I like the idea of incentivizing people to stay, but I don’t know how we could “require” it. I don’t want the U.S. to implement exit visas or egress control.
I think, not from the surface, but have a look here [1], where the author referenced from the IIEE article has build a submergible sensor and detected (a know) boat.
Electrifying ferries is great, but this particular one has a run time of 20 minutes (and a charge time of 10 minutes). I get a totally different vibe from 'oceanic ship' than a 20 minute ferry ride.
Near me, we now have a hybrid ferry, no charging infrastructure, but it still uses much less fuel than before it was refit, so that's cool too. It's bigger than the one you linked and sails on a longer route: 2,499 passengers, 202 vehicles, typically serves an 8.6 mile route.
Absolutely, but that's how this starts. Boats too started as ferries, it took many, many years before boats purposefully went into blue water. Ferries are a great testbed, they have lots of cycles and they are a pre-cursor to coastal and then eventually larger ocean going vessels, which I predict will go diesel-electric before they go all electric.
> eventually larger ocean going vessels, which I predict will go diesel-electric before they go all electric.
Diesel-electric, particularly when using Azipods, is great when you need to do a lot of maneuvering in narrow spaces like ports. But for long-haul it's hard to beat the economics of a two-stroke direct drive diesel.
Maybe a hybrid concept for a long-haul ship would be using a direct drive two-stroke main engine, but the auxiliary diesels replaced by batteries?
So, people start pretty early with rafts. A raft isn't a boat it's just a collection of stuff which floats ie is buoyant - so, with care, you can board the raft and cross a stretch of water without swimming, which is convenient. Boats incrementally improve on this by having a distinct "inside" of the boat which needn't be buoyant, separated from the outside by waterproofing. A canoe or a coracle would be examples of boats you can easily invent once you've seen rafts.
Most easy to invent types of boat are great if there are no waves. On a river there are basically never waves (yes rapids exist, no that's not common)
However at sea waves are commonplace. Situations where waves are minimal are extremely rare, usually occurring seasonally, when tides are smaller than usual and weather is calm. Sea Lion (the never attempted German invasion of mainland Britain) was predicated on absolutely calm sea because it would have used towed river barges to land troops. If there's a moderate sea but you green light the operation anyway, all your infantry drown and you've just lost the war immediately.
To be successful at sea you want even more buoyancy, to put the top of the waterproof outer parts of the boat above the waves, and you probably also want a keel, rather than having the vessel's bottom flat and sort of resting on the water which won't work well with waves. None of this is impossible, or even especially difficult with quite ancient technology, but it's not trivial, you definitely won't go from rafts to ocean-going freight transport in one attempt.
Sibling comment is perfectly correct that it starts small and ramps up.
From that article:
> "The ferry format, with its high-frequency turnaround, relatively short segment distances, and shore-based rapid charging, is one of the most promising early use cases for electrification in the maritime sector. Maritime electrification has gained momentum over the past few years"
Early. Momentum.
Moving some noticeable percentage of ships away from fossil fuels is still a win.
I think we'll see a return to sailing at some point with diesel-electric hybrids in between (there are just too many advantages to that model). The sooner we kick the fossil fuels habit the better.
Depends on the current fuel-to-payload ratio of the diesel ships. If it's 3% and batteries would push it to 10%, it's not a huge problem. But if it's 15% and batteries would push it to 50% you're losing a lot of capacity.
Not quite. The difference in energy density is way more than that.
However, most large ships apparently have multiple times more fuel capacity than is required for 5,000km of range, which is what makes the electric version realistic.
But if your competitor is running newer chips that consume less power per operation, aren't you forced to upgrade as well and dispose of the old hardware?
Sure, assuming the power cost reduction or capability increase justifies the expenditure. It's not clear that that will be the case. That's one of the shaky assumptions I'm referring to. It may be that the 2030 nvidia accelerators will save you $2000 in electricity per month per rack, and you can upgrade the whole rack for the low, low price of $800,000! That may not be worth it at all. If it saves you $200k/per rack or unlocks some additional capability that a 2025 accelerator is incapable of and customers are willing to pay for, then that's a different story. There are a ton of assumptions in these scenarios, and his logic doesn't seem to justify the confidence level.
> Sure, assuming the power cost reduction or capability increase justifies the expenditure. It's not clear that that will be the case.
