November 19

A Solar Farm the Size of 1,000 Football Stadiums Is Going Up in Indiana A new project in the central US will pile on some significant green energy capacity, as the country’s biggest solar farm starts construction. ....... The Mammoth Solar farm, as it’s been appropriately dubbed, will be built in a rural area of Indiana about 80 miles south-east of Chicago. Once it’s complete, the farm will occupy 13,000 acres—that’s equivalent to about 1,000 football stadiums. Distributed throughout that space will be 2,850,000 solar panels, which will generate

1.65 gigawatts of electricity

. ........ The biggest solar farm in the world is Bhadla Solar Park in India; it spans 14,000 acres and has a capacity of 2.25 GW. ........ Israeli energy company Doral Renewables is spearheading the project ......... Doral is the owner-operator of over 400 energy facilities globally, and has three other projects underway in the US right now ......... Nuclear power and natural gas (and maybe even fusion power) will be needed to pick up the slack—or, more likely, to be the primary workhorses in producing the clean energy of the future.

Electrifying the Future: Toyota Puts Over $13 Billion Into Battery Technology part of the company’s plan is to reduce the cost of batteries by 30 percent or more through innovations in materials and new designs. ...... It’s also a frontrunner in the quest to commercialize solid-state batteries, which could significantly increase energy density and therefore the range of electric vehicles. ......... despite being an early leader in electric cars, Toyota considered electrification a stopgap until cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells could replace gasoline ones ..... Toyota president Akio Toyoda claimed Japan would run out of electricity if it switched entirely to electric vehicles, unless it spent hundreds of billions of dollars on upgrading its power network.

Nvidia’s New Supercomputer Will Create a ‘Digital Twin’ of Earth to Fight Climate Change according to Nvidia, to really know where and how to take action on climate change, we need more data, better modeling, and faster computers. That’s why the company is building what it calls “the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to predicting climate change.” ........ we must know our future today—see it and feel it—so we can act with urgency ....... “Meter-scale resolution is needed to simulate clouds that reflect sunlight back to space. Scientists estimate that these resolutions will demand millions to billions of times more computing power than what’s currently available.” .......

Earth-2 will employ three technologies to achieve ultra-high-resolution climate modeling: GPU-accelerated computing; deep learning and breakthroughs in physics-informed neural networks; and AI supercomputers—and a ton of data.

........ hopes Nvidia’s model will be able to predict extreme weather changes in designated regions decades ahead of time ...... “All the technologies we’ve invented up to this moment are needed to make Earth-2 possible. I can’t imagine a greater or more important use.”