Trains in China have been transformed in recent years as the country has embraced high-speed rail and expanded its network to more than 40,000 km of tracks. The country has more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined, but the breakthroughs don’t stop there. A study published in the launch issue of the journal High-Speed Railway shows how satellite-based train state perception – for example, using China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) could revolutionize railway signaling.

How does train signaling work?

To understand the benefits of using satellite navigation methods to keep track of trains, it’s useful to consider how railway signaling works today. The governing principle of railway signaling is that no two trains should occupy the same portion of the track. And there are two approaches to managing train movements – fixed block and moving block signaling.

In both cases, the block length (the portion of track reserved for each train) is defined by the stopping distance of the fastest service using that line. And keep in mind that trains in China can take kilometers to come to a standstill when traveling at high speeds.

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Fixed block signaling systems only allow trains to proceed when the next block has become vacant, whereas moving block approaches make sure, dynamically, that there’s sufficient space ahead and behind to accommodate the braking of all units on the line.

Today, the amount of trackside equipment has grown to provide not just signaling data, but also includes systems to monitor train integrity – in other words, whether the front and the back are still attached. There’s other kit too, such as railway infrared hot box detectors that can determine whether wheel bearings are overheating and stop trains before mechanical failures occur.

A #Fuxing #bullettrain, with a designed speed of 350 km/h, departed on Tuesday morning from the Southwest Chinese city of #Guiyang, marking the operation of the Guiyang-Libo section of the Guiyang-Nanning High-speed #Railway. @VisitGuiyang https://t.co/XUSMHTOEiH

— Enterprising China (@sinoprise) August 9, 2023

Key to the implementation of today’s railway management systems is the placement of so-called balises (pronounced /ba-leases/ and named after the French word for ‘marker’), which stand proud a couple of inches above the sleeper below. If you’ve traveled on trains in China and elsewhere in the world, you’ll likely have seen the yellow- or orange-colored units in between the rails.

In their simplest state, balises are kind of like contactless payment points for trains. But rather than record transactions, these track-located transponders – which are powered by looms underneath the locomotive – provide information to the train on its whereabouts and details on the upcoming section of track.

Train transponders: Balises standing proud on a section of track in Europe.

For example, while the train keeps track of its location by counting wheel rotations, this calculation can be checked against the ground truth telegraphed by each balise. This is necessary as wheels slip and wear causes a reduction in diameter that would – if left unchecked – underestimate the distance traveled on long journeys.

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In addition, the beacons tell the train its permitted speed limit for that block of track, as well as information on the geometry and gradient of the upcoming section. Also, balises placed in sequence inform the train of its direction of travel.

However, there are cost implications of having to install and maintain infrastructure over thousands of kilometers of tracks. And to reduce the quantity and complexity of the track-side equipment that’s involved in supporting a modern railway, such as trains running in China and on high-speed networks in other countries, operators are considering approaches that are increasingly train-centric.

In their study, the researchers based at Beijing Jiaotong and Wuhan Universities – with expertise in computer and information technology, and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) approaches – consider the idea of so-called virtual balises.

Trains in China

Leveraging satellite positioning data gathered from BDS, which was constructed to provide independence from GPS, trains in China receive balise information based on their location. The advantage, as the Beijing and Wuhan teams point out, is that existing train control system frameworks could remain the same, as the information formats, etc, would be unchanged. But you could reduce the amount of physical trackside infrastructure that’s required.

Satellite positioning data could also be used for train integrity monitoring, to ensure that the front and back of the formation are where you’d expect them to be. And, based on field tests, the teams conclude that satellite systems could be key technologies in raising the capabilities of train-borne navigation.

Also, trains in China are by no means the only modes of transport to jump on this trend. Buses, trams, and trains elsewhere can be seen fitted with rooftop antennas that have active GPS/GNSS capabilities. But what’s striking about the development of intelligent high-speed rail in China is how it’s competing with short-haul flights, and – by all accounts – winning that competition.

And more trains and fewer flights is important to curb carbon dioxide emissions associated with transportation. On TechHQ we’ve written about the steps that aircraft manufacturers and operators will need to take to make aviation more sustainable. And those plans are based on continued growth in demand for flights, but China is showing that high-speed trains can reduce the environmental impact of aviation – at least when routes are competitive with short-haul flights.

High-speed trains in China can carry hundreds of passengers at a time, sometimes even more. The extra-long version of the Fuxing Hao Series Bullet Train can reportedly accommodate 1,283 passengers in 17 cars. And, if the concept of virtual balises takes off, satellite positioning could reduce the cost of operations and add to the appeal of high-speed rail.

The post What does BeiDou satellite study tell us about trains in China? appeared first on TechHQ.

In 2019, NASA funded a project to sow the seeds for an all-electric aircraft platform that it hoped would put commercial aviation on a more sustainable flight path. At the time, analysts were forecasting that air travel was on track to increase by 90% in the US over the next 20 years. And the aviation industry’s contribution to global emissions – based on Boston Consulting Group analysis – could balloon from single-digit percentages up to as much as 20% by 2050. Sustainable aviation needed some bright ideas.

What’s the flight path to sustainable aviation?

Four years later, the USD $6 million NASA project – dubbed CHEETA, reflecting how its members form a Center for Cryogenic High-Efficiency Electrical Technologies for Aircraft – has cleared the bar set by phase one’s concept stage. And it’s now time for the partners – which include nine academic institutions, Boeing, GE, and the Air Force Research Lab, all based in the US – to develop prototypes of their designs.

At the core of CHEETA’s sustainable aviation plan is the use of cryogenic hydrogen. “Because hydrogen takes up a lot of volume, it’s best kept cold in a liquid state,” said Phillip Ansell, lead researcher on the NASA program and director of the new Center for Sustainable Aviation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Instead of thinking of that as a barrier, we saw it as an opportunity to leverage those unique characteristics.”

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Superconductivity at room temperature has had a rough ride recently, but the approach, which reduces the energy losses in electric circuits, already has an industrial track record at low temperatures. “We saw a great deal of promise in using the 20 Kelvin cryogenic temperature of liquid hydrogen to enable the use of superconducting technology,” Ansell goes on to explain.

And it’s not just organizations in the US that seem keen on this idea. European aviation giant Airbus is also looking to combine liquid hydrogen and the efficiency gains of superconducting low-temperature circuits. Airbus announced a three-year demonstrator program (ASCEND) in 2021, which has the goal of increasing power density in the propulsion chain while keeping the mass of the distribution system low.

