I'm really curious how one acquires the knowledge and develops the skills needed to write so eloquently about a deeply complicated topic. What does patio11 read, who are the people he interacts with, what helped him nurture his exploratory traits, how does he structure new knowledge. It's all a fascinating mystery to me.
With regards to being able to learn about things, historically I've been weighted more towards "I read more on the Internet than almost anyone thinks is reasonable", but my job and market position have brought me into contact with people who are domain experts at various things, and when I'm planning to write about e.g. power generation I share initial thoughts with someone quite professionally familiar with that topic in Japan and e.g. they point me in the direction of virtual power plants as another subject to read about / include.
From my point of view on things, my worry is erring in the direction of too explainer-y and too "smart generalist who overrates his understanding of things that he's got ~hours of time invested in." I aspire to routinely delight people who are legitimate experts adjacent to the areas I'm covering and help non-expert professionals quickly get the right set of mental models to inform their own work.
> ...Europe generally (being fundamentally unserious about power policy)...
What makes this article unusual is it is a serious attempt at grappling with a political topic - asking what the underlying pressures and technical requirements might be. That makes it read very differently to a lot of 'debates' where neither side is treating the topic seriously (whether that is not painting the full picture, repeating talking points, direct lies and people stopping to talk about lies, motivated or sloppy reasoning, illogical arguments, a refusal to engage with huge differences in order of magnitude, etc).
If you write a lot of short-form comments (Twitter, HN, corporate media or reddit for example - anything that promotes slogans or soundbites) you probably won't learn to write like this in a million years, because they aren't environments that promote seriously dealing with topics. HN can just about manage to talk seriously on the subject programming/software, but it often has a weird disjointed style where the thought is spread across multiple comments with different authors.