Not worth a new thread or the effort to dig up a youtube thread.... but I think youtube pegged me for some sort of autistic train nerd. Tons of videos with no views of train spotting.... and also "watch me drive across the middle of nowhere" also with no views. TF? And, as always, not interested does nothing, don't show me this channel doesn't slow them down- there are a million of them apparently. Weird... anyone else getting odd recommendations all of the sudden?
Plant, Which Runs 24/7 on Nothing But Fresh Water and Seawater A renewable energy source that runs day and night, powered by salt and fresh water. On a humid morning in Fukuoka, a coastal city in southern Japan, a new kind of power came online. Japan has launched Asia’s first osmotic power plant, which generates electricity by mixing fresh water with salt water. “It’s a meaningful plan—the start of a plan, perhaps—in our response against climate change,” said Kenji Hirokawa, director of the Seawater Desalination Center, which runs the facility, as per Gizmodo. Fukuoka’s plant is only the second of its kind worldwide, following one in Denmark that opened in 2023. Japan’s version is larger and marks a step forward for this little-used but promising renewable energy source. The plant will generate about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year—enough to help run a nearby desalination facility and supply around 220 homes. That equals the output of two soccer fields of solar panels, but osmotic power keeps running day and night, in any weather. What Is Osmotic Power? Osmosis is the same process that helps plants draw water from soil and allows our cells to stay hydrated. Put simply, it’s the movement of water from areas with low salt concentration (like fresh water) to areas with high salt concentration (like seawater) through a special membrane. Osmotic power plants put this passive movement to work. Fresh water—or treated wastewater—is placed on one side of a membrane. On the other side is seawater, made even saltier by concentrating leftover brine from a desalination process. The difference in saltiness pulls the fresh water across the membrane, increasing the pressure on the saltwater side. That pressure is then used to drive a turbine, generating electricity. “It is also noteworthy that the Japanese plant uses concentrated seawater, the brine left after removal of fresh water in a desalination plant, as the feed, which increases the difference in salt concentrations and thus the energy available,” Professor Sandra Kentish, a chemical engineer at the University of Melbourne, told The Guardian. The process is completely renewable. It produces no carbon dioxide. And because oceans and seas are virtually boundless for this task, osmotic power is “a stable source of electricity generation that can operate 24 hours a day, for every day of the year,” Hirokawa told NHK (translated from Japanese). Why Haven’t We Used This Before? For something that sounds so elegantly simple, osmotic power has been stubbornly difficult to scale. “While energy is released when the salt water is mixed with fresh water, a lot of energy is lost in pumping the two streams into the power plant and from the frictional loss across the membranes. This means that the net energy that can be gained is small,” said Kentish. The breakthrough moment arrived in 2009, when the Norwegian energy firm Statkraft unveiled one of the world’s first prototype osmotic power plants. The four-kilowatt demonstration facility showed that mixing fresh and salt water could indeed be harnessed to produce electricity. But despite the proof of principle, high costs kept the technology confined to laboratories and small pilot projects. The challenge lies in efficiency. Pumps use up power to move water into the system, and membranes can slow things down due to friction. These hurdles are not unsolvable, but they’ve kept osmotic power in the shadows of its other counterparts—wind, solar, and hydroelectric. Still, research teams across the globe have kept the idea alive. In addition to Denmark and Japan, pilot projects have cropped up in Norway, South Korea, Spain, and Qatar. Australia paused its prototype plant at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) during the COVID pandemic. But Dr. Ali Altaee, a specialist in water-energy systems at UTS, hopes it can be revived. “We have salt lakes around New South Wales and Sydney that could be used as a resource and we also have the expertise to build it,” he told The Guardian. Akihiko Tanioka, professor emeritus at the Institute of Science Tokyo and a pioneer in the field, showed visible emotion at the launch. “I feel overwhelmed that we have been able to put this into practical use. I hope it spreads not just in Japan, but across the world,” he told Kyodo News.