The power and stored energy requirements of air travel, particularly over long-haul routes, make sustainable aviation a tough problem to solve. If you plot the maximum power versus stored energy requirements of different modes of transport on a graph, EVs such as the Tesla Model S and Toyota’s Prius would be on the bottom left – with parameters that can be achieved using batteries.

However, wide-bodied airliners such as the Airbus A380 – which need to carry large numbers of passengers to make the economics of flying add up – are all the way up on the top right. Sustainable aviation needs to address both the need for large amounts of power for take-off and cope with the large distances currently traveled without refueling.

CHEETA still has to prove itself on the scale of a commercial airliner, but the design concept – which uses hydrogen-fed electricity-generating fuel cells to power electric rotors – is off to a promising start. “We were able to reduce the electrical system losses to below 2 percent, so the whole system is over 98 percent efficient from the output of the fuel cell to turning the rotor of the electric machine,” Ansell reports.

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There’s a raft of projects globally looking at hydrogen as a replacement for jet fuel. Hydrogen burns without the carbon emissions of current jet fuel, and produces just water as a product of combustion. But it’s a very small molecule that’s difficult to contain, and critics may point to how fuel cells in vehicles have been slow to take off.

That being said, there are multiple reasons to believe that sustainable aviation based on hydrogen will succeed despite the struggles experienced in the automotive sector. As mentioned, power density and energy storage requirements make it hard to see how batteries will suit all but the smallest of aircraft, making hydrogen-powered fuel cells a more compelling prospect in aerospace.

And the number of refueling stations required are orders of magnitude less than for road transport. There are in the region of 100,000 gas stations for vehicles in the US, which would be a massive infrastructure challenge for hydrogen. However, considering major airports, you only have around 100 facilities to focus on.

Plus, as reported on by TechHQ, airports can use ground vehicles as a pathfinder for building out hydrogen refueling operations. The area around Toulouse in France, which includes a major Airbus manufacturing facility, has a pilot-scale hydrolyser to supply airport buses. And the longer-term plan is to scale this up to provide green fuel for light aircraft.

@LanzaTech have begun their pre-application consultation on their plans to develop a Sustainable Aviation Fuel (#SAF) facility in Port Talbot.

Find out more about the project and share your views here: https://t.co/bsOrdLCT4u pic.twitter.com/iN5IecMnz8

— Neath Port Talbot Council (@NPTCouncil) August 15, 2023

The global pandemic hit the aviation industry hard, but it is now bouncing back in a leaner and more fuel-efficient form. Older planes were retired as part of cost-cutting during Covid. And the industry has long been adept at making marginal gains on performance that have dampened its emissions despite rising numbers of passengers. But it won’t be able to decouple emissions from a boom in air travel without ditching fossil fuels for good.

There are lots of good news stories about sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which can even be made from food waste, and gives airlines a drop-in replacement. But the use of SAF by airlines globally is currently tiny, and it’s not a zero-emission solution. SAF is said by the International Air Transport Association to reduce CO2 emissions by 80%, as the CO2 absorbed by plants is recycled – for example, when SAF is derived from biomass.

Also, there’s a chicken and egg problem of aviation customers not wanting to pay high prices, but SAF suppliers needing to have a larger market to bring down costs. Given the relatively quick win that SAF offers, it feels likely that biofuels will provide some form of bridge until new technologies, such as those being pursued by CHEETA and other projects, are commercialized.

China, India, and growth in SAF

Experts point to the feasibility of China and India becoming major suppliers of SAF, as the demand for airline travel is expected to grow dramatically in both countries. Producing SAF could utilize concentrations of municipal waste and agricultural residues, as well as creating jobs and driving economic growth.

Considering China, the country is a global force in renewable energy, and producing biofuels to support a path towards sustainable aviation – as well as bolstering energy security – would be a logical move.

What’s also clear is how demand for aviation has weathered developments in communications. Video conferencing capabilities have never been as accomplished as they are today, yet business travel – a profitable revenue stream for airlines – has rebounded. And researchers have shown that the appetite for travel has remained strong over the past 200 years despite the various breakthroughs in communication, such as growth of the postal service, fax machines, and the internet.

This appetite for travel gives confidence to developers of sustainable aviation that passengers will be ready and waiting for future net-zero flights, which cannot come soon enough for the planet.

The post Sustainable aviation: NASA ups bet on liquid hydrogen appeared first on TechHQ.

• LK-99 is likely not a room-temperature superconductor.
• Replication attempts have not produced sufficient results.
• Scientists claim levitation could be from diamagnetism.

The verdict is in: LK-99 is not the beginning of a new era of electronics.

Hopes for the potential room-temperature superconductor were dashed by a scathing summary from the University of Maryland’s Condensed Matter Theory Center last week on X, formerly Twitter.

“With a great deal of sadness, we now believe that the game is over,” the tweet read.

“LK99 is NOT a superconductor, not even at room temperatures (or at very low temperatures). It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth. Data have spoken.”

The experts drew their conclusion from the results of a growing body of replication attempts that have taken place at institutions around the world. As soon as the two original papers which debuted LK-99 were published and made the inflated claim that the result “opens a new era for humankind”, academics and amateur scientists were hot on their tracks trying to recreate it.

This enthusiasm, both from the original South Korean authors and the wider scientific community, stems from the fact that a room-temperature superconductor would revolutionize technology as we know it.

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Tech revolution from superconductors on horizon?

A superconductor is a material with zero electrical resistance, so it can conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency. These do already exist, however, they only exhibit this property when cooled to extremely low temperatures or under extremely high pressures. This makes them very expensive to use practically for, say, wires in electricity grids which do not lose any of the electrical energy they carry as heat.

But if superconductors could be formed at room temperature, or close to it, they could be used in ultrafast and energy-efficient computer chips and servers. They would also lower the price of quantum computers, making them more widely available to solve complex problems for researchers.

LK-99 fits the bill, kind of. The researchers claimed it had zero resistance at temperatures of up to 400 K (127 °C, 260 °F) at ambient pressure. They also published a video showing it partially levitating, which they claimed was evidence of the Meissner effect, another hallmark of superconductivity.

This is when a superconductor ‘levitates’ after being placed on top of a magnet because it expels a magnetic field from its interior. The researchers added that it was not completely levitating in their video because it is an impure sample.

