given the 10-hour figure, one would assume it can feed up to 20 MW to the grid at any time
they have already built a 4 MWh pilot plant in Italy
the utility has also been building lithium-ion battery farms, so it stands to reason they see enough potential in this approach to continue pursuing it
compressed CO2 storage has advantages over compressed air in that it can be stored indefinitely at ambient temperature and has a higher energy density in liquid form
It’s an efficiency thing, the images are tiny compared to full color - the whole site is made to use as few resources as possible.They operate it off solar power (hence the battery meter) and around an ethos of reversing a lot of modern web design bloat practices. I appreciate them demonstrating the kind of stuff they advocate for with their own site.
2bpp with lossless compression is an order of magnitude fatter than what DCT codecs like JPEG can achieve, if you’re okay with all your illustrations being kinda shite. Even just 16 colors with no dithering would probably compress better.
You’d have to take that up with them - they might be interested in alternatives that improve efficiency. I wonder if they like that it’s very visibly a deliberate choice to modify the images for size, or if they feel they’d be answering constant ‘why do your images look bad?’ questions with a reduced color pallet.
For anyone else who wants more info, I think these are cool discussions:
Spent breakfast researching this:
So they’re literally using gas compression as a storage medium for energy? That’s genius.
In case you are in this community but haven’t religiously read everything on Low Tech Mag.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-of-the-compressed-air-economy/
The battery meter is a hoot. The Game Boy Camera images are just weird.
It’s an efficiency thing, the images are tiny compared to full color - the whole site is made to use as few resources as possible.They operate it off solar power (hence the battery meter) and around an ethos of reversing a lot of modern web design bloat practices. I appreciate them demonstrating the kind of stuff they advocate for with their own site.
2bpp with lossless compression is an order of magnitude fatter than what DCT codecs like JPEG can achieve, if you’re okay with all your illustrations being kinda shite. Even just 16 colors with no dithering would probably compress better.
You’d have to take that up with them - they might be interested in alternatives that improve efficiency. I wonder if they like that it’s very visibly a deliberate choice to modify the images for size, or if they feel they’d be answering constant ‘why do your images look bad?’ questions with a reduced color pallet.
For anyone else who wants more info, I think these are cool discussions:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#why_website https://lobste.rs/s/9v0ioj/how_build_low_tech_website
It definitely conveys that it looks bad on purpose. There’s utility in that signalling.