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I disagree with the niche market thing. #1 Military forward operating base #2 Anything that has to be in the middle of nowhere, think mining and agriculture, m

by sjducb 4y ago

I disagree with the niche market thing. #1 Military forward operating base #2 Anything that has to be in the middle of nowhere, think mining and agriculture, maybe even oil rigs #3 Shipping, it could make electric container ships viable. #4 Anyone who wants to rent their power, rather than build their own panels. You're shifting CapEx to OpEx. This is why cloud computing took off. You can have any amount of power you need at the flip of a switch. People will pay a massive premium for that.

photochemsyn 4y ago
I think the costs are going to be astronomical, and that's the difference with cloud computing - if it cost 10X as much to use AWS as it did to run your own servers onsite with IT people to manage them, AWS would never have taken off. Likewise, for mining and agriculture, onsite solar/storage is almost certainly going to be much cheaper. Electric container ships are an interesting idea, but even there it might actually be cheaper to just synthesize fuel from water and air. In particular, transmission losses and low efficiency seem to be the fundamental problem. See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521665
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  > Electric container ships are an interesting idea, but even there it might actually be cheaper to just synthesize fuel from water and air. How does one do this without power? And if possible, why isn't it done already?!
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    You’d do it at the port with nuclear/wind/solar. No one does it now because marine fuel is super cheap.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > How does one do this without power? You synthesize the fuel when and where you have power. > And if possible, why isn't it done already?! Hasn't hit cost parity yet. Hydrogen is the cheapest and it's still about triple the price. More portable fuels are more expensive to synthesize and cheaper to mine. Add a carbon tax (bunker fuel is filthy) and watch it happen overnight, or wait until around 2030 when the prices will cross over (but there will be an equilibrium price while capacity is built).
- sjducb 4y ago
  AWS is 10-100x the cost of on prem. I've got a client who is paying about $300k per year for a postgres instance that is basically my laptop. I think S3 is a loss leader and EC2 is close to cost. Everything else is a massive markup.
manholio 4y ago
For a given mass of solar panels, the space version is perhaps 50% more efficient, due to the fact they operate in space. Putting them there, in the most optimistic scenario, will cost perhaps 100x versus the ground level version. Currently it's something like 1000x, but let's asume prices go down due to Starship and what not. So you really have to ask what kind of practical scenario affords you to use energy that is at least 60 times more expensive than what is available at ground level (but more realistically, at least 300-400x). Even if you include the capital cost of Li-ion batteries, their wear and tear and road transport for over 1000 miles, you can still get power much cheaper by just trucking batteries around. That, mind you, is before any transmission loses, investment in ground infrastructure etc., it makes no sense to put solar panels in space because the efficiency gains are simply too limited. This leaves the military scenario indeed - which is basically sci-fi, but bras has been known to abandon common sense when planning technology, see the initial Space Shuttle concept, space laser weapons etc.
- DennisP 4y ago
  People drastically underestimate how Starship will change launch costs. Right now they throw away an expensive upper stage with every launch, and even the lower stage only gets used about a dozen times. Starship doesn't throw away anything and it's designed to be used about a thousand times. At scale it's basically just the cost of fuel and ground services, which drops cost by a couple orders of magnitude. The book The Case for Space Solar Power has detailed cost estimates for NASA's SPS-ALPHA design. It was published about a decade ago so has old launch costs. I plugged in Starship costs and got a total cost of $0.04/kWh, which is pretty great for dispatchable power without needing storage.
  - kiba 4y ago
    The real money comes from using starship to develop spaced based industrial capacity. Instead of manufacturing solar panels on earth, it would be manufactured in space. Once we have real space industry, doing things in orbit would be much cheaper.
    - deleted 4y ago
dmd 4y ago
You say "I disagree with the niche market thing" but then as a counterexample give four niche markets.
- macintux 4y ago
  Container ships are a huge market.
- sjducb 4y ago
  Anyone who rents power is a huge market too. AWS are buying diesel generators to backup/supplement the grid.
thangalin 4y ago
#2 Radio communications, mountain-top repeaters. Not dropping $4k on chopper rides to battery swap would be a boon for the environment and bank accounts.
deleted 4y ago
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by sjducb 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago

