Solar Factories and HVDC Lines - Pollent Power Pushing - The Amp Hour

Chris says that there is still lots of time to enter The Hackaday Prize. Don't Panic.
Dave recently did a judge interview.
Need to connect your project? Chris got his Electric Imp working in about 10 minutes using their getting started guide.
Dave recently had to declare email bankruptcy. Chris was listening to a podcast about someone who had to do the same with nearly 10,000 unread emails.
Sometimes we get used to the reminders we set for ourselves. Chris either needs a speaker in his house that announces meetings or a shock collar that punishes for not getting something done.
Dave recently made a video debunking the solar roadways we discussed a few weeks back.
Elon Musk (via SolarCity) recently bought a solar manufacturing company. They will be opening a new plant in Western New York near Chris's hometown.
They will also use the abundant power from Niagara Falls to help power the plant. Chris took pictures with a Nikola Tesla statue up there when he was younger.
Germany now gets 50% of its power from renewable sources.
Martin Lorton is installing solar panels on his house in Cleveland. Even with cloudy cities like Cleveland (and some in Germany), they can still output significant power.
Dave says there are now 1 million homes with solar in Australia.
Chris reveals that he used to design instrumentation at ABB.
The exciting stuff coming from ABB in the past few years have been around HVDC, specifically with an eye towards long distance transmission of massive amounts of power (think gigawatts).
Another exciting piece is the DC Breaker that can switch the large amounts of power in less than 20 ms.
They also look amazing, the standoffs required for 800kV is significant.
The Diagrammer by Mergenthaler was a badass piece of industrial equipment for making schematics. Think there are any still around?
Rhode & Schwarz stopped branding products in the Hameg product line as Hameg (with the associated logo).
Someone made a compilation video of Dave saying America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D8bdemvjIk
Our buddy Mike Ossmann has been working on the NSA playset, a replication of the hardware shown in the catalog of gadgets to order. He will be showing it off DefCon.
Chris will also be traveling to Detroit in two weekends to hang out with the Hackaday guys and film the Red Bull Create competition.
Dave has been duking it out in the harsh Aussie winter by competing in the Tough Bloke competition.

Image is courtesy of ABB

Solar Factories and HVDC Lines - Pollent Power Pushing

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