‘Levitating’ room-temperature semiconductor. Source: Lee S et al. (2023)

However, scientists had a problem with many of their claims. The synthesis of LK-99 involved mixing several compounds containing lead, copper, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus and heating them to very high temperatures, but the chemical equations provided to illustrate what was happening were not balanced. The synthetic instructions were also strangely vague, not including details like cooling rates for the furnaces.

The compound created was, as admitted by the Korean scientists themselves, not a pure sample, which negated the measurement of zero resistance. The levitation could also have been through magnetic repulsion unrelated to superconductivity.

Other common tests that confirm superconductivity were not included, and the researchers did not analyze the sample in the traditional manner which would verify its exact structure.

Finally, the accompanying video doesn’t actually show the material fully levitating – only one side rises off the magnet. This led researchers to believe that the observed Meissner effect stemmed from impurities creating areas of superconductivity rather than the compound as a whole.

The two papers themselves were submitted in an unconventional manner, with a few hours between them and attributions to different authors. Some of the researchers involved later admitted that one of the papers was incomplete and contained “many defects”.

However, there was only one way for the skeptics to be totally sure that LK-99 was a fraud – to make it themselves.

The Beihang University in Beijing quickly ruled the material as not being superconductive after their reproduced sample gave a high measurement for resistivity at room temperature and did not repel or levitate over a magnet.

This was not the case for another fragment of reproduced LK-99 from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, whose video showed a fragment floating at multiple angles. This is evidence of ‘perfect diamagnetism’, an indicator of superconductivity.

First claimed successful replication of LK-99

Accomplished by a team at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and posted 30 minutes ago.

Why this is evidence:
The LK-99 flake slightly levitates for both orientations of the magnetic field, meaning it is not simply a… pic.twitter.com/bh0x9oqaz2

— Andrew Côté (@Andercot) August 1, 2023

However, as author Chang Haixin told TIME, it is difficult to distinguish perfect diamagnetism from strong diamagnetism, and the latter is demonstrated in materials that are not superconducting. The National Taiwan University and the National Physical Laboratory of India also reported diamagnetism in their respective samples, but these did not show zero resistance or any other indication of superconductivity.

The International Center for Quantum Materials in China observed signs of ferromagnetism – where it can become magnetized by a magnetic field – in flakes of reproduced LK-99, but, again, this was ruled as not being indicative of a room-temperature superconductor.

In the fortnight since the first papers were released, and gained widespread attention through a post on Hacker News, reports from the US, Russia, Spain, and the UK have also concluded that LK-99 is not the Holy Grail material and confirmed its structure.

Andrew McCalip, an engineer at space start-up Varda Space Industries, live-streamed his ‘backyard’ replication attempt on Twitch and live-tweeted it on X. Only a few of his fragments responded to a magnetic field, and he also detected impurities that could explain the observed phenomenon.

Meissner effect or bust: Day 8.5

We made the rocks pic.twitter.com/ygVOATBaHD

— Andrew McCalip (@andrewmccalip) August 4, 2023

Other labs have provided theoretical explanations for what the South Korean team observed in their sample. Still, these do not prove that the cause is superconductivity beyond a shadow of a doubt. There have been no complete successes so far in replicated experiments.

Last week, the Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics, which set up an investigative committee at the start of August to verify the results of the original papers, told Bloomberg that it is still awaiting the original samples of LK-99 for independent assessment.

While this final result is still weeks away, the consensus is clear, albeit disappointing. Data have indeed spoken.

The post “The game is over” for room-temperature superconductivity claim appeared first on TechHQ.

Now that AI is well and truly embedded into the collective consciousness, it’s time that we, as technologists, parse some of the real and imagined ‘dangers’ lurking in the technology.

For the purposes of argument, let’s first assume that AI, in the common parlance, is equated with machine learning (ML), and in the public perception, at least, LLMs (large language models).

To understand AI, we must have at least a cursory grasp of how the technology works. Many commentators feel fit to pass judgment on the implications of AI without actually understanding the basics of what goes on under the hood. In that, there’s nothing wrong per se: plenty of professional car enthusiasts out there, for instance, wouldn’t know their crankshaft from their big end. But a grasp of the processes involved in producing a recognizable AI, specifically, an LLM, helps explain how and why certain dangers exist.

Machine learning models of any type need a body of data from which to learn. A large quantity of data is generally considered better than a small one, and clean data is usually preferred. Clean data exhibits as few anomalies as possible in its structure (so all international ZIP codes should be made to follow the same format, for example) and in its content, too. Bodies of information fed to an AI that state too often that the world is flat will influence the model’s perceptions of what shape the world is. This example neatly brings us to our first deadly danger:

AI is biased

It’s accepted wisdom that any body of data will contain outliers – snippets of information that are well off the beaten track compared to their peers. Among a list of popular religions, for example, there will be one or two latter-day wits that claim to follow the ways of the Jedi Knights. A smart AI algorithm can cope with outliers and not adjust its comprehension to an inappropriate degree. However, if the body of information given for learning is inherently biased, in the main, then the “taught machine” exhibits the same attitude.

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Large parts of the internet, for example, are dominated by young, Western men interested in computing. Sampling data from there would lead any learning algorithm to believe there are few women, few old people, and few people with so little disposable income they couldn’t afford the latest technology. In the context of the learning corpus, that may be true. In a wider context, not so.

Therefore, any learned picture of the world drawn from the internet reflects the inherent bias of the personalities present on the internet.

Inaccuracy

Machine learning algorithms will harvest data that presents a biased picture, and extrapolated conclusions requested by end-users querying Bing’s AI, for example, will reflect that. It may present conclusions of the ‘fact’ that young American males of color have strong criminal tendencies. That’s not because of any truth in that finding; it’s because a political system has incarcerated that demographic to an extraordinary degree.

Large language models are created by a complicated, statistically variable word-guessing game. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, has learned to communicate by compiling sentences from lists of words, one after another, based on what the next word is fairly likely to be.

This process can lead to AI “dreams,” beloved by the mainstream press. Once anomalies creep into the real-time guesswork of what word comes next, errors that form surreal imagery compound, creating streams of consciousness that amuse and confound in equal measure.

Copyright or license infringement

Creative works or everyday internet postings are released under some degree of stricture, deliberately by the author or from those given by a proxy. The contents of Twitter (or X), for example, are owned by the company running that platform. Pictures taken from a high school reunion on Facebook (Meta) are owned by Mark Zuckerberg. And computer code written under a deliberately chosen license (the GPL, for example) has similarly to be reused or represented in a particular way.

