Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

October 24, 2024

India’s Renewable Energy Capacity Hits 200 GW accounting for 46.3% of total power generation

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:19 PM

India has been pushing heavily in the renewable Energy field to make itself less reliable on Oil and other fossil fuel imports. Earlier this month we hit 200 GW Milestone and renewable energy now accounts for 46.3% of total power generation in India.

This is awesome news and something we should be proud of. My parent’s place in Delhi is running on Solar (well everything except the AC’s are on Solar) and my cousin’s farm and hour is almost 100% on solar now as are most of the houses in their village. The same is the case in a lot of villages in India especially in UP (others as well but I have not seen them all personally). A lot of the street lights etc now run on solar as well and there was an ongoing project to use the excess power generated by the panels put on the highways to power the villages on route as well.

The top 4 States Driving India’s Renewable Energy Capacity are as follows:

  • Rajasthan 29.98 GW
  • Gujarat 29.52 GW
  • Tamil Nadu 23.70 GW
  • Karnataka 22.37 GW

UP is not there in the top 4 yet as they started a bit late but there is an extensive push there for solar and I know other states are also exploring Solar, wind and other renewable energy sources as well. In addtion The Government of India has introduced various measures and initiatives to promote and accelerate renewable energy capacity nationwide, aiming for an ambitious target of 500 GW of installed capacity from non-fossil sources by 2030.

Source: NDTV: India’s Renewable Energy Capacity Hits 200 GW Milestone, Accounts For 46.3% Of Total Power

– Suramya

October 23, 2024

Auto adjusting Desalination system that works with renewable power

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Science Related — Suramya @ 10:41 AM

Having drinking water is a problem in a lot of places on Earth due to various reasons. One of the solutions for this is to extract drinking water out of sea water/salty water. Unfortunately, the traditional methods of doing this require a lot of power and that causes other issues. Plus, that means that we can’t setup the desalination plants in locations where they are most needed as these locations don’t usually have reliable power either. One solution is to use renewable energy such as Solar to power these plants but the traditional setups expect constant power levels which isn’t always possible due to weather conditions.

Around a 100 years ago we developed reverse osmosis and electrodialysis, which are two membrane-based desalination technologies. Reverse osmosis requires a lot of pre-treatment and thus not sustainable everywhere, which is why MIT researchers led by Jonathan Bessette decided to go with electrodialysis instead.

What makes their approach really interesting is that their setup runs on renewable energy (Solar Power) and automatically adjusts the quantity of water being processed depending on the weather conditions instead of expecting constant power levels. So if it was a sunny day with clear skies then the setup would process more water, and if it was cloudy the quantity being processed would reduce automatically.

The two most important parameters in electrodialysis desalination are the flow rate of the water and the power you apply to the electrodes. To make the process efficient, you need to match those two. The advantage of electrodialysis is that it can operate at different power levels. When you have more available power, you can just pump more water through the system. When you have less power, you can slow the system down by reducing the water flow rate. You’ll produce less freshwater, but you won’t break anything this way.

Bessette’s team simplified the control down to two feedback loops. The first outer loop was tracking the power coming from the solar panels. On a sunny day, when the panels generated plenty of power, it fed more water into the system; when there was less power, it fed less water. The second inner loop tracked flow rate. When the flow rate was high, it applied more power to the electrodes; when it was low, it applied less power. The trick was to apply maximum available power while avoiding splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The prototype unit they setup was the size of a shipping container and over the 6 months trial period it desalinated around 5,000 liters of water per day—enough for a community of roughly 2,000 people. The team is now working on productionalizing the solution and selling it commercially.

Their work was published in Nature: Direct-drive photovoltaic electrodialysis via flow-commanded current control, earlier this month.

Looking forward to people building on top of this effort and having such units available for purchase.

Source: Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@kevinrns/113341185649409458

October 22, 2024

Tech is not a replacement for human contact

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 6:35 PM

The more I read about the kind of products these so call ‘AI Founders’ are coming up, the more I feel that they all need some serious therapy. The latest example of this is intouch.family which is an AI powered chatbot that calls your elderly parents so you don’t have to. I mean seriously? The official description is:

InTouch is a subscription service for seniors which regularly calls and keeps company to your parent, evaluates their well-being and alerts you if assistance is needed.

I get that we are all busy and it sometimes gets hard to call people and keep in touch, but anyone who thinks that AI is a replacement for the human touch especially in keeping up relationships needs to get their head examined.

I am quite bad at remembering birthdays and anniversaries except for close family and friends. When I was in college I thought that it would be nice if I could automate wishing folks Happy Birthday without having to actually wish them myself. So I wrote a program where I fed in all the birthday’s and the idea was that at a random time during the day it would email them a message wishing them. I even had a lot of enhancements planned, like use the ‘Poet’ program (it generated poems, based on certain criteria) and add it as part of the message to make it more personal. Spent a few days creating the program and it worked perfectly.

I was about to start using it and then realized that the whole point of wishing folks on their birthday was to keep in touch with them, not discharge an obligation. Especially if you have not talked to someone for a while, wishing them allows you to initiate a conversation. So I ended up changing the software to email me a reminder (This is in the days before Google Calendar and other reliable online calendars) so that I could call/email/text the person wishing them.

The whole idea behind technology is to make human contact easier, not to replace human contact. Telegrams allowed us to send urgent news quickly, then came phones that allowed us to talk to people who were far away, then we had VoIP/Voice Calls that allowed you to call without massive bills. Then came video calls such as zoom/Whatsapp etc that allow you to see the person you are talking to as well as hear them. In the near future we will have VR calls where you will feel that you are in the same room as the other person.

Unfortunately, most of the ‘AI’ services we see are being created/marketed as a replacement for human contact instead of as an aid to it. For example, instead of making friends to talk to, someone has created a AI ‘friends bot’ that you can share stuff with. (can’t find the link right now) Another genius created a whole social network that contains only AI bots that respond to your posts and create content.

I know making new friends can be scary at times but you need to find out what works for you. The stereotypical nerd who is anti-social is not something you want to aim for because that is absolute nonsense. You need to work with others if you want to succeed in life. If you are on the spectrum it can be harder for you to make friends but you need to see what works for you. One of my close friends is like that and we stay in touch over chat and emails as I know that they prefer non-verbal communications. With others I call or email or meet face to face. At one point a lot of my existing friends became busy with life (Got married/had kids etc) and I had to go out and make new friends so I started hiking and joined groups where we would go out for weekend trips or hikes. Ended up making new friends and actually met my wife in one of these trips. (Which was awesome!) I also have a lot of online friends that I have never met face to face (but I hope to when I can) and we email/message each other all the time.

Tech is awesome but nothing beats the human touch. Use Tech to enable/improve your connections/interactions but don’t make it a replacement for them.

– Suramya

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