I'm not a fan this type of solar development. I live in Arizona and we've bulldozed plenty of the desert. There's lots of life and beauty worth preserving. Instead let's put solar panels on the huge, hot, mostly empty parking lots we're forced to have in the city. It is more expensive, but it can reuse some underutilized space and add some shade within the city. Or put it over agriculture on more rooftops or other similar spaces.
My playdate arrived a few weeks ago. Lots of good fun little games. A lot of the catalog games look nice, but most are just outside of the impulse purchase to me.
Understandable, and I hope one day to be able to offer a demo so people like you and I can make more informed purchasing decisions. To give you the developer point of view: after all is said and done (cuts/taxes/fees/fx/etc) I see just under half of the list price. I'm trying to make a living doing this (it's my one and only job) and I have no idea what price is "best" so I make a decision and have to stick with it. If I may ask, what is the impulse purchase price limit for you?
I feel that teachers learning about how their interactions contribute to how young students think and feel about themselves and the subject is important. The teachers directly talking about 'growth mindset' to students seems to work against it. It makes me think of corporate speak. For example 'synergy' is worth thinking about (make sure we're working together effectively and similar), but the when we start talking about finding synergies or improving our synergy, eyes start rolling.
> A big goal of the city’s heat mitigation plan is to more than double the city’s tree cover from roughly 10% to 25% by 2030 by planting drought-resistant trees like elms, ashes, and Chinese pistaches, prioritizing historic neighborhoods in the urban core.
That's nice, but just on my street I've seen neighbors take down 3 trees over the past couple years without replacing them. Trees are expensive to trim and care for properly. I haven't heard of anything addressing that. The poorest neighborhoods have almost zero tree cover. The heat + water are and will become larger issues in Phoenix in the next few years and it feels like leadership isn't doing much. On the water front I've heard really interesting things that Las Vegas is doing that should be replicated here (reducing lawns and water waste - example article: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/las-vegas-decla...).
I have a child starting college next year. One thing that surprised me is the number of extra fees. It very much reminded me of ticketmaster, comcast, or airbnb hidden fees. Adding them all up for starting next semester the fees are over $1000. This article does say 'tuition and fees' so it's probably taking this into account. Still it surprised me and feels like a pretty scummy practice.
This depends on the school. One of my kids is at a college where there are very few if any itemized extra fees, not even room and board (all students live on campus). Another went to a school where there were at least half a dozen fees in addition to the tuition, as well as room and board.
I definitely agree that the advice is regional. I live in Arizona and I've been working to transform my backyard though some managed neglect with some success. The big thing for me was knowing what plants live in my yard: what to keep and what to remove. After killing the bermuda grass, I did get some nice volunteer sunflowers that I've encouraged to the point that we yearly get a good amount of them on our back porch (water settles in the area when it rains). I've added some globe mallow and other natives over time. I've also learned about all the different invasive weeds in my neighborhood (globe chamomile a.k.a stinknet is a plague). This past winter/spring I added more wildflower seeds which turned out pretty nice. I'm hoping over time I can get more native plants or at least more desirable plants to out-compete the less desirables so it gets easier to manage. In the end I think it's more work than a lawn and takes some education, but to me it's infinitely more interesting and enjoyable to work on.
This is very neat. I've heard of similar benefits to combining solar panels and agriculture.
I'm glad this is getting some attention. I live in the desert and often I hear from people who don't live here the sentiment that it's useless, dead land, but the opposite is true. The deserts in the southwest US are alive with all sorts of interesting and beautiful plants and animals.
The recent videos from Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t have focussed on some of the endangered desert habitats and cacti around Texas. His videos are always awesome, but these most recent videos have really opened my eyes about the diversity and fragility of these ecosystems, despite being so hardy in other ways.
Almost any area builds soil structure if you leave it undisturbed. It’s important to remember that solar installations aren’t an industrial concrete slab but leave space for secondary agricultural use. I have a hayfield which produces better year over years because the roots of the grass are undisturbed.
Desert is a funny term. Most of the areas that Americans call desert are really steppe (semiarid) by the Köppen classification, and Phoenix — in a true desert — still gets three times as much precipitation as Tamanrasset in the Sahara. There are very few areas in the Americas (Death Valley, the Atacama, etc) that are as dry as the deserts of the East.
Most people hear "desert" and probably think of the Sahara and Arabian deserts, but the classification includes much less extreme areas as well.
They're also covering water canals with solar panels, which a) makes use of otherwise wasted space, b) reduces evaporation of the water, c) reduces algal and weed growth which causes toxicity and flow problems and d) encourages cool shaded zones beneficial to local wildlife.
>Haryana solar power policy announced in 2016 offers 90% subsidy to farmers for the solar powered water pumps, which also offers subsidy for the solar street lighting, home lighting solutions, solar water heating schemes, solar cooker schemes. It is mandatory for new residential buildings larger than 500 square yards (420 m2) to install 3% to 5% solar capacity for no building plan sanctioning is required, and a loan of up to ₹1 million is made available to the residential property owners. Haryana provides 100% waiver of electricity taxes, cess, electricity duty, wheeling charges, cross subsidy charges, transmission and distribution charges, etc. for rooftop solar projects
> Haryana provides 100% waiver of electricity taxes, cess, electricity duty, wheeling charges, cross subsidy charges, transmission and distribution charges, etc. for rooftop solar projects
I wonder why it's 'rooftop solar projects' specifically and not also inclusive of on-the-ground solar projects.
Just make sure the solar panel components contain no heavy metals or other toxic substances. Same with the batteries.
These materials do leach & contaminate the ecosystem & water table.
Bonus points if no children were compelled to mine or manufacture the material.