When MLs are presented with raw data, however, it’s not clear whether or not any licensing strictures are observed. Does OpenAI grab copyright material to learn its language? Does Bing Image Creator take copyright imagery to learn how to paint? And if the greedy silicon digestive systems then spout, in part or whole, material that was released restrictively, where does the end-user stand in the eyes of the law?

Like the legal complications of liability in the event of a crashed autonomous vehicle, the new paradigm is unexplored territory, morally and legally. Authors, artists, and programmers may protest their work is put to uses it was never designed for, but the internet age’s adage of ‘be careful what you post’ is especially relevant now.

Even if creators somehow flag their output as ‘not to be used by learning models’, will the large operators of those models respect their choices? Like the “do not follow” entries in a website’s robots.txt file; it’s debatable whether any individual’s wishes are respected.

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Responsible AI takes more than good intentions

Mediocrity

From the early days of computing, data’s veracity was always doubtable. GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) remains a cornerstone of data analysis. In 2023, media companies began to use LLMs as content producers for various purposes: item descriptions in large online stores, reports on financial markets, and articles that contain perfect keyword densities to produce optimized SERP (search engine results page) placement.

And because the LLMs continue to snapshot the internet as new learning corpora, there is a significant danger of a spiral of self-propagation. Artificial intelligences will begin creating new generations of learned ‘facts’ that were themselves produced by AIs.

Ask a large language model to explain, for example, mental health law in Canada. The results will be coherent and comprise readable paragraphs and use bullet-point summaries of key information. The choice of bullet points comes not from the importance of any bullet-ed statement but from the fact that years of SEO practise have stipulated that bullet point lists are a good way to create web content that will rank well on Google.

When that information is copied & pasted into new articles and then absorbed in time by LLM spiders crawling the web, the decision to use bullet points becomes reinforced. The information in each snappy highlighted sentence gains extra emphasis – after all, to all intents and purposes, the author felt fit to highlight their statement in this way. It’s easy to see the dilution of importance by repetition, as evolving LLM models merely repeat and refine emphasis that was never particularly justified.

“DEMOTIVATIONAL POSTER: Government Contracting – It’s easy to stay afloat when you’re swimming in a sea of mediocrity.” by Claire CJS is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Over the years, average humans will produce average content consumed and averaged out by LLMs, producing even less remarkable content for the next generation of OpenAI-like companies to consume. Mediocrity becomes the norm.

Brilliant art, amazing writing, and earth-changing computer code can be produced by talented people, only to be subsumed in a morass of “meh” and regarded only as an outlier and disregarded by algorithms trained to ignore or at least tone down extraordinary content. There’s no consideration of value, merely distance from the average as a measure of worth.

Perhaps in that, there is a gleam of hope. If machine learning’s output is merely passing fair, genuine creativity will surely stand out. Until some very clever people quantify the muse and write algorithms that easily out-create the human creators.

The post 4 terrifying dangers lurking in AI appeared first on TechHQ.

• Future India-Japan semiconductors trade agreed.
• The collaboration is part of a plan to reach $35.9 billion Japanese investment in India by 2027.

Semiconductors and resilient supply chains are a key point of interest in India’s plan to reach $35.9 billion Japanese investment in the country by 2027, according to officials.

During a two-day visit to New Delhi in July, Foreign Ministers of India and Japan, S. Jaishankar and Yoshimasa Hayashi, met in the Indian capital to explore deepening technology and defence equipment collaboration. Both emphasised “the crucial role of a strong partnership between India and Japan in ensuring an open and prosperous Indo-Pacific region that is inclusive and rules-based”, according to a statement by India’s External Affairs Ministry. The two countries share strong economic ties: trade between India and Japan reached $20.57 billion in fiscal year 2021-2022.

On July 21, India and Japan signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on semiconductor development. Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw described the agreement as a substantial step in creating a resilient and complete value chain.

Resilince for semiconductors’ manufacture in India

“The MoU is on five fronts, viz. semiconductor design, manufacturing, equipment research, talent development, and bringing resilience to the semiconductor supply chain,” said Vaishnaw.

Semiconductors are materials used in electrical circuits and components that partially conduct electricity. Usually comprised of silicon, they conduct less electricity than a conductor (e.g. copper) and more than an insulator (e.g. glass). Semiconductors can be found in a huge variety of products, from computers and smartphones to medical equipment. Their properties and conductivity can be altered by a process called doping, which introduces impurities to the material so that it can meet the needs of different electrical products. Because of this, semiconductor devices have a large range of useful applications, and are widely used across almost all industries.

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Chip manufacturing can generate huge profits when times are good, but the industry is also notoriously cyclical. In 2022, for example, worldwide sales reached a record $574.1 billion, but the industry experienced a significant downturn in the second half of the year. Demand for chips is generally consistent with market demand for personal computers and other electronic equipment, so while manufacturers often struggle to meet high demand when things are going well, periods of lower demand can have a significant detrimental impact. If we look at long-term trends, however, the semiconductor industry has displayed consistent growth over the last two decades. This can be partly explained by a shift in the customer base, given that retail PCs and hard drives are no longer the primary market for semiconductors. Corporate spending on chips has increased as technology has increasingly permeated our everyday lives.

India’s semiconductors prioritized

India is therefore prioritizing chip manufacturing for two reasons. Firstly, India is a major consumer of electronics, and currently spends around $24 billion annually on importing semiconductors. This is expected to rise to USD$110 billion by 2030. This heavy reliance on imports became particularly troublesome during the pandemic, which caused significant supply disruptions. Geopolitical conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine war have also led to disruptions in the supply chain. Secondly, the Indian government has identified electronics manufacturing as a strategic economic sector. By developing a self-sufficient domestic industry, the government hopes to both meet the country’s domestic needs and to promote economic growth. Financial incentives of up to 50% of total project costs form part of a $10 billion government plan for semiconductor and display manufacturing projects.

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This is not the first time India has tried to establish a strong domestic semiconductor industry. Efforts go as far back as 2006, when the Andhra Pradesh government partnered with SemIndia to establish a $3 billion manufacturing facility. The project never materialized, and despite multiple expressions of interest in the decades since, a number of projects have had to be abandoned. Most recently, in July this year Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government suffered a potential setback when Foxconn walked away from a $19.5 billion semiconductor joint venture with mining conglomerate Vedanta Ltd.

