Yup, Growatt is the Chinese OEM that Base Power white labels to pretend it does US manufacturing. In fact this stuff is low quality. You need to be careful. There are gradations of quality at cell, pack, inverter, control levels. You will be crushed if you realize you AliExpressed your way to a home power "solution" only to have it fail young.
For what it's worth, Tesla PV/batt inverters are bad, almost as bad as the Chinese manufacturers mentioned ITT. PW3 has very high failure rate ~10%+RMA, not good enough IMO to be in the path of power at my house.
(Their motor inverters are world-class, but totally different topology)
Tesla Powerwall products (including Powerwall 3) have a massive failure rate. Seems like 10% over lifetime. Shoddy technology compared to the leading competitors, especially the inverter. They should go back to white labeling cheap Delta inverters.
In the industrial world, where the real money is to be made, a high failure rate of the individual units isn't an issue.
You simply overspec the site by perhaps 2% to allow 2% of units to fail and the whole system is still working to specification.
Then you design the replacement procedure for the battery or inverter modules to take 10 seconds per module and swapping the faulty ones out only takes a few man-hours per year even for a gigawatt scale installation.
These are forcememed companies, unfortunately. Neither Palantir nor Anduril make a single thing that China doesn't, and neither one makes a single thing at attractive cost that would intimidate China in a conflict. They could disappear tomorrow with no impact to US military lethality.
Combat-proven software that helps put warheads on foreheads in compressed timescales. I'm not talking about development projects or what could happen, I'm referring to applications that are being used right now.
There's a massive difference between something in a lab or in a paper presentation and code that is running in production and provably works. There are lots of individuals pushing up daisies that would attest to the effectiveness of Palantir's applications if they could still speak.
1) lol 2) source for such confident claims 3) even if true, can they potentially make existing tech cheaper than competitors? Competition is good for price. If so, still an "impact on US military" 4) see 1.
EVs with BrakeFlow resistive protection against thermal runaway also will have a big impact –– allowing for faster discharge into the grid. Increasing cRate for grid services can "bring forward" the point in time –– so 2030 could even happen a few years sooner if these high performance batteries from Enovix come to the EV market soon.
Same reason internet bandwidth if more abundant and cheaper than ever, but your Comcast bill seems to actually only go up.
Local rooftop solar, with no reliance on utility monopolies, is the most important thing in the global energy picture, and I'm afraid it isn't even close. And I'm pro nuclear. But it's past time to recognize that it's the distribution monopolists that are the problem. Solar and batteries free you from that.
The phenomenon is that consumer prices for broadband go up, even as the wholesale cost of bandwidth (what Comcast is reselling to you) goes down. The cause of this is a mix of two things:
1. Cable companies have regional monopolies. Without a choice, they can raise prices on consumers without losing customers
2. Cable companies face ever increasing 'infrastructural' costs, such as environmental review, trenching, construction, permitting, easements, etc... These costs are well established as going up in excess of inflation (part of why we can't build new infrastructure anymore) and therefore even while the product itself (internet access) gets cheaper, the 'last mile' of distribution keeps getting more expensive.
Does anyone have any good articles about AWS (or other) lock in? I have Matt Prince's article about egress fees, but I'm looking for something more thorough.
No, Westinghouse has designs for small reactors too.
One prob with oklo seems its amateurish funding and founding. The other is that maybe 1 mw isn’t so useful. 100mw makes a difference (with distribution), so does 50kw (without distribution.)
What gets me is that amazing innovation was taking place, and privately financed. CA households were themselves paying out of their own pockets to build the huge additional capacity needed for EVs, for instance. All that rooftop solar really adds up. It also makes PGE's job much easier. They barely have to lift a finger these days when it's sunny and not too hot.
But PG&E and its uniparty allies like the NRDC just couldn't have it. They want control. They can't support distributed, renewable energy, because it cuts their (very badly maintained and undeserving of support) monopoly on distribution.
Classic CA decision that only serves PG&E and insiders, not the people.
I don't particularly like PG&E but you're misrepresenting the situation. They have to lift a lot of "fingers" when it's sunny in order to keep their portion of the grid stable. Unlike base load power plants, the power supplied by household solar panels constantly fluctuates. Some sort of grid scale storage might eventually solve the problem but for today that doesn't exist.
Honestly, no. PV does fluctuate, but at PG&E scale, the fluctuation is (a) smooth and (b) predictable. Demand for energy is going up, but demand for PG&E's brand of energy is going down. But state law guarantees PG&E revenues. That's the reason for these anti-consumer moves.
In any event, surely you agree that state granted monopoly utilities are public services. They're endowed with a monopoly to serve what the people need. PG&E seems to believe it has a right to live perpetually in... I don't know... 1988? But it doesn't.
