Tuesday, February 13th, 2024

Time	Event
7:00a	28-Ton, 1.2-Megawatt Tidal Kite Is Now Exporting Power To the Grid Minesto, a marine energy tech developer based in Sweden, has deployed their new Dragon 12 tidal energy harvester to the Faroe Islands. Operating like an underwater kite, the Dragon 12 "uses lift generated by tidal flows to fly patterns faster than the currents, harvesting renewable energy," reports New Atlas. From the report: Where devices like Orbital's O2 tidal turbine more or less just sit there in the water harvesting energy from tidal currents, Minesto's Dragon series are anchored to the sea bed, and fly around like kites, treating the currents like wind. Just as land-based wind energy kites fly in figure 8 patterns to accelerate themselves faster than the wind, so does the Dragon underwater. This, says Minesto, lets the Dragon pull more energy from a given tidal current than other designs -- and it also changes the economic equations for relevant sites, making slower tidal flows worth exploiting. These are by no means small kites -- the Dragon 12 needs to be disassembled to fit in a shipping container. It rocks a monster 12-meter (39-ft) wingspan, and weighs no less than 28 tons. But compared to other offshore power options like wind turbines, it's an absolute minnow, and extremely easy to install using a single smallish boat and a sea bed tether. As with any renewable energy project, the key figure here is LCoE (levelized cost of energy) -- so what's it gonna cost? Well, back in 2017, Minesto projected about US$108/MWh once its first hundred megawatts of capacity are installed -- with costs falling thereafter as low as $54/MWh. The Dragon 12, like other tidal devices, will be more effective in some places than others -- and Denmark's Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the chilly North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, offer ideal conditions. Home to about 55,000 people and more than a million puffins, the Faroe Islands funnel tidal currents through a number of slim channels. This accelerates the water significantly, and thus increases the energy that devices like the Dragon 12 can harvest. That's where the first Dragon has been deployed, and on Friday, it was connected to the local power grid to begin delivering energy. You can watch a video of the Dragon 12 on YouTube. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
5:20p	Backblaze's Geriatric Hard Drives Kicked the Bucket More in 2023 Backblaze has published a report on hard drive failures for 2023, finding that rates increased during the year due to aging drives that it plans to upgrade. From a report: Backblaze, which focuses on cloud-based storage services, claims to have more than three exabytes of data storage under its management. As of the end of last year, the company monitored 270,222 hard drives used for data storage, some of which are excluded from the statistics because they are still being evaluated. That still left a collection of 269,756 hard drives comprised of 35 drive models. Statistics on SSDs used as boot drives are reported separately. Backblaze found one drive model exhibited zero failures for all of 2023, the Seagate 8 TB ST8000NM000A. However, this came with the caveat that there are only 204 examples in service, and these were deployed only since Q3 2022, so have accumulated a limited number of drive days (total time operational). Nevertheless, as Backblaze's principal cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein pointed out: "Zero failures over 18 months is a nice start." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
6:40p	Sam Altman's $7 Trillion Chip Dreams Are Way Off the Mark, Says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took an indirect jab at Sam Altman when he said $7 trillion can buy "apparently all the GPUs." From a report: The Nvidia CEO made the quip at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Monday when asked how many GPU chips that much money could buy. Altman, the OpenAI chief, is reportedly trying to raise trillions to boost supplies of the chips needed for AI processing. Huang told the United Arab Emirates' AI minister, Omar Al Olama, that developing AI wouldn't cost as much as the amount Altman is seeking to raise. The Nvidia CEO said AI infrastructure costs would be considerably less than the $5 trillion to $7 trillion Altman is reportedly trying to raise because of expected advances in computing. "You can't assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much," Huang said. He also suggested that the cost of building AI data centers globally would amount to $2 trillion by 2029. Huang said: "There's about a trillion dollars' worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we'll have $2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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