Academy Awards Best Picture - Know These New Rules Before You Start Production

A friend has a Model 3 Performance, 0-60 in 3 seconds, can get up the long ramp at 90 MPH, doesn't even own a fast charger at home. He paid $63 two years ago, now it's #55, 000 new.
 
And, speaking of money, a 35 year old French (soccer) striker Kareem Mostafa Benzema (or simply "Benz"), a world player of the year from two years ago is also leaving his club of 14 years Real Madrid and moving to Saudi Arabia for a reported $630M over the next three years. Which is a lot of money that is not taxable either.
 
And a bit on oil - OPEC is meeting over the weekend in Vienna (their HQ), where they're planning to cut the production again. For the third time in a year. Yet prices are still dropping (especially considering the dollar based inflation) in the long term, despite several short-lived rebounds that followed some impressive posturing and general disinformation. (here's an amusing tidbit that didn't make all the major news wires - OPEC banned Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and Reuters from attending and reporting from their meetings. The oil producers want a full blast disinformation scheme)

And that's because the EU and China are moving heavily into the renewables, mostly solar but wind too. EU is up 40%, heading toward 60% by 2026 off 2020, with over 12,000 homes are on full solar already. The EV (both fully electric, aka BEV's, as well as plug-in hybrids) are at the 21% market share in the second quarter of 2023.

In other words, the Euros are weaning themselves off (mostly Middle Eastern, in their case) oil. Part of it due for the political reasons, part of it due to the war in Ukraine, part is due to the maturation of the required technology and part is due the ever increasing output of plants that have been under construction for several years and are now coming online.

PS. The Germans have also heavily gone from the gas heaters into the heat pumps. Their sales are up 111% off the prewar 2022, with over 300,000 units sold in the first quarter of 2023 alone. (there are about 40,000,000 homes in Germany, so a little over 1,000,000 units annually doesn't seem to be much ... but it is)
 
It's going to take a lot of petro-dollars to fund Neom. But hey, the Middle East has lots of sun and wind, so they can start moving over to that stuff... not nearly as much money in it, but hey, you gotta fund your toys somehow.

They have a clever idea in Europe about using wind power to drive a hydrogen plant. That solves the battery storage problem. They generate hydrogen during the day and pump it into old natural gas mines and then use it at night for power. The closest thing to 100% clean power and no impact regarding lithium mining or waste. Like the sulfur-lithium batteries...... don't hold your breath. So many of these sorts of ideas are 'just around the corner and in trials and then we never hear from them again.

I talked to Juan. He agreed. For 2 points gross profit participation, he'll let me document him as one of my financers. I'm golden for Best Picture nomination. My wife has started looking for jewelry and gowns.
 
The hydrogen revolution needs both the production and the consumption sides. There are some well known firms (Bosch, Siemens, VW, etc.) that are working on the possible designs. What comes to fruition and where is unknown. Technically speaking, a solar panel powered hydrogen plant somewhere in Morocco or Australia can provide and subsequently deliver sufficient volumes to the power plants, where hydrogen will be converted - without the platinum-cobalt catalysts, presumably - into energy.

Oh and Messi's coming. A poor flea (that's his nickname "Pulga") doesn't know what he's gotten himself into. Miami is a fun place to spend time in but its MLS franchise, owned by David Beckham, has been a disaster since inception. Leo will need better coaches and better imported players or he'll hightail his behind to Saudi Arabia.
 
DLD said:
And that's because the EU and China are moving heavily into the renewables, mostly solar but wind too. EU is up 40%, heading toward 60% by 2026 off 2020, with over 12,000 homes are on full solar already...

PS. The Germans have also heavily gone from the gas heaters into the heat pumps. Their sales are up 111% off the prewar 2022, with over 300,000 units sold in the first quarter of 2023 alone. (there are about 40,000,000 homes in Germany, so a little over 1,000,000 units annually doesn't seem to be much ... but it is)
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Someone recently tried to convince me that it was smarter to put a wind turbine on my property than to get rooftop solar panels. Seems like a crazy idea to me. But his argument was that supposedly it's very expensive to take down your panels and put them back up when you need to do work on or replace your roof. And that they also increase the potential for water leakage because you need to drill holes in your roof to install them.

