Panasonic has said demand for backup batteries is rising quickly, and it is largely driven by the expansion of AI infrastructure that requires stable, continuous power. It has already allocated around 80% of its planned output to existing customers, leaving only a limited share for new buyers attempting to scale systems.
Burn all this useless crap down
Shut it down
All this for what? AI Big Becky diving videos?
This might not be the worst thing, if it results in better stationary batteries. Unfortunately they will probably just keep using lithium ion.
don’t most enterprise ups use lead acid?
We use rack mounted LiFePO for some of our network nodes that don’t have local facility provided UPS. But I do notice Lead Acid often as I visit various small datacenters. My guess would be that Lithium is still more niche
Yup. My old job had liebert (now vertiv) UPSs for our data center and those suckers were essentially just thousands of pounds of lead acid batteries stacked in a metal chassis
Yes yes they do. In fact most UPS’s from small desk ones all the way up all used lead acid not lithium ion. Lithium ion batteries are far more expensive.
Oh this one is going to be interesting, cause the other component shortages were not something thin clients needed.
You have got to be goddamned kidding me. Literally this weekend I said to myself “time to get a UPS”.
I mean it depends on what you’re used for a UPS is. The smaller ones can still be had on Amazon for under $100 and if you hurry you could still get that pricing. But by the sounds that those ones are going to be jumping way up in price for no reason because literally those are useless to anybody in the Enterprise level. Unless they’re being used at a desktop level which they do tend to purchase pallets worth of but this is more along the lines of Enterprise server level UPS’s.
Chech out what Bluetti offers. They’re LFP portable batteries but with a UPS features. You’ll want the elite versions though, all the others are noisy with the fan, which the elite series fixed. The tech is pretty new with these showing up in the home portable battery market, but they will last longer in both battery longevity and power during outage than the old SLA type ones. And if youre travelling / going somewhere and dont need the UPS active you can take it with you and be useful!
I actually have an ac180 for camping and using tools away from power. I kinda figured it was a bit of a waste as just a ups, and worried about killing the battery quickly.
Maybe get another dedicated one for the office where I need it…
Have you ever tried running a small coffee maker off of one of those? I’ve been trying to decide what power supply I’m replacing my battery system in my pop-up trailer with and I didn’t want to go with anything that was too large or takes up too much space. But this looks like for price it’s near perfect for my use case. The only thing I’m ever curious about is will it run my coffee maker in the morning. And what kind of charging are you using for it? Do you run solar off of it?
Hey just FYI, if you do decide to get something, the AC180 is last years model and is upgraded by the Elite 100v2 even though they still sell the AC180.
There’s a comparison on the elite 100 page about half way down, but if space is one of your concerns, it’s smaller, and 12lbs lighter for only 130wh less. It also chargers faster from solar than the AC180, but a little slower from wall power.
With 1800 watt output power (3600 surge) it can run anything a normal 120v outlet can run before tripping a circuit breaker, which will include any coffee machine, however if the coffee machine uses the whole 15amps while the heater is on, it’ll only run for around 45 minutes.
I have the 100 and really like it
https://www.bluettipower.ca/products/elite-100-v2-portable-power-station
Edit: oh and I wall charge mine. I have 200w of solar as backup for emergencies but I haven’t used it to power it beyond testing.
Solar is important for my use. I Boondock so I’m away from power for up to a week at a time. I would love to stop bringing my generator.
One day I’ll own something that can tow, and be able to do things like this.
How much solar capacity do you usually take with you?
The last 2 years only 100w, but I can increase it up this year.
Ya, I don’t think you really need that much as a UPS but if you ran the AC180 in UPS mode, it would turn the fan on every 15-20 minutes as the circuity in the battery is still powered by the battery, even though the power is fed to your gear from the wall power. That results in it slowly going to 99% and then charging, which is noisy on the non-elite models in a quiet room. These LFP models are good for like 3000 cycles though, so using it as UPS it’ll still last a decade or longer with 80% capacity left over.