India’s history with semiconductor trade

Another recent initiative is the Indian Semiconductor Mission (ISM), launched in late 2021 by Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. A specialized and independent Business Division within the Digital India Corporation, ISM’s vision is to “build a vibrant semiconductor and display design and innovation ecosystem to enable India’s emergence as a global hub for electronics manufacturing and design in a more structured, focused, and comprehensive manner”. Its objectives include the formulation of a long-term strategy for developing semiconductors; supporting start-ups; and promoting mutually beneficial partnerships with national and international agencies, industries and institutions.

By coordinating on incentives and rules, India and Japan will hope to strengthen partnerships between the Indian and Japanese private sectors. Both will invest in their strongest areas – Japan’s raw materials, for example, and India’s 50,000+ design engineers – with the ultimate goal of building an optimal supply chain.

The post India & Japan’s silicon handshakes appeared first on TechHQ.

Nature has no shortage of lessons for device makers looking to make better products with a host of properties that come easily in the natural world. Many thousands of years of evolution have yielded computing systems such as the human brain, which can operate on the power of a dim lightbulb. And Circuits of Life – a UK-based project featuring experts in computational biology and other disciplines – is taking inspiration from the protein-based electronics necessary for life on Earth and aims to build key components to order.

On TechHQ we’ve written about how slime mold has an incredible ability to solve mazes and perform optimizations that would challenge conventional computers. And nature turns out to be rich in computational capabilities.

In his book ‘Quantum Supremacy’, Michio Kaku points out that plants have quantum computing-like properties. For example, leaves are incredibly efficient in photosynthesizing light into chemical energy – much more so than classical physics would suggest.

And Kaku describes to readers how photons of light incident on the leaf surface are channeled counterintuitively like golf balls being hit in all directions yet still finding their way to the hole. Considering leaves as quantum solvers may feel peculiar, but biology is no stranger to properties that have device appeal.

Circuits of life as a molecular toolkit

“The flow of electrons within protein-based circuitry is essential to life, underpinning cellular energy generation and photosynthesis,” writes the Circuits of Life team, introducing its latest findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

In the paper, Ross Anderson and his co-authors describe how to make conductive, biodegradable wires from designed proteins, which could – the researchers believe – open up a new era of environmentally friendly programmable bioelectronics.

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The molecular wires, which are comparable in size to features found on silicon chips, are said to be compatible with conventional electronic components made from copper or iron. And, thanks to their protein origins, these nanostructures may also provide a bridge to the biological machinery responsible for generating energy in all living organisms.

Circuits of Life got the go-ahead in 2022 when the proposal to create and comprehend the way that nature builds its electronics was awarded GBP 4.9 million in funding, as part of the BBSRC’s flagship Strategic Longer and Larger (sLoLa) grant scheme. And the support provides five years of funding to build completely new protein-based circuitry, catalysts, and light-harvesting assemblies.

For example, it’s thought that the dynamic nature of proteins could help lower the energy barrier to substrate entry and product exit – offering catalytic support to bioreactions. Artificial bio-inspired electron-conducting circuitry could also lead to novel sensors for diagnosing disease and detecting environmental pollutants.

@uwaterloo Scientists create 'artificial leaf' that turns carbon dioxide into fuel.The "artificial leaf" technology mimics photosynthesis by taking carbon dioxide and converting it into methanol and oxygenhttps://t.co/OjQ34YiLND pic.twitter.com/7QmgkXGdX5

— R+T PARK (@RTPARKUW) November 4, 2019

Nature’s ability to transport electrons is fundamental to cellular respiration – the method by which living organisms obtain energy from food – and photosynthesis. And understanding in more detail how proteins and other related structures enable these bioengineering marvels has benefits for cleantech and building better medical devices.

Artificial leaves capable of turning carbon dioxide into fuel could solve the dual problem of providing green energy and consuming products that would otherwise contribute to global warming.

Bioelectronic medicine – exploring novel neural interfaces

In medicine, there’s great interest in being able to selectively modulate the autonomic nervous system. Neural engineering studies have indicated how it’s possible to act on the internal state of the body and compensate for damaged or dysfunctional elements.

“For decades, several devices known as neural prostheses have used electrical pulses to communicate with the nervous system to improve health and save lives,” writes Marina Cracchiolo and colleagues from the BioRobotics Institute of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, based in Italy. “These devices act by substituting or modifying the activity of a dysfunctional or injured nerve or a neural circuit, which in turn directly controls muscles or sensory organs.”

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However, circuits of life – such as the computer-simulated building blocks proposed by Anderson and co-workers in the UK – could zoom in and take bioelectronic medicine to a whole new level. Biocompatible, miniaturized devices raise the prospect of targeting individual nerves to modulate and decipher neural signaling patterns, paving the way for advances in bioelectronic medicine.

Galvani Bioelectronics – a joint venture between pharmaceuticals firm GSK and Google X spinout Verily – is an example of one med-tech developer aiming to transform patient lives through precision neuromodulation. And it’s clear that being able to lean on not just conventional electronics, but also to learn from how nature manages electron flow will pay dividends.

Returning to the idea of circuits of life – bioelectronics inspired by nature – computers play a major role in proposing how to build nanoscale protein wires for long-range electron transfer. The first step is to devise a modular protein platform for creating well-folded variants that can then be extended as part of a computational design strategy.

Techniques such as NMR spectroscopy and cryogenic electron microscopy allow workers to visualize their creations and gather structural insight that can’t be simulated in the digital world. And physical experiments provide confidence in the fidelity of the design process.

“To fully unlock the diverse functional repertoire of the natural oxidoreductases, it will be necessary to integrate molecular dynamics simulations and continuum electrostatics calculations, and other prediction tools, into the design process to define and modulate biophysical properties,” concludes the Circuits of Life team in their write-up.

The group’s comments point to the direction of travel in the project, which still has plenty more to offer the field on top of its early breakthrough in creating a microscopic toolkit of ‘green’ tuneable electrical components.

The post Circuits of life – what can tech learn from nature? appeared first on TechHQ.

• China plans to legislate children’s screen time limits.
• But it intends to give the job to technology providers, rather than parents.
• The outcome of limiting children’s screen time remains to be seen.

China is about to make screen time limits for young people an actual law.

Reuters reports that China’s cyberspace regulator announced Wednesday, August 2nd, that children under the age of 18 should be limited to a maximum of two hours a day on their smartphones.

