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Where I am at least, people using less power because power because power need to profit more, is wild.

They literally had record profits the last few years, rather than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a global endeavor, not some local for profit business with complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.

Yes I'm angry, because I pay more in electric than most anywhere in the world. If I charge my care with LEVEL 2 using city provided charges, during the day, it's more expensive than gas.

Energy security is national security.

Cheap electricity means you can do things that made "no sense" with expensive electricity. (e.g. smelt aluminum)

Cheap electricity means you can underbid regions that have expensive electricity...

As Technology Connections said, "Panels that cover your electrical needs for the next 25+ years? In the Midwest, we call that a good deal!"

Most of those technologies also need uninterrupted power supplies. Something wind, solar and batteries for the next 50 years aren't.

Ember Energy: Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025

> Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.

What does this mean? It means we are most of the way there with solar and batteries alone, even if we need a bit of carbon based generation to bridge the gap while solar and battery deployments scale globally. Solar and batteries will only continue to get less expensive and better.

Our World In Data: Installed solar energy capacity - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

Solar PV go brrr.

Pumped hydro is one solution. You bank the excess wind/solar using gravitational potential energy and then draw on that whenever you need to.

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

Yes, we just need to build the mountains first.

Yeah, or water towers. No need to play god here.

Pumped hydro energy storage relies on the cheapness of water and existing geology. If you have to build the chambers instead of damming a river it's too expensive. Most of the good spots to have a reservoir are already used. If you have to manufacture the bulk media instead of just using water it's too expensive.

Pumped hydro doesn't need a river, "just"* rock which isn't water porous and some nearby body of water (lake, sea, whatever).

The economics works out even if you were lifting concrete blocks rather than water, hence why you get pictures like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_Vault_Test_Tower_2...

The argument against lifting concrete is that you can dig a hole in the ground an pump water in/out of it for more reliability and lower cost than having a crane lift and lower concrete, and it's easy to make it much bigger both horizontally and vertically, so why bother.

But it does appear to be economical even with that, and water is cheaper.

We make lots of holes in the ground on a regular basis, including for extracting fossil fuels. Here's two, note scale bar, though I have no idea what the rock around it is like regarding water losses: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.9063171,6.4418046,17655m/dat...

* it's never "just" with things on this scale

There are exactly zero economically viable pumped water storage systems where water towers are involved. If you do the math for the amount of a mass of water, you'll see why! It's not feasible.

Indeed, you can get a sense of the scale on the Dinorwig wikipedia page and the pages it links to.

It has a storage capacity of about 9.1GWh.

The upper reservoir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchlyn_Mawr) holds 9.2 million cubic meters of water.

So 1 million cubic meters of water provides ~1GWh.

We can see how that compares in terms of raw GPE (Gravitational Potential Energy):

1 million cubic meters of water = 1E6 * 1E3 kg = 1E9 kg

There's roughly a 500m vertical drop between the upper and lower takes at Dinorwig so:

1E9 kg * 500 m * 9.8 m/(s^2) = 4.9E12 J =~ 1.36GWh

As for water towers, if you look at something like the Roihuvuori tower in Helsinki (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_tower) which is one of the largest:

Height: 52m, Capacity: 12000 cubic meters

If we are generous and say that all of the water is stored at the maximum height then:

12000 * 1E3 kg * 52m * 9.8 m/(s^2) =~ 1.7MWh

You'd need over 5000 of them to match what Dinorwig can provide.

Have you heard of batteries?

> Something wind, solar and batteries for the next 50 years aren't.

False. If you'd stopped before the "and" you would have been correct, though.

Batteries are really cheap now, and supply of batteries is growing basically as fast as people can get the investments and permissions for the inputs and the factories.

I love Technology Connections, but he has no idea what discounting is in economics. Or at least he writes his videos as if he doesn't.

What discount rate are you using?

Solar has one of the lowest capital costs [1] so the discounting works in it's favor. And then the non-discountable operating costs also works in its favor since the fuel supply (light) is free.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

Yup. It's why even in fairly red states like my own (Idaho) solar, wind, and battery are going up everywhere. Even without significant subsidies the economics are really good for renewables.

They'd be even better if we didn't have extreme tariffs on China.