We put in a whole-house heat pump system last year in the attic with ducts going to ceiling vents in every room. Heating and cooling. I can't give it a long-term review, but so far I love it.
 
Tom Roper said:
I had the plug and play idea at 4 yrs old when I filled by older brother's fuel tank from the garden hose to save him a trip to the gas station. It didn't work out well then, and home charging is not working out well now.

It takes forever. Tesla drivers have killed over supercharger spots in Denver. The infrastructure is stupid. Having different plugs and different battery styles and charging stations that don't work together is nuts. What is needed is standardization, ubiquitous refresh stations and standardized cores where instead of waiting for a charge, you drive over an open pit and a robot swaps your battery core. You drive away. The spent core goes into a recharging queue. And how will the electricity be generated to meet this demand? Solar? Wind farms? Or the continued burning of more fossil fuels? Better get going with it soon. Solar and wind farms are eyesores, as well the effect on the environment and wildlife should not be underestimated. Proprietary charging formats, already overstressed tranmission lines. Jimmy Webb wrote "Wichita Lineman" for Glenn Campbell,

"And if it snows that stretch down south
Won't ever stand the strain."
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Growing pains. By the time EV adoption reaches a critical mass, we will develop better standards for recharging them and have more places to do so. Personally, I plan on keeping an ICE available after I buy my first EV. And basically use that on trips where I don't have a comfortable margin of charge above and beyond what I need for the day. But I have a long commute to Manhattan (about 150 miles round-trip) and the average EV range is now 291 miles. So, even after my battery capacity degrades 30%, I would still have more capacity than I need for 98% of my drives and just charge it overnight.

I don't think that swapping batteries will ever be a thing. They're huge and very valuable and would incur way greater standardization challenges than charging. I'd rather take good care of mine and not mix it up with others.

Solar and wind are becoming cheaper than other forms of electricity generation. So, that battle is kind of over. And they have the benefit of decentralization.
 
ahalpert said:
Someone recently tried to convince me that it was smarter to put a wind turbine on my property than to get rooftop solar panels. Seems like a crazy idea to me. But his argument was that supposedly it's very expensive to take down your panels and put them back up when you need to do work on or replace your roof. And that they also increase the potential for water leakage because you need to drill holes in your roof to install them.

We put in a whole-house heat pump system last year in the attic with ducts going to ceiling vents in every room. Heating and cooling. I can't give it a long-term review, but so far I love it.
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It depends on a location. The US Southwest (Texas, Arizona, Nevada, California) has very low costs of solar energy (as low as 2cents per KW, with the newer panels). In other states, it can be as high as 9c/KWH. The Germans and the Dutch are going solar inland because they can save on space that way, while going wind offshore. The Dutch are apparently top solar adapters.
 
Here's the problem with solar for personal use (households) as things stand. The solar energy is produced - wait for it - during the day. (shocking, huh?) while the consumption of energy is far more distributed (the highest energy consumption in places like California are from 6 to 9 PM,). That means that energy has to be stored somewhere. And there are major difficulties. Most local utlliities will shaft the homeowners - they force a contract where it buys energy for ~ 5C/KWH but will sell it back to the homeowners/panel storer for 20c (or higher, depends on the state, obviously). One way out of this conundrum is to store energy yourself but the currently popular type (Lithium Ferro Phosphor or simply LFP) are OK for automobiles but a tad too pricey for home use. The next generation batteries made off very inexpensive sodium has just gone on production lines and available only to "preferred customers" (Chinese car manufacturers of entry level electric vehicles). To make financial sense, both the batteries and the storage has to be packaged at a far lower rate and completely bypassing the local utilities.

Then purchasing an electric vehicle will make more sense too. It's far cheaper already for the upscale electric automobiles (vs. the upscale ICE) but is at a wait & see stage for the entry tier vehicles. CATL stated that the sodium batteries will go into wide scale production in the 3rd quarter. The largest sodium reserves are in the US (large sodium mines). Some deals will have to be struck to bring the technology to the US market. But when it does come, it ought to prove highly important.

