* this is a record for the time a turbine has been under the sea without any maintenance, which proves its commercial viability
* because it generates powers during high/low tide, and because the lunar cycle is different to the solar cycle, it could help fill in the parts where solar falls off in a predictable way
BUT:
* Tidal energy is valuable but geographically constrained
* Only a few countries have suitable locations for it (UK, Canada, France, South Korea)
* The Global Technical Potential (in TWh/year) is 1/10th of offshore wind
>* The Global Technical Potential (in TWh/year) is 1/10th of offshore wind
I assume the value is still massive? The UK is still aiming to 4x its Off Shore wind by 2030. That would be 60% of UK electricity. If the new Nuclear Power plant actually deliver double its current 15%, that would be total 90%. The rest could just be solar and underwater turbine.
I am just wondering if underwater turbine causes any issues with marine life. If not we could absolutely deploy them on massive scale and avoid the eye sore of Wind Turbine.
South Korea was going to build a large one but canceled it due to the marine life threat. One way they try to fix it is by having a safety mechanism that turns the blades off when marine life passes through but this increases operating costs on something that is already high maintenance.
Yes, the Annapolis station was conceptually very much like a hydroelectric dam generator. When the tide was coming in sluice gates were opened to allow a reservoir to fill, then when the tide was going out the water was sent through a high-speed turbine.
It's unlikely that Nova Scotia will see tidal power again in the near future. There's been some attempts at in-stream generation, but the projects have been opposed by the local fisheries, and the federal regulators don't seem interested in helping define the requirements.
Plus a newer one off Vancouver island BC shut down after a couple years because its operating costs made it economically infeasible. Had to get fixed and upgraded a few times. Which I why the maintenance thing in the headline is probably relevant.
"Tidal energy is valuable but geographically constrained" Is this really a negative? Can it not be simply viewed as a boon for places where geographically reasonable? I live in Arizona, I'll not be upset when left out of tidal energy - I've got solar and a sunshine surplus.
the hard part with geographically constrained sources is that they have a harder time getting economies of scale. solar works everywhere and is really easy to install, so the market cap is massive, leading to corresponding increases in production efficiency.
> * Tidal energy is valuable but geographically constrained
Yes, of course. I do not get the point, this is not a solution to every electricity generation problem
> * Only a few countries have suitable locations for it (UK, Canada, France, South Korea)
There are more than that. I have a seven knot tidle current 5km from my house, not mentioned in your list. I know of others. The costal conditions are quite common for this. The same technology will be useful in rivers too
Tides happen everywhere, but not to the same extent and not always at useful times. If your peak production times don't line up with peak demand times, then you need expensive energy storage. (This would change with the phase of the moon, so sometimes you'll get lucky and sometimes you won't.)
One thing that's relatively unique about the UK is that different parts of their coastline experience tides at different phases -- meaning with carefully chosen placement of different tidal energy plants, you can always have some of them operating near peak production. Click around https://www.tidetimes.org.uk and you can find places with high tide times happening at just about any time of day.
If you look at a map like http://www.bidstonobservatory.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016..., the best places to use tidal energy would be red areas with lots of white lines hitting the coast -- these would give you the highest-amplitude tides with the most opportunity for phasing. The UK has both.
Most regions have very small tidal ranges. That doesn't mean they have small tidal currents (think of fjords or straights for example), but it does make it more likely.
And in those fjords and straights, I reckon yhese solutions will compete with boat traffic.
Fascinating. I wouldn't have expected the English Channel to have the strongest tides. I would have expected it to be the Atlantic coast of Ireland or France.
Earth without land masses would have around 0.5m to 1.5m of tides, depending if it is springs or neaps. All the higher amplitude tides are caused by resonance in the sea. The North Sea and the Channel and Irish straight are quite resonant.
> * The Global Technical Potential (in TWh/year) is 1/10th of offshore wind
To put this in perspective, less than 1% of the world's land area would be needed for wind turbines to power the current energy needs of the globe (according to NREL). So this is not a limiting factor.
1% of the world's land surface is massive! That's about 1.5 million square kilometers. That's more than 4 times the land area of Germany or apparently about as much as the entirety of the built up area on Earth.
But that's non-exclusive use of 1% of the surface. Land under wind turbines can and is actively used for farming et al. The actual area that's prevented from other use is much less than 1%.
For reference the Sahara desert is 9.2 million square kilometers (obviously covering the entire desert in turbines is impractical, but we might be able to come up with 1% “useless” land if needed)
“No known solution” is categorically false [1]. Economics is the issue
1. Generate hydrogen or other synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from electricity; flow batteries, saltwater batteries, and a myriad other chemistries; compressed air; hydro, etc etc
They're not really solutions if they're not achievable in practice though. Otherwise why not add nuclear fusion to the mix?
To give some example: Switzerland is roughly electricity neutral over a year, but there's a significant winter/summer imbalance of about 5TWh.
To add enough storage to compensate this imbalance, you would need to:
- cover about 2% of the country in batteries
- build about a thousand pump storage stations: despite the Alps covering about 40% of the country, it's not clear if you would have enough valleys to flood
- hydrogen looks a bit more reasonable, if we don't look at the costs, you only need to store a few millions m3 of liquid hydrogen. The gas storage in Germany for instance are quite a bit larger than that, but hydrogen is also significantly harder to store.
And all of this is to use once a year essentially! None of it looks practical or affordable (a pump storage station costs a few billions a piece for instance).
