tfourb

Remote places don’t have a lack of jobs because of a lack of energy (many of them have a lot of it), but because they are remote. Exploration of a new resource might change how remote they are (Dubai is less remote today than before oil was discovered), but only if the resource is sobering with developing linkages for. Not sure why it would be worth tapping underwater volcanoes in a currently remote place when there are plenty of geothermal sources in less remote places available.

Meanwhile, New York exports its trash to the mid west and microplastics are found on the top of Mount Everest.

I live in Germany and my 12 kwp solar produces more energy than I need throughout the year for a house and a family of four including charging my car. Even if it would produce only 6 months a year, it world be a decent Investment and I get more like 9 months worth barely any grid supply out of it. The only reason we don’t go full offgrid is that the wood stove for heating in winter would be much more expensive to build and run than buying energy from the grid. What the hell are you talking about?

By the way: the number of power cuts I have experienced in the past 10 years is 1, because some idiot rammed a powerpole somewhere. The number of times I read about a power cut in the USA somewhere is more or less daily.

Managers bet their companies on more stupid stuff all the time. Elon Musk just bet SpaceX and Twitter on datacenters in space …

In the political reality of Germany there is literally 0 chance that these tax cuts won’t be extended. Low investment by BASF has many reasons, but their inability to get politicians to extend that tax cut isn’t one of them.

It's most likely due to a rebate or cash back when changing providers. You can save a lot of money by switching providers every 12 months and taking cash back into account. If you have dispatchable loads (i.e. flexible charging of an electric vehicle) and a suitable electricity meter, you can also save a lot of money be choosing a dynamic tariff that tracks market prices (plus taxes etc).

Not exactly the same. Buildout of the grid in Germany lacks behind buildout of renewable capacity. Thus, when we have strong winds or a lot of sun, a lot of renewable production actually gets blocked at the source and/or the price of electricity goes to 0 or even negative (though you still pay taxes, so for the conumser, usage isn't free even with dynamic tariffs).

In these scenarios, using more (renewable) electricity actually has no net effect at all, as it is purely from additional production, which is only available because you use it. I live in a region in Germany with a lot of wind and solar and I regularly see my PV plant be capped by the local energy company and the wind turbines around my village standing still despite a stiff breeze. Every kwh I use from my own PV in this case is free energy in the most expansive meaning of the word.

Same effect for green (planted) roofs. They can increase pv production above them by around 5% annually our installer told us.

1.8 MWh, highest production since we built our 12 kWp system five years ago.

Hungary just instituted quite extreme power savings policies (including stopping all industrial train traffic during the day), because it can't cool its nuclear power plant due to a lack of water in the Danube and 40% of its electricity production went bye bye. Same situation in Romania and France had similar problems a few years ago and will likely have them again this year.

"Green" supporters prefer renewable energy, because it allows you to build a resilient and distributed network of production, distribution and storage that can't be easily disrupted by any one shock event at the fraction of the cost of nuclear (if you count subsidies and government financed research, not even considering the socialization of insurance against accidents).

The tax reduction will almost certainly be extended and not be allowed to sunset. Industry electricity costs are more or less in line with other highly developed countries around the world and will remain so. Also, many larger industrial companies do not source their electricity from the common grid, but have dedicated power plants and increasingly their own investments in renewable energy production.

Civilized countries regulate the rates that lawyers can charge for standard work. Also lawyers get only reimbursed for reasonable costs by the loser. Still expensive, but not absurdly so.

My guess world be that the TSA had exactly nothing to do with any decline in hijackings. That is most likely due to new security protocols around cockpit access, as hijackings haven’t stopped but are committed mostly by pilots now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

> In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:

The website does not open for me. Are the quoted prices consumer prices including tax or wholesale prices before tax?

If it’s the latter, 8 cents is not that cheap and comparable to the average price per kWh (all sources) in Germany. In most cases in most places, the lion’s share of electricity costs is tax and infrastructure refinancing, not actual production. Levellized cost of PV+storage is well below new nuclear virtually in every deployment scenario.

> For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:

Because NG is one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity, if you are not producing NG yourself locally AND don’t have to pay for environmental costs.

> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?

Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).

And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.

> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?

I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?

We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.

> The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days.

Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.

> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.

You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.

>> Power transmission is a thing. > It is not a thing you can trust.

You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?

For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.

> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.

Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?

> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death.

The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.

Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.

That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.

"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.

> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.

2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.

Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.

Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.

fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.

Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.

We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.

Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.

China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".

There is an official eu organic label. It’s not compulsory of course, but it’s the baseline for organic food production in and for Europe. Other (private) labels have stricter rules and are usually certified in addition to the EU label.

There are > 800.000 yearly deaths due to hep b.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_B

Yes, there is an effective vaccine but not everyone has access to it for tons of reasons.

thanks!

Obviously there is no single cause for any social dynamic (hence my "i.e.") but there is wide scientific consensus that poverty (especially when combined with inequality) contributes greatly to crime, bot directly (people steal if it is the only way to get something to eat) and indirectly (poor people are much more likely to live in the social conditions that correlate with incidence of crime).

How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty) instead of suppressing the symptoms by pushing crime out of politically powerful areas into politically marginalized areas?