I think the costs are going to be astronomical, and that's the difference with cloud computing - if it cost 10X as much to use AWS as it did to run your own servers onsite with IT people to manage them, AWS would never have taken off. Likewise, for mining and agriculture, onsite solar/storage is almost certainly going to be much cheaper. Electric container ships are an interesting idea, but even there it might actually be cheaper to just synthesize fuel from water and air. In particular, transmission losses and low efficiency seem to be the fundamental problem. See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521665

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> Electric container ships are an interesting idea, but even there it might actually be cheaper to just synthesize fuel from water and air. How does one do this without power? And if possible, why isn't it done already?!
- ch4s3 4y ago
  You’d do it at the port with nuclear/wind/solar. No one does it now because marine fuel is super cheap.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > How does one do this without power? You synthesize the fuel when and where you have power. > And if possible, why isn't it done already?! Hasn't hit cost parity yet. Hydrogen is the cheapest and it's still about triple the price. More portable fuels are more expensive to synthesize and cheaper to mine. Add a carbon tax (bunker fuel is filthy) and watch it happen overnight, or wait until around 2030 when the prices will cross over (but there will be an equilibrium price while capacity is built).
sjducb 4y ago
AWS is 10-100x the cost of on prem. I've got a client who is paying about $300k per year for a postgres instance that is basically my laptop. I think S3 is a loss leader and EC2 is close to cost. Everything else is a massive markup.

manholio 4y ago

For a given mass of solar panels, the space version is perhaps 50% more efficient, due to the fact they operate in space. Putting them there, in the most optimistic scenario, will cost perhaps 100x versus the ground level version. Currently it's something like 1000x, but let's asume prices go down due to Starship and what not. So you really have to ask what kind of practical scenario affords you to use energy that is at least 60 times more expensive than what is available at ground level (but more realistically, at least 300-400x). Even if you include the capital cost of Li-ion batteries, their wear and tear and road transport for over 1000 miles, you can still get power much cheaper by just trucking batteries around. That, mind you, is before any transmission loses, investment in ground infrastructure etc., it makes no sense to put solar panels in space because the efficiency gains are simply too limited. This leaves the military scenario indeed - which is basically sci-fi, but bras has been known to abandon common sense when planning technology, see the initial Space Shuttle concept, space laser weapons etc.

DennisP 4y ago
People drastically underestimate how Starship will change launch costs. Right now they throw away an expensive upper stage with every launch, and even the lower stage only gets used about a dozen times. Starship doesn't throw away anything and it's designed to be used about a thousand times. At scale it's basically just the cost of fuel and ground services, which drops cost by a couple orders of magnitude. The book The Case for Space Solar Power has detailed cost estimates for NASA's SPS-ALPHA design. It was published about a decade ago so has old launch costs. I plugged in Starship costs and got a total cost of $0.04/kWh, which is pretty great for dispatchable power without needing storage.
- kiba 4y ago
  The real money comes from using starship to develop spaced based industrial capacity. Instead of manufacturing solar panels on earth, it would be manufactured in space. Once we have real space industry, doing things in orbit would be much cheaper.
  - deleted 4y ago

dmd 4y ago

You say "I disagree with the niche market thing" but then as a counterexample give four niche markets.

macintux 4y ago
Container ships are a huge market.
sjducb 4y ago
Anyone who rents power is a huge market too. AWS are buying diesel generators to backup/supplement the grid.

thangalin 4y ago

#2 Radio communications, mountain-top repeaters. Not dropping $4k on chopper rides to battery swap would be a boon for the environment and bank accounts.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]