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[Reelya]

Hmm I wonder if it would be possible to make a battery that stores energy when the rates are cheap for use during the daytime. That would be useful even without solar. Cutting peak load means lower coal emissions.

[wierd]

Sure. Just put the charging system for it on a timer. Very low tech solution to that.

What will happen is that peak load will go away, and constant load will become a thing.  It will then be "night time load", which precludes solar generation at the source, meaning either wind, hydro, or coal/gas.  If the load needs to be reliable, that leaves only hydro and coal/gas. Hydro cannot be used everywhere. Coal/Gas can.

[Reelya]

Night time load will drop quite a bit in a solar-heavy world however. The typical subsidies artificially inflate night-time usage, because they were designed for a constant-generation scenario. All they need to do is jack up the price so power costs more when it's dark, and power consumption patterns will shift to be more similar to solar generation patterns.

[feelotraveller]

I think the likely solution is a Dwarven Water Reactor...  wait wrong world... recalibrating...  innovation around Pumped Storage Hydroelectricty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
http://reneweconomy.com.au/no-batteries-needed-pumped-hydro-for-energy-storage-79785/

Basically using large scale pumping and and subsequent release of water over a significant drop as very efficient large 'battery' storage.  Caveat is it can't be down everywhere... yet.

[TempAcc]

How efficient is it actualy, though? Wouldn't friction eventualy suck out energy out of the system bit by bit? Or is the gravity enough to compensate for that :U?

Also there's evaporation.

[Reelya]

Huh? I can't even follow the logic of the friction thing.

If you pump up 1 ton of water, it'll cost a set amount of power (e.g. 1.0 kwh) and give you back another (slightly lower) set amount of energy (e.g. 0.8 kwh). That already accounts for both friction and evaporation. But next time you want to store energy, the costs are the same as the first time: you spend 1.0 kwh of power to pump up 1 ton of water.

I think the issue here is that you haven't factored in that the electricity supply is from outside the system, as is the water supply. Your issues would only be relevant if it was a closed loop.

[Starver]

Friction as in "you get back slightly less energy" could make it wasteful enough (at practical scales) to make it less attractive, and while water doesn't 'wear out', the pumps/turbines do.

That said, at the right location, it could be useful...

[Max™]

Heating up water is a cost, but you can find workarounds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating

[Reelya]

Friction as in "you get back slightly less energy" could make it wasteful enough (at practical scales) to make it less attractive, and while water doesn't 'wear out', the pumps/turbines do.

That said, at the right location, it could be useful...

According to wiki, it's also the cheapest form of storage available. So that needs to be factored in. 80% efficiency isn't bad if it's really cheap to implement. But there's also the fact that cities need water to be pumped so that mains water is pressurized. Pumping up water with gravity could save energy that's used to do that already.

[Starver]

ObXKCD, then.. 

[Max™]

Sorta tech news, but not really news if you're already using one of the dev or earlier builds, but on firefox 50+ at least you can do stuff like this to enable OpenGL compositing and similar changes so your graphics card is used instead of sitting at full CPU if you want to glance at youtube. So much nicer sitting at ~39 C with my GPU instead of ~49 C on my CPU, and getting all the dedicated graphics goodies.

[Reelya]

http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/careers/the-inconceivable-truth-our-jobs-are-not-coming-back/news-story/b920569e34edbb9c9a618a17175a95bb

Nice article bringing a lot of the automation, job losses, and minimum income strands together.

EDIT: And a new battery tech today:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/11/23/2255256/scientists-create-battery-that-charges-in-seconds-and-lasts-for-days

A new type of battery that lasts for days with only a few seconds' charge has been created by researchers at the University of Central Florida. The high-powered battery is packed with supercapacitors that can store a large amount of energy. It looks like a thin piece of flexible metal that is about the size of a finger nail and could be used in phones, electric vehicles and wearables, according to the researchers. As well as storing a lot of energy rapidly, the small battery can be recharged more than 30,000 times. Normal lithium-ion batteries begin to tire within a few hundred charges. They typically last between 300 to 500 full charge and drain cycles before dropping to 70 per cent of their original capacity.

[Reelya]

Combining social media and VR. I guess someone had to do it. What could go wrong?

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/287657/Social_VR_platform_High_Fidelity_raises_22_million.php

[itisnotlogical]

When I read that it reminded me of Second Life. Follow the link, lo and behold, it's by a founder of Second Life.

I think this sort of alternate-reality social experience thing will only be really good when we get full body input for VR, where you can actually walk around. Until then it'll just be like playing a terrible MMO with nothing to do.

[Starver]

I must remember to get into that early and write the swordfighting routines, and also get to intimately know the access and egress methods for the sub-basement areas of the Virtual World.