Smart device providers have been asked by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) to introduce ‘minor programs’ that would prevent users under 18 from accessing the internet on mobile devices from 10pm to 6am.

The CAC said there would also be more specific timers to be set by providers: 16-18-year-olds would be allowed two hours a day, children between eight and 16 would get one hour and children under eight would get just eight minutes.

Parents can opt out of the screen time limits, the CAC said, although again it would be the responsibility of providers to enable this.

Investors were unimpressed by the news, and shares in Chinese tech companies have been sent tumbling; shares mostly fell in afternoon trading in Hong Kong after the CAC published its draft guidelines.

The draft is open to public feedback until September 2^nd.

Do young people need screen time limits? Source: REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo.

Xia Hailong, a lawyer at Shanghai Shenlun law firm, said the rules would be a headache for internet companies.

It would take “a lot of effort and additional costs to properly implement these new regulatory requirements,” he said.

“The risk of non-compliance will also be very high. So I believe that many internet companies may consider directly prohibiting minors from using their services.”

This isn’t the first time that the government has stepped in to alter young peoples’ use of technology. In recent years, Chinese authorities have grown concerned about rates of myopia and internet addiction among young people.

In 2021, the government imposed a curfew for video game players under 18, a massive blow to gaming giants like Tencent. Limits of three hours a week were imposed on what the government called “spiritual opium.” There was a similar crash in share-prices in Chinese gaming stocks.

Video-sharing platforms like Bilibili, Kuaishou and ByteDance have since 2019 offered “teenage modes” that restrict the users’ access to content, and the duration of use.

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Bytedance’s Chinese answer to TikTok, Douyin, bars teenagers from using it for more than 40 minutes.

Screen time limits a parental responsibility?

What’s remarkable about China’s proposed action is that it will be directed by smart device and internet providers. In the UK and America, similar restrictions can be implemented on social media apps and games, but parents have to opt in.

Off means off with screen time limits – but who has control?

For example, TikTok (also owned by ByteDance) has parental controls that it calls “family pairing.” Parents can link their child’s account to their own and control direct messages, set screen time limits, and turn on/off restricted content directly from their own device.

A setting called “digital wellbeing” can also be turned on to set screen time limits on app use. It allows for more restrictions on children’s accounts, blocking videos flagged as inappropriate (although not everything inappropriate is flagged, so it’s not failsafe).

The issue with regulating screen use is that, deep down, we all know that the less screen time, the better. Even though technology has become an indispensable part of modern life, its negative aspects can’t be understated.

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However, business-wise, it doesn’t pay to acknowledge those drawbacks. The lack of distinct regulation from government bodies makes it very easy for tech companies to find loopholes; parents could adjust their child’s settings – but everybody understands that they probably won’t.

Limited to two hours a day – could YOU do it?

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It’s certainly far less of a headache for a parent to enforce the law than it is their own rules – if it’s “the law,” parents get to pass on the responsibility for the unpopular action to an unseen external authority. What remains to be seen is the impact of limited phone use on China’s young people, and whether legislative change is a trend that will be followed globally.

The post Who should set children’s screen time limits? appeared first on TechHQ.

Soybeans are big business. Soybean production has risen from just under 27 million tonnes at the beginning of the 1960s to over 370 million tonnes today. And the bulk of those soybeans are used as livestock feed. But that could all change in the future if molecular farming takes off, as developers have shown that animal proteins can be produced directly from the soybeans themselves. And it’s another example of how agritech is transforming the food industry.

Meet the molecular farmers – plant-based agritech

Using plants to grow animal-protein is taking off as indicated by a growing ecosystem of biotech firms.

• Bright Biotech
• Forte Protein
• Kyomei
• Miruku
• Moolec
• Mozza
• Nobell Foods
• Tiamat

Plants as small factories

Moolec, which last year became the first molecular farming foodtech listed on the Nasdaq, highlights how the commercialization of molecular farming is progressing. The plant-based technological platform works by introducing real animal genes directly into seeds. And the foodtech breakthrough enables plants to function as small factories by growing animal proteins within main food crops – for example, in yellow soybeans and peas.

Moolec has hit the headlines most recently for growing soybeans that were rich in pork protein. And the results were four times higher than the firm had expected based on earlier experiments. In the latest announcement, Moolec said that the animal protein reached a high expression level up to 26.6% of total soluble protein in soy seeds.

A regular soybean (left) and one grown by a molecular farming host plant that’s been designed to produce animal protein. Image credit: Moolec.

Moolec’s soybeans carry a distinct pink color, which reveals the animal protein that’s been grown by plants in the field. And in safflower plants, which the company has engineered to produce a nutritional oil (gamma-linoleic acid), the company is reporting expression levels of around 60%, up 10% on initial expectations.

As well as using the plants to produce so-called neutraceuticals, Moolec is using safflower as a host for plant-based cheese replacements. And the project has advanced beyond the research stage to move into scale-up operations. “In early January, 25 tonnes of SPC2 (Safflower Chymosin) were harvested from the production campaign 2022/2023,” writes the firm in its Q3 FY 2023 business update.

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One of the big benefits of molecular farming is that the growing infrastructure is already there. Farmers have been growing crops for generations and can continue to use existing skills and equipment. The agritech element – although disruptive as molecular farming enables producers to skip the livestock stage of animal protein production – complements existing workflows and benefits from operations already available at scale.

Producing animal protein in the lab, on the other hand, requires a complete rethink of traditional farming practices – and implies additional cost and energy. For example, precision fermentation and cultured meat have sprung out of the pharmaceutical industry. But medicines are typically much more expensive than food.

However, disrupting conventional agribusinesses from within – or, more accurately, on the land using agritech – doesn’t have to carry the same cost penalties. And, in fact, there are multiple savings to be had.

Making a pitch to investors, Moolec’s senior management team points out that compared with conventional animal-based food production, molecular farming requires 35x less land usage. Carbon dioxide emissions are 60x less, and the water footprint is reduced too. And these numbers, which apply to any meat-free diet, not just one rich in molecular-farmed plant produce, point to opportunities for more eco-friendly foods.

A new vertical in food – alternative proteins

Supermarket aisles are the ultimate testing ground for food producers. Competition is fierce, particularly in established categories where shoppers have long discovered their favorite brands. And getting consumers to switch from one brand to another is expensive for companies – just ask Pepsi!

So when a new vertical in food opens up, it’s no surprise to see a rush to win market share. And alternative proteins is a rapidly rising food vertical with huge growth potential. Consumers are warming to plant burgers for various reasons. And Moolec’s hope is that plant-grown animal proteins will make meat-free products tastier and more appealing.

