There have often been private deals between renewables and big energy customers but the finances don't always work out how you might expect. Renewable projects are built using debt with interest rates largely based on the likelihood of generating revenue by selling electricity. And because of the long time scale interest can snowball to form a substantial part of the cost. Having a guaranteed customer in the form of a data centre is balanced by the risk that they might go out of business. You are basically coupling the risk of the generator to the risk of the consumer. That is why CfD style schemes are often favoured because it is just a safer source of revenue. Obviously hyper scalers have access to very cheap credit, but they may end up paying more for the electricity.
Could be seen as a technology demonstrator for interesting military technology. It could offer something akin to turn based warfare where units charge up and make synchronised moves.
Wether we like it or not power generation at this scale is political. And whilst the culture war stuff is rubbish we can't escape the fact that these questions exist on dozens of different dimensions and include things like economics, politics, emotional, human factors, the environment etc. ultimately the argument needs to be won rather than settled.
Any commercial venture will just become dominated by compounding interest payments on debt. Keeping so much capital tied up for so long without revenue is just too expensive.
Generally all the weight of the fusaage has to go through the wings anyway so it is structurally more efficient to put weight on the wings in the first place.
In sailplanes we add up to around 200 litres of water to wing tanks in single-seat gliders (empty weight typically around 280kg) to improve the high speed performance (typically up to 270 km/h these days) and ability to fly comfortably in turbulence.
It's surprising what you can fly formation with, even without an engine [1] :-)
[1] this particular glider does have a small engine for takeoff, but maximum speed with the engine extended is 180 km/h and here they are flying at 280 km/h.
Also from Stefan's channel, some fun here in New Zealand ... this flight passes just a couple of km from the Lord of the Rings "Weathertop" site (Google maps knows it).
With many bureaucratic systems AI seems to be used to build a better horse when cars and tractors already exist. Everything was built for a paper based world and was never designed with data or automation in mind.
I see it as the first step towards removing entire workflows like this.
Once the humans are removed, there is far less motivated reasoning to keep that process alive if it’s just robots burning tokens passing paper back and forth.
I will likely somehow be proven wrong, but it is one of the main uses I am optimistic for in the AI space.
Yes that is a good point and AI also gives us tools to make traditional systems more quickly. It could actually deliver on some of the original benefit promised by computing.
Particulate pollutant levels decay exponentially and have a substantial drop off with distance. So levels across a large area (like London) are not the whole story.
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