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German Space Center has constructed the world’s largest artificial Sun
- unwind 10y ago"It refuses to work at night" ... yeah, that's exactly how the Sun works. Very annoying stupidification of the content, in my opinion. Humans calling the Sun "finicky" is a bit like ants calling an aircraft carrier "slow and cramped", or something.
- Luc 10y agoSimile; a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid (e.g. as brave as a lion ).
- pluma 10y agoNatural sunlight on Earth is finicky. They're not talking about the sun itself. They're just using "the sun" as a shorthand for the weather, the rotation of Earth and so on. Humans sometimes do that.
- 31h 10y agosyn·ec·do·che səˈnekdəkē/ (noun) a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”).
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoCuriously, that's the line that caught my attention too. Because, solar is so popular but the sun is so 'unreliable' - another case where popular enthusiasm contradicts simple engineering. The sun is a terrible power source, simply because it fails at least half the time everywhere.
- maxerickson 10y agoSolar construction is dominated by energy and finance companies, with large projects in places that don't have subsidies. Popular enthusiasm is barely relevant.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoHm - what's the impact of roof solar in California? My brother's electric rates went from $0.24 per kwh to $0.46 and we suspect its because the power company is recouping its losses from buying all that off-peak rooftop generation at retail rates. So he's installing rooftop solar too, just so he's on the other side of that equation. relevance: its popular enthusiasm that got the buyback rate set at retail instead of wholesale. Thus fueling a statewide boom in pointless rooftop solar.
- maxerickson 10y agoDoesn't make sense to me. For the costs to be that significant, net metered kilowatt hours would have to be a huge chunk of their generation, and rooftop solar is smaller than utility solar, which is maybe ~10% of the market, and rooftop doesn't net meter most generation, it consumes it off the grid. It could well be the case that solar is changing the cost mix and driving up prices, but I doubt net metering is driving that.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoBut they're related in a strange way: they raise the rates a penny, they have to pay a penny more back to solar at 'retail rates'. So its a funny feedback loop.
- maxerickson 10y agoThe numbers just don't work. California power consumption is something like 40 gigawatts, net metering is a fraction of 4 gigawatts. So even if the net metering is somehow 100% cost (it isn't, they sell the power), it still wouldn't do anything like double rates.
- zebrafish 10y agoPretty cheap installation for the amount of knowledge they could potentially get out of it. I wonder how much it costs to run for an hour.
- lucaspiller 10y agoIndustrial rates in Germany are around €0.15/kWh 149 x 7kW = 1043kW 1043 * 0.15 = €156.45/hour
- VMG 10y agoWatched a TV clip about this. I was surprised that apparently the control system was programmed by one guy (Dmitrij Laaber). I found a Master Thesis explaining control software for a prototype of this: http://elib.dlr.de/108662/1/Deepak%20Chopra-Master%20Thesis.pdf http://elib.dlr.de/108662/1/Deepak%20Chopra-Master%20Thesis.... (is Deepak Chopra a common name?)
- Insanity 10y agoYeah I doubt it is _that_ Deepak Chopra that you tend to think about when hearing that name ;-)
- Jdam 10y agoDoesn't surprise me. It's an Engineering and not a software company. Somebody just writes the software, because it needs to be written. When I worked there a couple of years ago, E-Mailing source code files was a well established process. (Depending on the department though)
- VMG 10y agoIIRC it was even software and the hardware (wiring etc).
- jaddood 10y agoI don't think it's too difficult to be done by one person, though I am bot surr
- shiven 10y agoYes, Deepak Chopra is not an uncommon name. Source: I'm from a part of India where that first name/last name are very common.
- morsch 10y agoSynlight is a giant parabola made up of 149 7-kW xenon short-arc lamps... so a total power draw of about 1 MW? That's nuts. Hope they remember to turn it off when they leave the room.
- theandrewbailey 10y agoAnd they remember to shield any Raspberry Pis in the area. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/xenon-death-flash-a-free-physics-lesson/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/xenon-death-flash-a-free-ph...
- ekingr 10y agoMuch less environmental-friendly than the Odeillo solar furnace[1]... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeillo_solar_furnace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeillo_solar_furnace
- jws 10y agoMore importantly, I hope they remember not to turn it on when they are in the room.