There’s the Elite 30 which can be a nice little battery backup / be portable and isn’t too much more expensive then the comprable SLA types that don’t last long.
Thanks so much for the advice. I’ll look into it.
If there’s a shortage of AAAs, and my TV remote stops working, we’re gonna have a problem.
Get yourself some rechargeables. Yeah they don’t last as long per charge. But I’ve got a stockpile and I keep rotating them out so I’ve always got a fresh pair ready to go.
Honestly? I’m on the 3rd cycle with my AAAs (used for an MP3 and small electronics) and the 2nd for my AAs.
I’ve not noticed them lasting less, and I’ve already made back what disposables would cost.
Bonus: I charge them at work because why not.
I do this with underwear.
You recharge your underwear? Is it “smart”?
In a sense? I refill before each fresh pair.
I doubt that there’s actually a substantial impact on battery cell production. Might be on rack-mountable batteries containing those cells. But setting that aside:
Panasonic plans to expand lithium-ion cell
Non-rechargable AAA batteries are typically alkaline, and rechargeables are typically NiMH, not lithium-ion.
EDIT: Looking at a handful of rack-mount lithium-ion batteries on Amazon price history using camelcamelcamel, prices are either unchanged or very slightly up. Could be Panasonic looking to get into the news, but it’s not clear to me that there’s a shortage of even rack-mount lithium-ion batteries.
Hit up Costco while you still can
Bubble please burst
It will burst the same way the dotcom bubble bursted.
Just like the internet, AI will be here to stay.
0 productivity increase. 0. Once this bubble is over the clean up will set us back years and that is if we’re lucky.
That’s the part of all this that truly blows my mind…nobody wants this shit. You dont even need to be a technophobic boomer to fucking hate dealing with AI when youre trying to get an answer to a question that isnt something you can find on wikipedia, like for example, “How much will this particular software license cost me if Im installing it on two host VMs serving approximately 200-250 concurrent users?” The AI isnt gonna answer that right…I know it wont, because Ive spent at least 2-3 full fucking 10 hour days in aggregate playing this stupid fucking game as phone lines are getting closed left and right and I always end up running in circles until it will even permit me to get an actual human fucking being involved, if that is even a possibility, which 70% of the time, it just dumps you to an email and a wait for a response email that also didnt answer the fucking question.
And the thing is…its getting harder and harder to opt out. I cant even vote with my wallet because its either deal with the AI trash, or deal with some fly by night company that no one has ever heard of and goes radio silent for weeks when they cant fix a problem in 3 minutes.
This is gonna make me sound old but I saw this coming 25 years ago with self checkouts. Look at what a piece of shit the average self checkout is. Just last weekend the lines at my local grocery store were out the fuckin door because all the self checkouts somehow decided the cart itself was an item in a cart that wasnt scanned and thought everyone was stealing. Rather than get humans on the checklanes and shutting the self checkouts off, the store just had an extra person at the self checkout to enter their code after literally every single transaction to bypass it. Im talking rows of 20 self checkouts that had two people that had to code through every single transaction. Human cashiers wouldnt have had that problem, but human cashiers cost money, so better your service as a customer suck fat ass then bring in a couple teenagers extra to cover some weekend shifts on a register.
I see this at the doctor now with their self checkin machines that take fifteen minutes to get through what you could do with the person in three. I see this when trying to ship a fucking package and the machine runs out of labels and theres no human being for miles around to put more in so you can get on with your life.
This shit fucking sucks, and they no longer have any incentive to improve, because theyre all doing it, so everybody sucks, and we just get to deal with it.
Remember this when you see the lack of savings being passed on in lieu of all the payroll theyre saving. Every minute you fight with AI to answer a simple fucking question, some oligarch is screaming CHACHING!!!
Comparing the dotcom bubble to the AI bubble is like comparing a corn kernel to a corn cob at this point.
