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Power Density Model using C (Programming Language)

Low-level programming. Executables use low energy intensity. Algorithms can be optimized for time and space complexity.

Posted by Diego Ibanez October, 26, 2022 5 likes

a Power Density Model

based on Vaclav Smil's works

It is essential that we understand what is too much and what is too little for humans, as per Kate Raworth's proposition.
Here I suggest to build a model based on Vaclav Smil's works on power densities. Having for example in supermarkets double or triple the amount of calories necessary for daily consumption is a waste.
Other aspects are also complicated: we should for example work on converting the use of fossil fuels to something more beneficial to humans (and use alternative sources of energy). But doing so without thinking of consequences means that potentially, dirtier resources (e.g. coal) risk being more used because they're cheaper.
This is why I propose to build a big graph with contstraints that will help us make the right policy choices. We may then make the whole financially attractive as a fund that rewards not investors but goes into a foundation for our children.

Diego Ibanez

Contents

Attachments

Natural-Gas-in-the-New-Energy-World.pdf

Members using this tool

Roberto Cadau

Milan, IT

Shikher Gupta

India

Michael Daley

London

Ole Kristian Ouff

Sandnes, Norway

Diego Ibanez

Geneva, Switzerland

Ms Raworth's doughnut economics is a brilliant idea as we are reaching the boundaries of our planet.

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2 comments

Tristan Strange almost 2 years ago

Hmmmm. This question of lanaguage is an interesting one...

I'd be very keen to discuss this somewhere. Can you recommend anywhere to discuss this?

A memory leak has potential to burn way more carbon than you intended...

And development time is often drastically increased by using low level languages - potentially reducing the amount of time a developer might spend choosing the right data structures/model of computation/optimised libraries for a problem...

Yes, "Algorithms can be optimized for time and space complexity" more in langauges like C (same stands even more so for assembler if you're cleverer than the compiler!)... but it often takes more time and could result in buggier software.

People claim interpreted languages are slow - and they are slower than C... but if I've got a stack of matricies to multiply together and I'm not doing it 100s of times a second I wonder if I could get it done with less compute time overall using Python/MATLAB than I would googling everything I'd have to to handle matrices efficiently & safely in C!

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Michael Daley about 2 years ago

Sounds very interesting. Where is the actual code or model?

1 0

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