World of Warcraft had this in Booty Bay. There was a hilarious achievement where you first got your reputation to max with the Booty Bay guards by killing the nearby pirates, then the other half was to kill the guards until the Bloodsail Buccaneers faction exalted you; a 2.5x reputation grind that took weeks. And when you were done you couldn’t enter Booty Bay anymore because the guards killed you on sight.
WoW was amazing back when it first launched, I tried it again a year ago and everything felt on guardrails now. There was a linear set of quests that led you down an unmissable road to level up and get gear. You never were stuck with missing or low level items, each quest gave you the pieces you were missing and you get purple gear for doing the right steps in the right order, not for taking risks and getting lucky.
I remember first playing and feeling totally lost as I wandered from place to place hoping not to stumble into something with a skull that would murder me. Any item you lucked into was a godsend and people were equipped with a jumble of gear that was the best they could get. If you got your hands on an epic you wore it forever. Maybe it is just nostalgia but it really didn't feel great for it to be so straightforward now.
This randomly reminded me of when I grinded dwarf reputation in World of Warcraft so that at level 40, I was the only human riding a goat/ram (dwarf mount) instead of the horse.
I remember killing endless crocodiles in STV so I could turn in their heavy leather I think during the event where the realm works together to open the AQ gate.
I'll see a 13yo gardener here in Mexico and wish he could be doing that instead of working. :(
Nowadays it probably takes 20 hours if you really grind. Repairing rep on the pirates was soul-destroying but so was getting all those lockboxes for Ravenholdt rep.
I haven't played retail in the last few years so I'm not sure if that rep has changed, but on my main I never bothered to regain the Booty Bay rep and was still KOS to them. Hilarious.
I've worked with LLM's for the better part of the last couple of years, including on evals, but I still don't understand a lot of what's being suggested. What exactly is a "custom annotation tool", for annotating what?
Concrete example from my own workflows: in my IDE whenever I accept or reject a FIM completion, I capture that data (the prefix, the suffix, the completion, and the thumbs up/down signal) and put it in a database. The resultant dataset is annotated such that I can use it for analysis, debugging, finetuning, prompt mgmt, etc. The "custom" tooling part in this case would be that I'm using a forked version of Zed that I've customized in part for this purpose.
Typically, you would collect a ton of execution traces from your production app. Annotating them can mean a lot of different things, but often it means some mixture of automated scoring and manual review. At the earliest stages, you're usually annotating common modes of failure, so you can say like "In 30% of failures, the retrieval component of our RAG app is grabbing irrelevant context." or "In 15% of cases, our chat agent misunderstood the user's query and did not ask clarifiying questions."
You can then create datasets out of these traces, and use them to benchmark improvements you make to your application.
I actually think major components supporting consciousness are already present in LLMs, and some of the 'requirements' like "perceiving time fluidly" are anthropomorphism: perception of time is streams of discrete signals; an LLM also processes streams of discrete signals -- just not as high resolution or analog as the ones our brains process.
There are certainly big missing pieces too though -- like the article talks about, physical grounding; to me, this should probably also include emotion and other neuro-chemical mechanisms. But I think we have a moral duty to look very critically at whatever "criteria" (doubtless these will keep changing as machine intelligence advances) society and the AI Labs end up developing to "define machine consciousness". Personally I think we're headed in a very direct, straight line back to widespread institutionalised slavery.
> There are certainly big missing pieces too though -- like the article talks about, physical grounding
I think that it may be possible to view consciousness as the combination of three things:
(1) A generalizable predictive function, capable of broad abstraction. (2) A sense of being in space. (3) A sense of being in time. (#2 and #3 can be combined into a "spatiotemporal sense.")
Animals have #2 and #3 in spades, but lack #1. LLMs possess #1 to a degree that can defeat any human, but lack #2 and #3. Without a sense of being in space and time, it's not clear that they are capable of possessing consciousness as we understand it.
The country I'm from and the country I'm living in right now are both "democratic socialist", has been called "socialist hellhole" by more people than I can count, and they both sit at +4.0 and +4.4.
So I guess the positive ones are the "democratic socialist" countries?
Sure it isn't a socialist country, but many Swiss policies would be considered socialist in US politics, eg: if you are sick/ill you receive 80% of your salary for 720 days.
> Social democracy and democratic socialism are related but distinct political ideologies. Social democracy, often associated with the Nordic model, focuses on regulating capitalism to create a strong welfare state and reduce inequality through social programs, while generally supporting a mixed economy with private ownership. Democratic socialism, on the other hand, envisions a more fundamental transformation of the economic system, often including greater public or worker ownership and economic democracy, while also emphasizing democratic principles.
All countries in West Europe implement social democracies. They greatly outperform the US.
Countries in Eastern Europe are still enduring their legacy of communism/democratic socialism, but 30 years ago they experienced a radical swing towards the blend of neoliberalismo professed by the US.
Lastly, you look at data showing how the US greatly underperforms in key quality of life metrics, and the conclusion you opt to extract is cherry-pick those to look down on? That's tragic.
* this is a record for the time a turbine has been under the sea without any maintenance, which proves its commercial viability
* because it generates powers during high/low tide, and because the lunar cycle is different to the solar cycle, it could help fill in the parts where solar falls off in a predictable way
BUT:
* Tidal energy is valuable but geographically constrained
* Only a few countries have suitable locations for it (UK, Canada, France, South Korea)
* The Global Technical Potential (in TWh/year) is 1/10th of offshore wind