I'm not a fan of vandalism and luckily I'm living in a country where I have the law on my side when demanding that public space is not surveilled indiscriminately, but I totally understand the urge to simply take a stick to a camera that records my every movement.

At least in Germany, you'd have to opt in to your name and address being included in the phone book. So no, it's not remotely close to getting your personal details leaked publicly.

The manufacturing of all modern battery chemistries is dominated by Chinese companies because the Chinese government has strategically invested in production capacity and expertise for more than two decades.

But Chinese companies are running and building production facilities around the world. Leaving the production in Chinese hands is a political choice, not an inevitability.

Also, you can't take batteries away once you have delivered them to the customer. I have a 14kwh battery in my basement. It's built by BYD, a Chinese company. But once installed, I can pull the network cable and air gap it from the internet. Communication with my roof-mounted-solar and grid-tied electrical supply works without external network access, if I deem that an unacceptable risk. I could also do the work required to filter all network request from the battery management system at the router to make sure it can only contact servers from a whitelist, if I want to have access to diagnostics while I'm not at home.

These are all known, manageable risks that are completely within the capability of sovereign states to take care of. But there is literally no government (apparently) that can keep Trump and Netanyahu from fucking over the global fossil energy supply on a whim.

> Solar plus batteries can provide synthetic inertia if the incentives/regulations are correctly designed.

Yes, but why build nuclear at all, if you are already building PV + batteries? Nuclear is much more expensive than that combination. And if you add nuclear capacity on a level that actually matters (i.e. 30%+ of peak load), you run into real integration problems.

As I've written elsewhere, a toke nuclear program can make sense if you want to keep the industrial base, institutional knowledge and expertise around, i.e. to guarantee independent access to nuclear weapons. But it is ludicrous to make nuclear a cornerstone of your energy policy. Not even China is expanding its share of nuclear in total energy generation. They keep it around as a strategic asset, but a subsidized one.

For countries like Denmark and Spain I'd be pulling my hair out if my government would start throwing money into the money pit that is nuclear power (and it is inevitably is government money, because no nuclear power plant has ever been built without government subsidies and/or price guarantees).

> Nuclear can load follow, within limitations

Yes, but it makes zero economic sense to do so. Nuclear is multiple times more expensive per kwh than PV + batteries, even if you run it at max capacity continuously. If you require nuclear to load follow on a regular basis, not a single reactor will ever be built again.

There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium and drastically reduce the usage of other suplly-contrained inputs. Especially for stationary storage (where energy density and weight are not much of a concern) there is a wide array of technologies already available and in development.

And as you yourself say: once a battery has been built, it simply exists. There is a very gradual deterioration, but nothing even close to the "just in time" dependency that we are experiencing in this very moment when it comes to fossil fuels.

For a strategic independence point of view, being reliant on a global value chain to replace existing infrastructure every 15 years beats being reliant on a global value chain to replace your tank of gas every day by miles. Don't let perfect become the enemy of good!

First of all there is no alternative that makes sense. Climate change is real and its consequences are more expensive and catastrophic than any trade-offs we’ll have to make for a 100% renewable grid.

The good news is that going 100% renewable is probably less onerous than most people expect. If we get our act together politically, we can easily build the grids, generation, storage and intelligent loads required. With the exception of a few industrial processes, the technology is already existing and economically viable, but it also gets better and cheaper every year.

I never get why people are so opposed to renewables. In the past (and apparently present), we have spent multiples of what we’d need for 100% renewables on stupid wars. Now we could transform our economy with dramatic positive consequences even if we ignore climate change completely (think air quality and corresponding public health concerns, as well as political risks associated with fossil fuels).

It will be one of the breakthrough developments of human civilization and unlock tremendous potential, but people are concerned with the aesthetics of windmills and bickering about minor subsidies, while there is literally an economic crisis going on because some ships with liquified dinosaurs on boats can’t get to their destination on time …

> The problem spain needs to overcome is the morning and evening peaks. From memory it's something like 1-2 gigawatts (but it could be more.)

The EU has collectively added 27 Gwh of battery capacity in 2025 alone. If Spain only needs anything close to 2 GW of load for around 2 hours in the morning and evening each, this seems to be inherently achievable.

> you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.

Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.

At the moment, this would theoretically work, because you have gas peaker plants that can adjust much faster and pick up the slack while nuclear plants come up (or down) to speed.

But countries like Spain and Denmark want to have a 100% renewable grid within two decades (much shorter than the typical lifetime of a nuclear reactor). So gas peaker plants are increasingly not an option.

The reality of the grid at that point will be a lot of wind and PV capacity (because it is dirt cheap). Nuclear is not compatible with those on its own, because a cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop power much quicker than nuclear will be able to follow.

Of course you can build a ton of batteries to act as a buffer. And guess what, that's exactly what we are doing right now. But at that point, why do we need nuclear again? Simply building batteries is already much cheaper than building a substantial nuclear generation capacity and while batteries will continue to become cheaper while nuclear won't.

Also, if you require new nuclear plants to load follow on a regular basis, it completely destroys the already bad economics of the technology. You need to run those at capacity continuously to make even remotely sense.