The US economy was more spread out and varied back then, and the bubble wasn’t over a third of the entire economy.
And you know, the internet actually had market value and was producing profit immediately at least. AI still has yet to turn any profits.
Except AI in its current form is actually mostly useless.
AI wouldn’t be so bad if the planet wasn’t being turned into computronium.
Another 2008 crisis and not being able to find a job or afford simple necessities, no thanks.
Stop selling stuff you haven’t made yet to people who have no money and haven’t paid. Wtf is wrong with businesses these days?
The point of capitalism isn’t “make a widget/sell the widget/to a customer” anymore, it’s “create market value/sell the value/shareholders are the entire point.” The widgets are just a prop in a way, the customers an abstraction. If it’s making money, if it’s growing above 3.5, we worship it. If it’s growing at thousands of percent, then it’s a god who cannot be stopped. Everything else just supports this - government, social programs, people’s life and death and joy in between - that’s all an abstraction. Shareholder value is the only thing that matters.
This is why we must restrain capitalism with regulation, but it’s too late, it’s metastasized into its final form now.
The point about capitalism has always been being able to live off of property without moving a finger and securing that position with all that you have. What you are seeing is are the dynamics of capitalist class society. The numbers game is itself nothing new, nor anything that is has especial depth.
We choose capitalism and we could choose not to do capitalism. So to capital, which comes from this social structure, you are like an abstraction, only because it exists in an less concrete way because it needs intangible property relations. To a fish you are trapped in air while you view fish as being trapped in water.
But the point of the economic critiques known from history is to show exactly this:
There is the numbers economy, the stock market, taxes and money. There is culture, there are political systems (liberalism, fascism) and political skirmishes. Then there is what actually exists in a very clear and tangible way. Schools, cars, machinery, fields of corn, people, their relations and so on.
One creates the other. The abstractions arising from the soil of the “real world” can not strike back and make the real world abstract. That is impossible. Capitalism and capital is not a demon that keeps you from undertaking modifications on the structures that birth it. It possesses no special or poetic qualities.
Why would you think there is anything wrong with them? They now get to scalp people with outrageous prices for the 20% they are selling. If the AI sloppanies pay, they made big sales. If the slop producers producers are unable to pay, they will sell the reserved stuff for normal or even slightly elevated prices. It’s win-win. Basically an excuse for industry wide price-fixing.
Supply and command, Ricky!
I’m tired boss…
That joke aside, does anyone else find swapping out UPS batteries bizarrely satisfying? Every time I heft one of those APC rack batteries and slot em in, I walk out of the server room with a smile on my face!
Fuck, maybe I need to answer the call of the void and work as a tradie XD
i used to go in there and fart
Based!?
So everything at this point?
They‘re going full tech feudalism. There will be a shortage of everything. Especially of electricity and clean water.
Yep, literally the whole habitable layer of our planet.
Anything it takes to set up a data center. I bet network cable is next.
Fiber optics jumped 4 times in price locally.
Glad I bought 305M of S/UTP Cat6a 8 months ago for our renovation
I went with fiber for mine, and I’m glad I bought it when I did because the prices are going up.
BUY BUY BUY
I wonder if there’s going to be a point in the future where we all look back at this massive over-investment and kick ourselves for making so much expensive electronics waste.
They learned nothing from the NFT/“Metaverse” hype cycle, but a century of hindsight might help. There’s always going to be that golden goose that can make you insanely rich based on vague bullshit a lot of people don’t fully understand.
Some entities have too much money to invest in stupid endeavors, money that they took from everyone else and they can lose without worrying too much. It’s a rotten society.
Well yeah but money now.
I for one are going to go shopping for used parts.
Hopefully soon - I’d love more homelab upgrades
Do we kick ourselves for dotcom bubble?
Apples-to-oranges comparison fallacy.
nope!
The just in time economy is running a little bit late.
Feels like 2007