They do contain heavy metals and toxic substances. As do the batteries.
Looking it up, it appears that the contamination occurs during disposal so it's not a good idea to dispose of these in the kind of landfill where they can get into the water table, and it's preferable to recycle them.
It appears that mining these materials in formalized industrial mines has no child labour according to Human Rights Watch. It's artisanal independent mines that are risky from this perspective.
Mass-produced PV panels contain hardly any heavy metal. Some of them contain lead in the solder but this is avoidable. Most of the noise is about cadmium, but you will note that CdTe thin film panels enjoyed brief market success before being stomped again by the irresistible decline of the price of Plain Old Silicon. Even CdTe panels are basically inert, coming from the factory as a stable, insoluble glass. If you read the research papers about the possibility of cadmium pollution in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground. Why would anyone do that? Look at the funding for the papers. The "research" was designed as anti-renewable propaganda.
> in soil from CdTe panels, their methodology is to grind the panel into a fine powder and scatter that on the ground.
Sounds a bit off, but consider the effect of having the glass thrown into a landfill where it will be bulldozed, day after day, for several years. It is just jumping to the end of what would be the eventual outcome after a few decades of disposal.
I don't find that to be an arguable study design.
"Anti-renewable propoganda" is certainly a thing, but it's also true that many champions of renewables keep their blinders on when it comes to making assessments.
Solar and nuclear are the demonstrably effective means of producing large scale power, but they don't provide portable energy density (the kind we demand). Battery technology has finally come into the realm of competition, but that has been with extensive and persistent research for decades.
If chucking PV panels into landfills were actually a widespread practice, I am sure you could produce some statistics about how much of that has actually occurred.
The fact is that PV panel economic lifetime is way, way longer than reactionary renewable opponents want you to believe. It is not 15 years, or 25 years, it is more like 100-400 years. Nobody needs to decommission them en masse, yet. And even if they suddenly did, it still does not present a disposal issue. Suppose there are 100 million PV panels in California. This is the right order of magnitude for our peak generating capacity. If you took every PV assembly in the entire state, stacked them 50 deep so they were about as high as a man, and just put them in a field, they would not even cover 500 acres. That's less than a square mile. Total non-issue.
In a perfect world, everything goes according to plan & within specs. In an imperfect world, things break when they are not supposed to in the field, adequate maintenance is not performed & other corners are cut, budgets fluctuate, toxic events are covered up, poorly constructed products are deployed, etc.
The problem is there are studies that show heavy metals polluting the water table. That is what has been observed. I'm of the mindset that not all toxic events are observed, less are documented, & even less are expressed to the public.
Also the toxins released & human rights issues in the supply side have not been addressed in this thread.
It would be great to have better options for energy production, but we have observed some implications of solar cells as the 1st generations reach end of life & the impacts of in field breakages. There is enough of a history to take a sober look at what needs to be improved. Saying it's a "non issue" is frankly an irresponsible approach & makes me question if these issues are taken seriously. Claiming that everyone who brings up issues is anti renewable or an oil shill is also the wrong approach. Is there even proper risk assessment or is this the wild west?
That's a reasonable and fair argument I can accept.
However, I think the idea of the "anti-renewablist" is misguided. There are sceptics who fear advancements for the sake of advancement alone. Plastics are one perfect example (PFAS, PBA, etc). We are only beginning to understand how horribly these things disrupt organic chemical & hormonal balance. Scepticism is not your enemy.
No no, there are also people who just don't want to see their industry disrupted.
Example. Almost half of all Japanese people I meet say something along the lines "poor car shops who will be put out of business because of EVs", and will find many critics against renewables (including, most of the time, conspiracy theories, e.g. the West wants to eliminate Japan advance) just because they are sympathetic to the ICE cars industry.
And, last but not least, all the Russian trolls, as well as all the people who are unknowingly repeating them or influenced by them, will disseminate all kind of doubts and skepticism about renewables. Because fossil fuels is something they don't want to see replaced anytime soon.
I would amend your conclusion to say "Overall, the technology seems to be safely manageable."
Let to rot after funding is depleted is a recipe for disaster. Consider the original decommissioning plan for San Onofre nuclear power plant: https://sanonofresafety.org/nuclear-waste/
That kind of true for every human activity. Anything is dangerous if incompetent / malevolent actors are in charge.
Even pig farms cause runoff of manure and fertiliser into rivers, where they cause Eutrophication - massive algae blooms that consume all oxygen in the water, killing all the local fish and fauna and producing massive swaths of hte ocean where the only living thing is Jellyfish.
I'd like to see something like this used to generate an instrument from text. I don't think the 30 second clips are passable quite yet (I do like the simlish-esque vocals though). But I could see this being able to generate wavetables (or other synthesis methods). Generating an instrument from a text description would be very neat. "scratchy violin", "distorted kazoo", "combo violin and slide whistle", etc. It could be an interesting starting point to play with.
I would also propose taking it in the direction of generating synthesizer parameters for a popular VST or Hardware synth instrument. As a musician, it would be very nice to be able to program a synthesizer through plain text as a starting point.
When I was young taking horn lessons my teacher told me that being too close to the timpani can increase your chance to miss notes. This paper is useful in showing some evidence for that. This problem is more unique to the horn as its bell points backwards (and to the horn player's right side). From the audience and conductor's perspective (the house) the horns are usually center or on the left side (stage right) of the stage and the timpani are on the right (stage left) so it isn't an issue. However sometimes you show up and you're pointing right at the timpani or bass drum. I played in one group for a while that did that and it was very frustrating working with them to change it (it never happened). They squeezed us in so tight that it just didn't work well for the horns. To be effective the horn really needs some space and good surfaces behind to reflect the sound into the hall.
