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Flow Traders | FPGA Engineer | Amsterdam | Full-time, On-site | https://www.flowtraders.com/careers

Flow Traders is technology company operating in the financial ecosystem, using our proprietary technology platform to trade thousands of financial products. We are looking for a senior FPGA engineer to expand our team developing ultra low latency trading solutions. As a small team we own the whole stack and encourage our developers to be involved in the design, development, testing, benchmarking and deployment of projects, as well as the improvement of in-house development tools. Our stack is based on C++, Python, SystemVerilog and Chisel/Scala. Experience in networking protocols and open-source tooling (cocotb, verilator, Chisel) is a big plus.

If you are interested by the challenge and fit the profile reach out to us at fpgadev@flowtraders.com

The history of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan is a great place to start.

I will give you the example of my country, Portugal. We have very rainy winters and the reservoirs usually get full. At some points the entire production of the country is provided by hydraulic power (minus the base coal plants that can't be stopped). With rain usually comes a lot of wind. The eolic energy is sent to the Spanish grid for free, since the energy needs are meet by the hydraulic energy alone. In summer, we have very dry weather and the reservoirs are used just for top the demand of peak hours. The wind is irregular and more prevalent at night. Now we are retrofitting some dams to allow pumping, so the excess wind power at night is used to pump water back into the dam. This process unfortunately only has 60 % efficiency. My main point is, for the price of all those eolic towers, pumping dams and gas power plants that backup the renewables, we could build a more reliable nuclear fission power plant at a lower price.

There are some experimental IV generation Fission Reactors, which burn the entirety of the nuclear fuel leaving just lighter radioactive elements with shorter half-life. Regarding safety, the Molten-salt Reactor also of IV generation, allows for non catastrophic failures since if the reaction goes out of control, the salt solidifies and stops the reaction instead of exploding by the increased pressure. The downside is that reactor becomes a radioactive rock.

This article doesn't mention some serious problems that affect power grids reliant on renewable energies:

1 - The grids becomes vulnerable to the weather. There's no solar energy at night and it's greatly reduced in cloudy days. Wind power is unpredictable and closely matches the output of hydraulic power, so that the two sources can't complement each other. You can check Brazil in recent history to check the effects of droughts in the power grid. In the end there is a need of conventional power plants always ready to backup the grid when the renewable energy is not available.

2 - The majority of losses of the power distribution network are on the last mile, when the voltage is lower and the current is higher. If every house and electric car become consumers and providers to the grid, most power movements occur in the low voltage networks. There's also the issue of batteries storing energy for later consumption. Lithium batteries have a 80%-90% efficiency storing energy.

3 - Since we are talking of the environment, rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels.

Replacing the majority of energy production by renewable energies will result in an net efficiency loss. I would rather support a balanced production with nuclear (fusion?) power plants providing the fixed needs of the grid and renewable energies making up the rest.

You have CλaSH [0] based in Haskell developed at University of Twente that has the same goal.

[0] http://www.clash-lang.org/