- quakenul 10y agoHa
- myst 10y agoCame for fusion reactor, left disappointed.
- rwmj 10y agoI was hoping to see recent news on the Wendelstein 7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
- skdotdan 10y agoSame :(
- blojayble 10y agoI see I was far from being the only one who was excited about some news on fusion reactor.
- idownvotecrap 10y agodownvoted
- Fzzr 10y agoLikewise. I was expecting Doc Ock.
- Tepix 10y agoI saw the large space simulator (LSS +) at the ESTEC test centre (ESA) a few weeks ago where they can simulate up to eight times the solar intensity (the solar intensity is 10 times as high at Mercury) in their 15m by 10m vacuum chamber using xenon lamps. The surface temperature of the BepiColombo spacecraft due to launch next year will be around 500°C. That was impressive already. This one does not work inside a vacuum chamber but manages 10,000 times the normal solar radiation with the temperature reaching 3,000°C. Wow! + http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/Test_centre/Large_Space_Simulator_LSS http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technolo...
- evanb 10y agoI moved to Jülich in November. There's all sorts of interesting industrial, technological, and scientific research going on here---it's not just the Forschungszentrum and the space agency. Cologne and Aachen aren't far. Worth a look if you're looking for an affordable place in Germany with good access to cities and lots of smart people to start a company.
- evanb 10y agoAlso if you like beets.
- flohrian 10y agoSince (from your profile) you have also worked in a lab in the US: How does it compare to that? Do you like Germany so far?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- evanb 10y agoI didn't live in Livermore, I lived in Berkeley, and though I had a long anticommute I had a better network of people there. I like Germany so far (arrived in November), but I'm more of a city person. I'm looking to move to Cologne, but the rent is too low (although locals say it's very high), the demand is through the roof, and the supply is small. People I've spoken to say a year to find something to your liking isn't out of the ordinary. So I feel isolated, but I'm trying to fix it. But a year out of a three-year postdoc is substantial. FZJ and LLNL are both astounding places to do science. As a postdoc you don't notice it, but it's harder to do science at LLNL, since their core mission is security. Both places have excellent computational resources and friendly, brilliant people. You definitely notice the machine guns and the culture of security at LLNL, and it can make it difficult to have foreign visitors. It seemed to me that at LLNL / if you have DOE funding generally an inordinate amount of your time is spent justifying and fighting for your funding, whereas the German funding cycle seems to be a lot longer. The German system of supporting universities by having laboratory scientists responsible for at least 1 course a year is very interesting and healthy, I think. It's also easier to coordinate than it might be in the states where universities aren't all state run. Some US labs have very close connections to universities and often have joint positions (LBL and SLAC spring to mind), but the connections are stronger and obligations greater in Germany, I think.
- pinkskip 10y agoDenpock?
- danielvf 10y agoI worked on the light fixtures for the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, vehicle research center. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/about-us/vrc http://www.iihs.org/iihs/about-us/vrc These lights were 72,000 watts each, with a total of around three-quarters of a million watts of lights in the crash hall. (Almost as as much power as the German sun installation.) High speed cameras need a lot of light. I've stood in front of one of the lights in protective gear - but the heat still just goes through your body. The first time the IIHS lights were turned on it blew a power substation 20 miles away.
- vhost- 10y agoSlowmo Guys actually have a video detailing some of the challenges of filming in high speed (most of which have to do with light - or lack thereof): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lZvF-YyP0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lZvF-YyP0s
- balabaster 10y agoUgh, here I was hoping for an article about nuclear fusion... so disappointing. Instead of making power, we're wasting it.
- luca_ing 10y ago> wasting Using.
- nylonstrung 10y agoThis is research that directly pertains to the fusion in the sun.
- cmarschner 10y agoSo, they put up lamps.
- dhimes 10y agoA little OT- does anybody subscribe to this site? Is it worth supporting?
- sauronlord 10y ago...and they couldn't be bothered to turn it "on" and have at least one photo in the article. It's like saying "Bavarian Water Center has constructed the world's largest artificial waterfall" ... and then not bother to show what it looks like when the water is flowing and it is all dammed up.