Renewable energy outpaces coal for electricity generation in historic first, report says For the first time, renewable energy has overtaken coal as the primary source of electricity around the world, a new report says, indicating a shift in the global reliance on environmentally harmful fossil fuels. Renewable energy contributed 34.3% of all global electricity generated in the first half of 2025, while coal fell to 33.1%, the energy think tank Ember found. Renewable energies include sources like solar, wind and hydro, as opposed to fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. Populous developing countries like China and India led the charge in adding more renewable energies, Ember reports. Meanwhile, Western societies including the European Union and the United States met some of their increased electricity demand through the use of fossil fuels during this period. Nevertheless, global coal generation fell 0.6% in the first half compared to the same period a year earlier. "I think that most economies want to expand their clean electricity, but some are more strategic and seizing on the opportunity than others," said Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at Ember. Wiatros-Motyka said China has been particularly clever in decreasing its reliance on fossil fuels. She noted that such a shift gives countries more autonomy since they can reduce their dependence on energy imports from other nations. "There has been more investment in infrastructure that facilitates clean growth [in emerging economies] than in many advanced economies," she said. "This is probably about some countries missing the opportunities, and maybe they don't realize it, but that's what it is." Countries including Hungary, Pakistan and Australia set records in solar energy production, generating 20% or more of their electricity from solar power. The report found that global carbon dioxide emissions fell slightly in the first half of the year as solar and wind power "exceeded demand growth and led to a slight fall in fossil fuel use." China has been the largest driver in the move to renewable energy sources, accounting for 55% of global solar generation growth. The United States' share, by contrast, was just 14%. Renewables might slow as the Trump administration moves to sharply reduce clean-energy development. While the world — including the United States — is making significant gains in making energy cleaner, increased demand leaves renewables struggling to meet consumer needs, said Daniel Cohan, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. The tech race to integrate artificial intelligence into daily life is in part to blame. "This has really been an inflection point for the United States in that power demand in the U.S. had flatlined for a couple decades, and with the growth of data centers, and AI and crypto, and with other growth from industries and air conditioning, and so on, we're starting to see electricity demand grow 3% per year, rather than be flat or 1%," Cohan said. Cohan said that most of the new power plants in the United States and abroad utilize wind, solar and batteries but that now those plants are being put to the test. "It's a question of whether this wind and solar that we're adding is able to keep pace with the demand growth because if wind and solar don't grow fast enough, that means that we have to keep running the gas and coal power plants that we already have a little bit harder than we did before," he said. While it is ultimately cheaper and cleaner to rely on wind and the sun for power once the plants are operational, Cohan said funding the infrastructure for renewables remains a hurdle. China and other countries have been able to succeed because they foresaw a rising desire for renewable energy and invested heavily in those alternatives. "China took technologies that were originally developed in the United States back in Bell Labs in the 1950s and figured out how to scale them up, and just relentlessly year after year make them cheaper and cheaper and slightly better performing each time to the point that the cost of solar panels has fallen by well over 90% and the cheapest solar panels in the world are being manufactured in China," Cohan said. As far as the sustainability of humanity's energy consumption, Cohan said, the world is on the verge of making noticeable gains in protecting the environment from fossil fuel use. "Wind and solar are finally growing fast enough that not only do they offset some of the demand growth, but they actually offset more than 100% of the demand growth," he said. "That's the tipping point at which we can start to see fossil fuel use decline," Cohan said.
Plentiful supplies of Oil & Gas are good for some parts of the country, but not so good for those with ties to the Energy Industry. To maintain stock prices, Top of the Pyramid Executives will do their best to maintain the dividend. If necessary, reducing the headcount to reduce payroll is what will happen.
Base was mentioned a while back in the Generator thread and maybe in an electricity thread. The link that you provided fleshed out the details on what their plans are.. I had thought that they would be selling reserves from the battery packs only in extreme weather conditions. Their plans are much more aggressive in regards to buying and selling electricity throughout the year.
Currently, an idea for testing rather than a definite plan White color may be soon added to traffic lights in one state — Here’s its proposed function According to researchers from North Carolina State University, adding a white color traffic light to traffic lights found at intersections could help to accommodate the many autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the roads. As per the proposal put forward, these white lights won’t replace the normal red, green, and yellow lights, but complement them. In the process, AVs can communicate with traffic lights to control the flow at the intersection. What does the white traffic light at intersections signify? Although the color white was proposed by the North Carolina State University, any other color could work just as well. The white light would serve as a signal to indicate to human drivers that autonomous vehicles are going through the intersection. However, the traditional traffic lights will still work as per normal. According to Dr. Ali Hajbabaie, the lead researcher and associate professor of civil engineering at NC State, human drivers will still be able to drive as usual, but will also know how to maneuver their way through intersections alongside autonomous vehicles. The inner workings of the white traffic lights The white phase focuses on AVs approaching the intersection and provides a way for the AVs to communicate with the traffic signal and with each other. Distributed computing is key to this interaction between AVs and between AVs and the traffic lights. The white phase gets activated when the number of AVs at the intersection is rather high. At this phase, AVs will collaborate to ensure that traffic flow is well managed. Instead of waiting for light cycles to change, AVs can move through intersections by utilizing real-time negotiation and real-time data. Human vehicles will then just have to follow the AV infront of it. When not many AVs are passing through the intersection, the system will automatically revert back to the default setting of red, yellow, and green lights. This will guarantee safety for human drivers as well. Since AVs are able to communicate and manage traffic flow quite well, there is no longer a need to rely merely on traditional traffic light systems. The white phase will result in 3% fewer delays even when only 10% of AVs are present at an intersection. The considerable benefit of the introduction of the white phase The white phase has the benefit of reducing delays and ensuring that less stop-and-go traffic occurs. In the long run, fuel efficiency is ensured, as movement through intersections is much easier. At intersections with many AVs, the delays are reduced by about 94%. Due to the new white light system, trust is ensured, and human drivers can rest assured they will be part of the well-coordinated traffic flow. A considerable benefit is that there will no longer be a gap between human drivers and AVs. There are considerable advantages to introducing the white light phase. From this year, traffic lights will have a fourth color. Where will the implementation of the white light phase occur first? As per North Carolina State University’s proposal, AV technology is undergoing testing, and infrastructure is already being put in place. The research team has indicated that the pilot is ready for testing, with the initial tests happening in controlled environments where the AV fleets are already in operation. The reason for choosing areas with high AV density is that these areas tend to have less pedestrian movement and serve as the perfect testing grounds for smooth traffic flow. As stated by Hajbabaie, ports will be perfect for testing. This is because repeated traffic patterns can be seen at ports, and it has higher traffic flows. While white is ultimately the chosen traffic light color for AVs, any other color would work just as well, so the focus is not on the introduction of white traffic traffic lights, but on ensuring proper traffic control at intersections. With four color traffic lights coming to America, we have to wait and see which state will implement this new traffic light first.
