Winter solstice in Edinburgh.
Sunrise was at 8:42am: Sunset is due at 3:39pm, for a total of 6 hours and 57 minutes of daylight.
(Meanwhile, over on my blog comments earnest Australians keep trying to convince me that solar power is the solution to all our energy needs. Hint: up here, demand peaks at night—for heating—not during daylight hours for cooling.)
@robryk @cstross I suspect there was some due diligence along the way to going public? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/11/ess-battery-company-backed-by-bill-gates-softbank-opens-on-nyse.html
@robryk @cstross Odd. It shows up for me: https://mstdn.jp/@landley/109551851654546174
@robryk @cstross There's a bunch of container battery companies like Ambri and Form Energy that never shipped anything, which I consider basically scams. (Ambri gave a great 2012 ted talk but they've been wrestling with their tech for a decade: molten antimony is STUPID.)
These guys have actual customers and their website has actual numbers for products you could buy today: prices, capacity, charge/discharge rate, weight, efficiency, etc. They're building factories in spain and australia.
@landley @robryk I first ran across flow batteries a couple of decades or so ago, in the pages of New Scientist (warning: now owned by Daily Mail group, so can no longer be trusted for impartiality).
It looked like a really good idea that wasn't sexy enough to attract investment, so languished in development hell forever.
Only now, we could really use grid-scale battery backup for the intermittent renewables. So it's time.
@cstross @robryk Ambri set the space back years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sddb0Khx0yA was _exciting_ back in 2012 but it didn't WORK. (Ivory tower academic white guy behind it, of course.)
The moten metal ate through the seals (https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ambri-returns-to-the-energy-storage-hunt-with-liquid-metal-battery-redesign) and he KEEPS FUNDRAISING https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/ambris-liquid-metal-battery-mines-144-million-in-storage-investment-gold-rush and just... please stop. Get out of the way of the people who have stuff that actually works.
@cstross @robryk And I had ESS confused with Form Energy for about a year myself (http://landley.net/notes-2022.html#17-04-2022) which is another company that seems to soak up funding, advertise extensively, but never actually ship anything to customers.
ESS has real working things deployed in the field that people have paid them money for, and their limiting factor isn't research but building factories. As George Carlin said, "kinda helps the belief along".
@robryk @cstross does an hour-long interview with the CEO talking about the technology count? https://youtu.be/LPm3fgxbgg8