Share price is a bigger consideration than any +/- differences[1] between expenditure vs productivity delta. GAAP allows some flexibility in how servers are depreciated, so depending on what the company wants to signal to shareholders (investing in infra for futur returns vs curtailing costs), it may make sense to shorten or lengthen depreciation time regardless of the actual TCOO keep/refresh cost comparisons.
1. Hypothetical scenario: a hardware refresh costs $80B, actual performance increase is only worth $8B, but the share price increases the value of org's holding of its own shares by $150B. As a CEO/CFO, which action would you recommend- without even considering your own bonus that's implicitly or explicitly tied to share price performance.
Illustration numbers: AI demand premium = $150 hardware with $50 electricity. Normal demand = $50 hardware with $50 electricity. This is Nvidia margins @75% instead of 40%. CAPEX/OPEX is 70%/20% hardware/power instead of customary 50%/40%.
If bubble crashes, i.e. AI demand premium evaporates, we're back at $50 hardware and $50 electricity. Likely $50 hardware and $25 electricity if hardware improves. Nvdia back to 30-40% margins, operators on old hardware stuck with stranded assets.
The key thing to understand is current racks are sold at grossly inflated premiums right now, scarcity pricing/tax. If the current AI economic model doesn't work then fundmentally that premium goes away and subsequent build outs are going to be costplus/commodity pricing = capex discounted by non trivial amounts. Any breakthroughs in hardware, i.e. TPU compute efficiency would stack opex (power) savings. Maybe by year 8, first gen of data centers are still depreciated to $80 hardware + $50 power vs new center @ $50 hardware + $25 power. That old data center is a massive write-down because it will generate less revenue than it costs to amoritize.
A typical data centre is $2,500 per year per kW load (including overhead, hvac and so on).
If it costs $800,000 to replace the whole rack, then that would pay off in a year if it reduces 320 kW of consumption. Back when we ran servers, we wouldn't assume 100% utilisation but AI workloads do do that; normal server loads would be 10kW per rack and AI is closer to 100. So yeah, it's not hard to imagine power savings of 3.2 racks being worth it.
Thanks for the numbers! Isn't it more likely that the amount of power/heat generated per rack will stay constant over each upgrade cycle, and the upgrade simply unlocks a higher amount of service revenue per rack?
Not in the last few years. CPUs went from ~200W TDP to 500W.
And they went from zero to multiple GPUs per server. Tho we might hit "the chips can't be bigger and the cooling can't get much better" point there.
The usage would be similar if it was say a rack filled with servers full of bulk storage (hard drives generally keep the power usage similar while growing storage).
But CPU/GPU wise, it's just bigger chips/more chiplets, more power.
I'd imagine any flattening might be purely because "we have DC now, re-building cooling for next gen doesn't make sense so we will just build servers with similar power usage as previously", but given how fast AI pushed the development it might not happen for a while.
I've been in university research computing for 15 years, so large enough (~900 nodes) we need a dedicated DC, but not at the same scale as others around here.
Our racks are provisioned so that there are two independent rails, which each can support 7kW. Up until the last few years, this was more than enough power. As CPU TDPs increased, we started to need to do things like not connect some nodes to both redundant rails or mix disk servers into compute racks to keep under 7kW/rack.
A single HGX B300 box has 6x6kW power supplies. Even before we get to paying the (high) power bills, it's going to cost a small fortune to just update the racks, power distribution units, UPS, etc... to even be able to support more than a handful of those things
> Isn't it more likely that the amount of power/heat generated per rack will stay constant over each upgrade cycle,
Power density seems to grow each cycle. But eventually your DC hits power capacity limits, and you have to leave racks empty because there's no power budget.
Or they could charge the same as you and make more money per customer. If they already have as many customers as they can handle doing that may be better than buying hardware to support a larger number of customers.
(Maybe you are just joking, but I wonder about the idea.)
When I was a kid, it was a general assumption in science fiction that living in zero-G or low-G would provide health/longevity benefits. Our experience with the ISS shows that microgravity is bad for health (muscle atrophy, bone loss, vision problems). It is not clear that low gravity would be much different.
I don’t know. I have the same background. But I would think lack of falls and pressure on your heart would be a positive. My mother-in-law went down hill quickly after 80 when she fell and broke her leg.
I would assume it was a one way trip, and the trick would be getting to orbit while you could still survive liftoff
An industrial reel spool of paper, direct from the mill, feeding into a continuous printer tanked with lemon juice ink, then feeding into an operating shredder.