That's actually what's convinced me that renewables are a better choice than nuclear. I still like nuclear, but renewables are just so much easier and faster to deploy while being a lot cheaper. To make nuclear competitive requires regulatory changes along with a government that's simply willing to tell it's NIMBY citizens YIMBY.

Government literally has to get in the way of renewable deployments at this point to stop them.

Yes, the tariffs on Chinese PV and EV are really crazy.

Well, at least we don't believe in tariffs where I chose to live.

No, the problem is he speaks like he doesn't understand discounting at all. He treats a recurring revenue (or energy) as fundamentally different from a one time gain, as opposed to something you funge via discounting rates.

You are one level ahead: I'm more than happy to debate what discounting rates you should be using!

Australia I assume?

> They literally had record profits the last few years, rather than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a global endeavor, not some local for profit business with complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.

Sounds more like you guys should be lowering barriers to entry, not setting up a global non-profit cartel.

True. I suggested global because it allows for scale with copy/paste designs, where things like nuclear could actually become viable.

Where I am, we have a solidly aligned state government. There's no concept of consequences for anyone in power. They're paid by the local companies to pass laws to make competition legal. Some are investors. All corrupt. That's what you get with a solid political alignment.

Vote with your feet (and wallet), and support anything that makes people voting with their feet easier.

It's the McDonald's theory of policy: you don't vote on their burgers at the ballot box, you just go to Burger King or get a doner kebab, if you don't like it.

Did you try charging an e-bike with your contraption?

I don't know what you can take of this, maybe you can see it as advance pedaling, or to get a feel for energy conversion losses. Anyways, it is the kind of harmlessly stupid idea that I would want to try just because I could.

What a ridiculous idea, I love it.

Once I did a little bike training and looking at my power curve, I was incredibly impressed by how cheap energy is. 100W is an all day number, 200W less so, 300W is exactly 20 minutes when I do an FTP test. 400W is 4x Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar for an hour and he's a mutant. 1 horsepower is under a minute iirc, definitely under 2. 1kW is maybe 10 seconds. So I could keep my laptop and phone charged probably indefinitely as long as I have food, but not a ton more than that.

https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran...

Amazing stuff, have you written up a blog post? I could see a video being a fun format for this as well. Might help people develop the intuition for watts/power consumption in a different way

Kind of, it's in bits and pieces here:

https://hackaday.io/project/191731-practical-power-cycling

and is also a few years out of date.

I did do a video back then going against the infamous "bicycle toaster challenge" video (in which I determined it was probably less real than they made it out to be). I'm nowhere as fit as those guys, so in my attempt I was only able to turn a bagel into a dry crouton over the course of an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcNXp86BJ-o

Any sense what the efficiency ratio was for your setup?

I'm as curious as you to be honest - putting a strain gauge on the pedals for measuring mechanical power has been on my list for quite a while. My own (probably inaccurate) measurements right after the generator says I can get 60-70Wh in an hour, but I can get to 100Wh if I try harder. I have reason to believe my setup underestimates power because my ammeter clamps at 5A and I know I can peak over that on the down stroke of the pedal.

I've seen numbers like 250W mechanical power for an average trained cyclist, so either my setup is rather inefficient, my measurements are off, or I'm going to find out that I'm nowhere near as strong as a real cyclist.

On the other hand, the stationary bike I got originally had a rubber belt, which it would chew excessively and I eventually swapped it for a chain because it kept slipping in spite of tensioning it more, suggesting I'm hitting the thing harder than it was originally designed for (how that translates into power I'm not sure).

Oh don’t sell yourself short. It can certainly be both! (:

Thanks for sharing the details.

All in good fun of course, it has to be healthier than watching Youtube just sitting around normally.

> I've seen numbers like 250W mechanical power for an average trained cyclist, so either my setup is rather inefficient, my measurements are off, or I'm going to find out that I'm nowhere near as strong as a real cyclist.

Cyclists' power output is sometimes reported as a 'power curve' - a chart with power on the vertical axis, and duration-of-that-power on the horizontal axis.

For example, a cyclist might be be able to produce 500W for 15 seconds; 350W for 1 minute; 270W for 10 minutes; 200W for 1 hour; and 150W for 5 hours.