Nobody wants it, they just want brighter lights for themselves to compensate for being blinded by the brighter lights of others, but actually to retaliate, nobody can have brighter brights than me!
We'd need regulations for this, which we'd never get, especially after the Chevron doctrine was reversed.
Poles: "Don't invite them over for beer..."
Yeah, so we're still what, 10k behind China this year?
Hello.
As someone who's in the space and has been around Qcomm and their deals before.
It won't happen.
They will flirt like you can't imagine, they will propose, make offers, etc.
But closing the deal? No.
They are very smart, and Intel is too big for them to dismantle and exploit with value.
Their interest is not in Intel belonging to them, but in a large, Intel shaped hole in the market that they can attack, and their discussions are more likely about Intel's roadmaps so they can understand how they could best exploit Intel's fall.
They are unlikely to even hire some of Intel's spoils, maybe a few strategic VPs, but... they're just smart and ruthless and Intel is the dregs and bloated nowl.
The only way they'd do it is if the government sweetened it such that Intel was basically free, and they could fire as many as they want in a reasonable period, basically letting them own Intel without any cost at all. That is possible depending on how desperate the government is to prevent their fall, but I don't think anyone can make the right promises in time.
Oh, my bad. That makes perfect sense and I have no objections for purely thermal storage.
It said steam to customer, my brain filled that in with turbine.
I can buy all of it, near perfect heating, but 2% for their forced air circulation combined with turbine and generation losses? Seems too good to be true.
Chatgpt (because we're all lazy) :
Total Thermal to Electrical Efficiency
The overall thermal-to-electrical efficiency of a power plant, often referred to as plant efficiency, is the product of the steam turbine efficiency and the generator efficiency. Typical overall efficiencies for fossil-fuel-based steam turbine power plants (e.g., coal, natural gas) range from 33% to 40%.
In more advanced configurations like combined cycle power plants, which recover waste heat from the steam turbine exhaust to generate additional electricity, efficiencies can reach 50% to 60%.
Calculation Example:
If the steam turbine has an efficiency of 40%, and the generator has an efficiency of 98%, the total thermal-to-electrical efficiency would be:
\text{Total Efficiency} = 0.40 \times 0.98 = 0.392 \text{ or } 39.2%
So, for every 100 units of thermal energy input, 39.2 units are converted into electrical energy.
And that's if you're just heating the water before it hits the turbine, including the air circulation and basic entropy (there's a limit to how much you can pull out via heat differential), it seems like it should go down from there.
They use hot air warmed by gas burners.
Since we're using electricity here, and this was mentioned in the study linked elsewhere, they used ceramic heaters.
Fine, but given ... everything, it seems like you could do some smaller system with channels in the bricks for conduction, it's the hot air that bothers me, that's not great to try to use for conducting energy everywhere, you get turbulent effects.
Ok, they're claiming 98% rt efficiency.
I don't think we have 98% rt efficiency in anything, ever. That's miraculous. Batteries are around 92% at best? Pumped hydro is 85% or so.
That even sounds high for raw carnot efficiency.
I mean, if so, wow, that's awesome, and I don't really doubt their 1% daily decay, that seems attainable.
But 98% rt? I'm still skeptical.
I would think molten metal would be more effective for this, molten sodium or lead or something? Maybe some kind of Tin/Lead eutectic like old solder?
Firebricks just seem inefficient somehow, particularly since the heat isn't going to be uniform, while molten metals or salts can circulate and convect the heat more efficiently than... air.
They also have 100x we many executions as we have, probably closer to 1000x.
We really need them for boomers, for the world's sake.