Aside from all the turbulence of trying to get a project off the ground, the deciding factor was that the electrical transport infrastructure (aka wires) couldn't support the desired load of 4.5MW-10MW and was slashed to 3MW, making the project inviable?

To me, the "obvious" solution is to create solar plants closer to their use and lay down new infrastructure. From my understanding, one of the major reasons to have power plants so far away from urban centers is because they were dirty or location locked (waterfalls, etc.). With solar, this need essentially goes away with the ability now to put solar plants essentially in the middle, or directly adjacent, to urban centers.

Could someone enlighten me as to why this is not feasible or if someone is already discussing this idea?

> That doesn’t make sense to me. If larger objects move slower, don’t they move faster relative to the (accelerating) reference frame of the container?

Yes? But so what? The relevant interaction is between the peanuts and the Brazil it's.

> Also, conventional wisdom has it that shaking (temporarily) creates empty spaces, and smaller objects ‘need’ smaller such spaces to fall down, and thus are more likely to fall down into such a space.

Right, but preferentially under the larger Brazil nuts.

Thanks for the link, very interesting. I'll have to check out the paper but just watching the video it seems all these counter intuitive effects can be described from the oscillations being related to the size of the chamber.

For example if I were to roll the chamber at a very low frequency, I would expect the particles to clump on one side, then the other and so on. This is not really so surprising and the frequency will depend on the chamber dimensions.

That's the allure, that gravity is a derived effect from statistical mechanics. Thus the name 'entropic attraction'.

Entropic gravity is like the "brazil nut effect" [0] [1]. The idea is that if you shake a glass full of different sized nuts, the large ones will rise to the top.

From what I understand, this is because larger objects have more mass, moving slower when shaked, so as the larger (brazil nuts) don't move as much relative to the smaller ones (peanuts), and because of gravity, there's a cavity left under the brazil nut which gets filled in with peanuts.

For entropic gravity, the idea is that there's a base density of something (particles? sub-atomic particles?) hitting objects in random ways from all directions. When two large massive objects get near each other, their middle region will have lower density thus being attracted to each other from particles hit with less frequency from the lower density region. They sort of cast a "shadow".

I'm no physicist but last time I looked into it there were assumptions about the density of whatever particle was "hitting" larger massive objects and that density was hard to justify. Would love to hear about someone more knowledgeable than myself that can correct or enlighten me.

As an aside, the brazil nut effect is a very real effect. To get the raisins, you shake the raisin bran. To get gifts left from your cat, you shake the kitty litter. It works surprisingly well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_convection

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Incnv2CfGGM