The larger the plant-based market gets, the more alternative proteins – including those produced by yellow soybeans – will be consumed in place of regular meat products.

At a high level, Moolec sees itself as an ingredients supplier – providing seeds to contracted growers and plant-grown animal protein to clients. The firm believes that the total addressable market for alternative protein ingredients could be worth over $70 billion by 2025.

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And of that share, Moolec estimates that it could service around $350 million in plant-derived diary ingredients and $4.5 billion across nutritional oils and meat replacement segments. Also, Moolec isn’t the only company using agritech to open up new business opportunities.

Strawberries turn out to be a star attraction for deploying fruit-picking robots, and applying machine learning image recognition to select optimally ripe crops to reduce food waste.

Foodtech is an exciting area for developers to bring solutions that take pressure off scarce resources and reduce the global environmental footprint associated with protein production. And next time you bite into a soybean, who knows what flavors will be in there – molecular farming and agritech takes Jelly Belly BeanBoozling to a whole new level.

And did we mention that beans can play a role in quantum computing too?

The post Moolec goes full beans as agritech powers future breakfast appeared first on TechHQ.

• AI ethics commitments made by major players.
• Notably, attendees at the White House were all male and mostly white.
• There’s a potential for gaslighting double standards in the people deciding AI ethics.

AI ethics have been under debate since before the general public was familiar enough with the technology to understand the abbreviation.

Last Friday, a public commitment to promoting safety and transparency in the development of artificial intelligence was made by US technology companies including Google and OpenAI.

Coming together at the White House, executives from Amazon, Anthropic, Inflection AI, Meta, and Microsoft made “voluntary” commitments to “help move toward safe, secure and transparent development of AI technology.”

According to Anna Makanjju, vice-president of global affairs at OpenAI, the commitment will “contribute specific and concrete practices” to what she called an “ongoing discussion” about AI regulation.

As well as committing to more security testing, the companies also pledged to share more information across the industry and government about how they’re mitigating risk.

The Biden administration and Capitol Hill lawmakers – like governments globally – have had to scramble together a coherent policy response to the rapid emergence of AI technologies.

The White House has called the commitments a “critical step toward developing responsible AI,” noting that an executive order was still in preparation, and urging Congress to pass legislation.

Who was (and wasn’t) there

Among the executives who appeared at the White House alongside president Biden to tout their new public undertakings were Microsoft president Brad Smith and Nick Clegg, the president of Facebook and Instagram parent Meta.

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Many noticed the entirely male lineup at the White House last Friday. This is somewhat ironic, given the number of women leading the fight for a more ethical approach to AI adoption.

Earlier this year, UNESCO launched a Women 4 Ethical AI Platform, stating that “without an ethical framework, the development and deployment of AI threatens to reproduce gender inequalities present in the real world, and even magnify them.”

It’s not as though there aren’t women at the top of AI companies, either. The turnout at the global summit of AI for Good, held in Geneva this year, is proof of that: the speakers included Joanna Shields (Baroness Shields OBE), Chief Executive Officer of BenevolentAI.

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Also arguably overlooked were the women working in the American government on the very legislation that the White House is urging Congress to provide. Anne Neuberger, an American national security official who serves as national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology in the Biden administration, was present at the summit – but not the White House.

Google DeepMind’s COO is Lila Ibrahim, who has previously worked at Intel. Given her responsibilities at the company, which include Governance and Ethics, she would have been an ideal attendee last week.

Instead, Google’s president of global affairs was present at the White House on July 21. Also there, and likely a familiar face for Kent Walker, was Mustafa Suleyman.

Last Friday, when Suleyman was at the White House he was representing Inflection AI, where he is currently chief executive. He’s prominent in the discourse surrounding AI ethics and speaks widely about the need for technologists to be held responsible for their work.

What’s been conveniently forgotten is his reputation at Google, where he faced little responsibility for actions of his own.

Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014. His management style was the source of complaints from DeepMind staff who, Insider reported, had filed grievances over several years.

“He had a habit of flying out of nowhere,” said a former employee. “It felt like he wanted to humiliate you; like ‘I’m trying to catch you off guard,’ he would just start messing with you, in front of your colleagues, without any warning. ”

People familiar with the matter believed that Suleyman was aware of the effect this behavior had on employees.

“He used to say, ‘I crush people,'” said a former employee.

Apparently, there were confidentiality agreements made between DeepMind and former and current colleagues who complained about his management.

In August 2019, Suleyman was placed on administrative leave – at the time, a spokesperson said Suleyman was “taking a break after 10 busy years” – and an external lawyer was hired to investigate bullying allegations. Shortly afterwards, he left the company.

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Ah, justice? Nope!

Mustafa Suleyman was offered, and took on, a VP role at Google, promoting him to a position just two steps below the CEO. In early 2022, he left Google for Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm that saw him through to attending the White House on behalf of Inflection.

(Tweet includes a screenshot from this article.)

When he left Google, on being asked about the bullying mess, Suleyman’s response was an apology: “I really screwed up,” he said. “I remain very sorry about the impact that that caused people and the hurt that people felt there.”

AI regulation and diversity issues

Google’s research lab had its reputation badly damaged, possibly irreversibly, with its decision to fire Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell – two of its top AI ethics researchers.

AI ethics researcher fired by Google.

Both staff members had been calling for more diversity among Google’s research staff and expressed concern that the company was censoring research critical of its products.

“Not only does it make me deeply question the commitment to ethics and diversity inside the company,” Scott Niekum, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin who works on robotics and machine learning, told The Verge.

“But it worries me that they’ve shown a willingness to suppress science that doesn’t align with their business interests.”

Gebru claimed she was fired after questioning an order not to publish a paper claiming that, to paraphrase, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe.

AI ethics researcher Timnit Gerbu. Source: Winni Wintermeyer/The Guardian

Ironically, the language Google used to announce her departure – “behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager” – echoes that used upon Suleyman’s withdrawal from DeepMind.

The email sent to staff in 2019, after the news of Suleyman’s departure broke, read that his “management style fell short” of expected standards.

Now, this might be old news: the issue hit headlines in early 2021. However, have more recent headlines not vindicated the case she was making? Not only has the intrinsic bias of artificially generated text been proven, but so has the exploitation of already marginalized groups that came when AI companies (reactively) tried to stop their chatbots’ racism.

