have a less
efficient operation.

 

Come on mechanical engineering hipsters.  You guys should have caught that
efficiency mistake, even if not the other two things.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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