Side note - apparently, the US manufacturers have already invested ~ $80B into future battery plants - mostly automotive - that will achieve a full production stage within 3-4 years. So, despite some anti-EV rhetoric, there's a great existing commercial push forward.
 
The argument that the grid won't support everyone having electric vehicles is the same as saying the petrol industry can't support gas engines back at the beginning of the last century when there was no petrol infrastructure. Supply and demand work hand in hand. Assuming we go 100% electric vehicle sales by 2035 and it takes another 10 years for petrol owners to give up their cars, that gives us 22 years to increase the electric grid the 22% it will take to run all cars on electric.

That's why it took 20 years for color television in the '60s and HDTV in the '00s to overtake the previous technology. I watched HDTV demonstrations at NAB in 1990. It wasn't until 2008 that HD overtook SD TV sales. Who wants an HDTV when there is no content. Who wants to make HDTV when there are no TVs. It comes along piece by piece.

So what happens to the petrol industry if the 74% of oil being needed for petrol goes away? Will the cost of plastics, fabrics, etc skyrocket or not?
 
A friend and I went to Burbank's Fry's Electronics in 1998 to check things out. That's where for the first time I saw a flat screen Philips TV - 46" for $14,000 - and it wasn't even an HD (it was SD, 480P).

As to the energy production - most of is likely to move off-grid, made and consumed for the household itself. The oil prices should decline precipitously within a decade, driving most high cost producers out. The gasoline prices are likely to be very low, not counting taxes imposed on drivers.
 
That does look like nice stuff. I don't know. For $3.70 I'm going to go with Treazy. I showed it to my wife and she is thrilled.
 
ahalpert said:
Apparently only 1/3 of electricity consumption is residential? 1/3 industrial, 1/3 commercial. of course, those sectors could also produce energy locally. But I would think that everyone still needs access to the grid for surge capacity and off-hours supply

https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers
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But, at some point, a typical household will own two or more electric cars too and that's where a portion of the "home made" juice will go. Technically speaking, one could sell it to the neighbors as well.

In Europe, a lot of solar panels are installed on commercial roof-tops. There are far fewer NY/Miami type hi-rises and they supply enough energy for the smaller size office buildings. Then someone else has been working on window solar panel designs - transparent and glued to outer walls or glass on mid and hi-rises. Then there was a German company that made inexpensive, short range vehicles with roof top solar panels that could theoretically be able to skip plug-ins entirely. A perpetual mobile of sorts. They had some interest but went broke and closed the shop. Their cars were sort of like golf cart size. (would be perfect for driving right on stage during a Celine Dion song). A light car needs about a KW for 5-7 miles (Mercedes claimed to have gotten 7 miles/11 KM per one KW/H on a sedan), so if one could get 6-8 KWH, one could drive ~ 30 miles or so daily. But costs were too high to attract further investors.
 
And more on solar panels

"Scientists led by Saudi Arabia’s KAUST have achieved a power conversion efficiency of 33.7% for a perovskite-silicon solar cell. KAUST Professor Erkan Aydin made the announcement on its LinkedIn account.
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KAUST claims 33.7% efficiency for perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell – pv magazine International (pv-magazine.com)

A typical photo-voltaic solar panel is ~ 20-21%, so 33.7%, presuming it's practical in production, is 50% greater. Which drops the cost of energy produced by the same solar panels by roughly a half. Which is pretty gnarly. And really bleeping awesome.
 
PV's went up in price (the same for oil, the same for wind) after the Ukraine war started because of the rush away from the Russian gas and into the all sorts of the renewables. But plans to expand production had been underway beforehand also. In 2022, the global PV panel production was around 200 GW, now it's close to 300, next year it's expected to reach 400 and, by 2026, as much as 600 GW.

Hypothetically speaking - though it's probably not realistic - one could shuttle the already charged solar panels from warmer climates such as Northern Africa across the Middeterranian and/or Atlantic in day or two and then back and forth without building very long underwater cables. A large transport with the PV's on its deck could even charge its panels while already in transit and/or be connected to a much shorter underwater lines. The US pondered a Morocco-or-England line that would be something like 4,000 miles. A moving lines would be much shorter. But I am just fantasizing.
 
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