AI ethics: coming full circle

It might be that, at first glance, press photos from the AI ethics meeting at the White House showed nothing unusual. Perhaps the people most involved in AI ethics are all men! Famously, groups of (predominantly white) men have been at the forefront of ethical change and equality…

After years of silencing anyone who pointed out the human dangers of AI, technology entrepreneurs have got on board with criticizing the potential harms of AI. However, the approach only gives a platform to “AI Will Destroy Humanity – Robot Domination Imminent” headlines.

The lack of diversity at the White House meeting is compounded by Suleyman’s attendance. The people deciding what AI ethics is concerned with are themselves ethical nightmares. Convenient focus on AI’s world takeover means Google has been able to sweep allegations of misconduct under the carpet.

A Google search for Mustafa Suleyman, even with the keyword “bullying” does little to expose his history of manipulation and humiliation.

While those in power pull together to stress the importance of responsible AI adoption, they are also pulling the curtain over their own unethical practices and aspirations.

The post Tech executives responsible for AI ethics – but not personal actions? appeared first on TechHQ.

How many commercial-scale PV and wind power plants will China need to achieve its carbon neutrality goal by 2060? According to a new study – ‘Accelerating the energy transition towards photovoltaic and wind in China’ – published this week in the journal Nature, the answer is 3,844. And the calculations, performed by experts in China, Japan, and Europe, put numbers to the renewable energy scale-up required.

China renewable energy facts

Today, China is already the global leader in wind and solar farm capacity. Figures collated by Global Energy Monitor – a non-profit on a mission to develop and share information in support of the worldwide movement for clean energy – show that China has well over double the installed wind capacity of the US.

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And when it comes to active PV installations, Global Energy Monitor’s solar power tracker indicates that more than half of the world’s operating capacity is located in China. Combining wind and solar, China’s current renewable energy capacity is in excess of 500 GW, which may sound like a lot, but is still just a fraction of what’s required long term.

For example, the study’s authors forecast that – based on China’s 14th Five-Year Plan for a Modern Energy System – the country’s capacity for renewable energy generation will likely reach somewhere between 5 and 9.5 PWh per year. Whereas achieving carbon neutrality in China by 2060 will require scaling up renewable energy from wind and solar sources to as much as 15 PWh per year.

And this mismatch points to the need for much greater investment in PV and wind power in the country, from current levels of around US $77 billion to US $426 billion in the 2050s. Home to 18% of the world’s population, China’s share of global carbon dioxide emissions has risen to 28%.

But given the resources available, it’s feasible for the country to lead the way in the global clean energy transition – especially given its manufacturing expertise in producing PV panels and wind turbines.

China dominates the solar industry and has leadership across each stage of the manufacturing process, from the preparation of polysilicon ingots to wafer slicing, cell fabrication, and module assembly.

Top wind turbine manufacturers (onshore + offshore)

1. Goldwind, China
2. Vestas, Denmark
3. GE Renewable Energy, US/France
4. Envision, China
5. Siemens Gemesa, Spain
6. Mingyang, China
7. Windey, China
8. Nordex, Germany
9. SANY, China
10. CRRC Wind Power, China

[Source: BloombergNEF]

Ranking global wind turbine manufacturers, the majority of the top 10 firms are Chinese companies. And, subject to materials availability, these industrial strengths certainly put China and renewable energy on the same page – particularly in key categories of wind and solar, which experts see as being the most versatile solutions.

“Among renewables, PV and wind power have wider ranges of application than hydropower, generate less detrimental effects on food and ecosystems than bioenergy, and probably entail lower costs than carbon capture and storage,” write authors of the study published this week in the journal Nature.

Shipshape: workers check solar panels built on a fishing lake in China. Image credit: AFP.

The researchers considered a wide range of factors – resource limitations, administrative boundaries, land suitability, restriction of land use, ground slope, land cover, latitude, longitude, terrestrial and marine ecological conservation, water depth at offshore wind stations, shipping routes, solar irradiance, wind power density, and air temperature – to visualize the optimum renewable energy mix in China.

And, according to the group, the ideal combination of utility-scale facilities (> 10 MW capacity) corresponds to 2,767 solar farms, and 1077 wind plants, including 11 offshore developments.

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Wind and solar are complementary, with solar peaking during the day and wind at night. And, over the longer term, in summer and winter, respectively.

Large-scale conversion to renewable energy has, in the past, raised fears of grid instability and high-energy storage cost due to the uncertainty of wind and solar. But simulations – this time considering scenarios for the continental US between 2050 and 2055 – reveal that grid reliability and 100% clean energy penetration are not incompatible.

“Solutions are obtained without higher-cost stationary battery storage by prioritizing storage of heat in soil and water; cold in water and ice; and electricity in phase-change materials, pumped hydro, hydropower, and hydrogen,” wrote Mark Jacobson of the University of California, Berkeley, US, in a 2015 study.

Agrivoltaic trend

In terms of land use, deserts, grasslands, and oceans should provide most of the space for renewable energy expansion in China. On TechHQ we’ve written previously about how solar, animal farming, and crops can co-exist – a field dubbed agrivoltaics. For example, solar panels can provide shade for animals, while livestock contribute by keeping surrounding plants under control so that PVs receive maximum irradiation.

And there are examples already on China’s mainland, such as in Guizhou province (in the southwest of the country), where farmers harvest Sichuan peppers in fields shared with solar panels that offer shelter from the hot sun.

Large scale project: employees work on wind turbine hubs at a factory in Lianyungang, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province on February 28, 2023. Image credit: AFP.

Increased renewable energy capacity would give China greater energy security and some of the costs of development would be offset against savings from reduced fossil fuel purchases. However, modeling does assume investment in building ultra-high-voltage transmission lines to provide efficient energy distribution – boosting capacity and reducing electricity losses – across the vast territory.

Also, because facilities will be distributed widely across the country and not just concentrated in China’s richer regions, there’s potential for wind and solar infrastructure to play a role in increasing per-capita income from $29,000 to $34,400 in North China and from $29,100 to $30,600 in Northwest China – based on research estimates. Renewables can bring development to desert and marginal lands that otherwise have little in the way of revenue opportunities for residents.

Studies also point to the value of collecting geospatial data. Advances in satellite imaging are making it possible to position solar arrays in locations that offer the brightest prospects for clean energy generation.

The post China renewable energy calculations sum up carbon neutrality goal appeared first on TechHQ.