Perovskite structures are notorious for breaking down very rapidly in real-world use. Now a research team from Princeton University has developed a process for overcoming that problem, making perovskite a real competitor to existing silicon PV technology.

Some key points:

• nuclear causes fewer deaths, both animal and human alike
• nuclear takes up far less space, and therefore destroys far less of the environment compared to solar farms, hydro, or wind farms
• nuclear is stable and not an intermittent source, no issues with grid storage, unlike renewables, which currently solve this with fossil peaker plants
• nuclear is hard to turn off so to meet fluctuating demand solely on it, you'd need an excess of nuclear, which is a waste
• nuclear excess could encourage other use of electricity, such as electric heating or transport, however
• nuclear when it does go bad, goes really bad, mostly in that a large area has to be abandoned for a long long time (historically still fewer deaths than renewables per unit of energy produced tho)
• nuclear can cause the proliferation of nuclear weapons
• nuclear is a lot harder to spin up, requires extensive education and is hard and takes a long time to build a plant, compared to renewables
• all that nuclear waste and no plan other than shove it in somewhere, in a mountain, and keep it secret, keep it safe.

Yay or Nay?

What say you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiPSy2bKZkE

A conventional ship with an easily deployable and retractable kite sail system burns less fuel than one without it. It's a type of hybrid vehicle, that has two propulsion methods, the main reliable one, and the supplementary one, for fuel efficiency. With the system installed and the kite in use, the ship saves an estimated 15% of fuel. However:

"There's a structural problem slowing down the process: ship owners (who have to make the investment) often don't pay for the fuel – that's the charterer's duty. The charterer on the other side doesn't charter the ship for long enough a period to make installing low-carbon, but potentially expensive, untested technologies pay back."

The lack of carbon emissions regulations for shipping and low fuel prices have added to these difficulties. The shipping industry is responsible for around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually, which is about 2.5% of the world's total CO2 emissions.

A company behind these (SkySails GmbH), while technically successful at cutting shipping costs and carbon emissions, has faced economic difficulties. Since then, the company (reborn as SkySails Group GmbH) has switched to land-based airborne wind energy systems for electricity production from high-altitude winds.

What do you think? Yay or nay? Is this technology dead in the water? Not worth the effort? Will we see ships like these in the near or distant future? What needs to change?

Some good reads:

http://www.vos.noaa.gov/MWL/apr_09/skysails.shtml

https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/lets-go-fly-a-kite-skysails-and-climate-change/

https://www.aerominetechnologies.com/

Low on actual info, but I guess the wings create some sort of negative pressure that drives the small turbine at the bottom.

Analysis shows the utility has raised bills $26 annually over the last 11 years.

lithium is a trouble for many communities all over the world besides the nickel mining which is in the most hateful wars happening nowadays. what do you think about lithium as a resource?