PaulDavisThe1st

There's actually no mention of the technology used by the turbines. This article is about how you heat up a heat storage facility that is then used (somehow) to drive turbines. Might be water, might not be.

Not quite right.

The 1000 degree air is not used directly to drive turbines, but instead to deliver heat to a heat storage unit via a heat exchanger. The solar-heated air, after flowing through the heat exchanger, is still around 250 degrees and the article mentions some possible uses of that heated air (again, not generation).

Generation occurs using heat coming from the heat storage unit, not using the solar-heated hot air. Since the heat storage unit can also be fed by hot air heated via other means, this makes the heat storage unit "source neutral" - it can be heated by solar or fossil fuel combustion (or whatever).

The turbines are "downstream" of the heat storage unit.

Not quite. It's a solar thermal (heat generator) that feeds a heat storage facility via an air-flow heat exchanger. That exchanger can alternatively be fed hot air generated using any other technology, including burning fossil fuels.

So, the heat storage facility is "source neutral". In addition, precisely how the stored heat is used "downstream" is also not a central part of the design, but turbines etc. are a likely option.

October 30th/31st ... how are you doing?

Alternate take: people are so afraid to be themselves that it has become easy to ideologically divide us.

You've read it wrong .. "they're NOT more unhappy without them"

Isn't it the inverse? i.e we think it is bad for students to have phones in schools, but it might be a problem for the students if we ban them, so let's do the test ... yep, no problem for the students, so let's definitely ban them for educational reasons?

That might have been an excuse in 1992. It's not an excuse in 2026. The geeks won. We are the cool guys (or were, until the fucking geek CEOs went insane).

Isn't that more or less precisely what I said?

S2 was reasonably OK, IMO. But that was it. And all their talk of having a fantastic entire story laid out right from the start? I don't believe a word of it. There's no way they had thought up Rehobaum or whatever it was called back when they started work on S1.

I've read that globally almost all the places that can do pumped hydro "storage" already exist. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, then while this is a really cool technology, we won't be getting much further with it.

I'm a volunteer firefighter in rural NM. We have a commercial property close to us that repeatedly has false alarms on its fire alarm/smoke detection system, to the point where even the best of us are suffering from "the boy who cried wolf" feelings.

Because of this, I discovered that (apparently) NY Fire Department charges $5000 per false call on an alarm system directly connected to the dispatch system.

Somethng to think about.

When it comes to subjectivity, I am not a majoritarian. I would go even further: I do not care what the majority thinks. Furthermore, I think this is a vital element of a free and vibrant society.

What a deeply strange article. It starts out deep in the details of Emacs' origins, then suddenly gives up, fast forwards and ends with a whimper.

ps. My first sight of the author was in a basement lab at the Weizmann Institute in 1986, sitting cross-legged on a chair working in front of the then-wondrous brand new Sun workstations - the so-called "3M standard" (1MB of RAM, 1MHz CPU, 1M pixels). Good times but old times!

> the cathedral was a gift to the humans of future generations

do you know that (a) the designers of those cathedrals actually thought that? (b) the the people who built those cathedreals actually thought that?