VintageCool

The article really really wants to put a positive spin on Richard III, but in Dictator's Handbook terms he clearly failed at building an effective coalition to rule England. The people whose opinions counted in 1485 mostly did not want Richard III to be king.

> That many allies of his brother, Edward IV, supported Henry Tudor speaks to Richard’s inability to command widespread loyalty. Richard’s rule failed because too few people supported him

The established figures who had supported his brother rebelled against Richard.

> Richard’s subjects and foreign observers were stunned by his brazen betrayal, his swift execution of Lord Hastings, and the disappearance of his young nephews, all of which undermined efforts to stabilise the kingdom in the two years that followed. Further resentment and anxiety festered when Richard misjudged regional politics and redistributed southern property among his northern affinity.

Richard was redistributing southern property to northerners because he couldn't find southerners that would support him.

On the plus side, Richard III ended the War of the Roses by convincing all the Yorkist supporters (who had supported his brother) that they had to cast their lot with the last Lancastrian candidate (Henry Tudor) in order to get rid of Richard.

Facebook/Instagram Reels is a TikTok clone to directly compete in that space.

YouTube Shorts also exists to compete with TikTok.

Or a large amount of regular saltwater.

Topaz Solar Plant is my pet peeve in solar-v-nuclear cost comparisons online, because it pops up all the time and it narrowly misses the biggest story in energy: the cost of solar PV dropped by 90% in ten years! Solar went from being the most expensive way to generate energy to being the cheapest.

Unfortunately, people looking for comparison tend to search for the biggest solar installation, and Topaz pops out on that list. However, because solar is so modular, new installations tend to be small and quick.

Example: The Black Bear solar project in Alabama came online in Feb 2023, just 15 months after it secured $100 million in financing in Dec 2021. The project provides 100 MW (AC) of power. That's $1m / 1 MW of solar generating capacity.

The CEO of the Alabama Municipal Electric Authority is quoted as saying that, had Black Bear solar come online in Jan 2022, they would have saved $10 million in fuel costs (since natural gas prices jumped after the start of Putin's war).

https://lightsourcebp.com/us/project/black-bear-solar/

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/12/20/130-mw-alabama-solar-...

https://www.greenvilleadvocate.com/2022/11/29/black-bear-sol...

My guess is that houses are an inflation-resistant asset. It's a good place to dump money if you have too much. And the downside is limited by political inertia: most voters own homes and would suffer if their house lost value, so the American political system will sacrifice much to prevent housing prices from going down too much.

> Then why is the US one of the few nuclear countries that hasn’t build in years?

They haven't opened a new nuclear power plant in France in 20 years. Canada hasn't opened a new reactor in 30 years. UK in 28 years.

If we were really serious about climate change, we'd build a ton of wind and solar and batteries, plus a ton of new transmission to get electricity from the windy and sunny places to our cities.

That's currently the fastest way to cut our greenhouse gas emissions.

Michaux's paper starts with the assumption that it would take about 4 weeks worth of batteries to survive the Finnish winter, and therefore every grid in the world will need 4 weeks worth of batteries.

Despite a writing a hundred page paper covering basic details of existing power generation technologies, he devotes only about a paragraph to establishing that assumption.

Additionally, there is a section dedicated to ocean shipping. Routes are currently chosen to minimize costs, traveling long distances on bunker fuel. Running those same routes on batteries would be prohibitively expensive. Instead of concluding that in the future we will do ocean shipping differently because the cost minimization will work out differently, Michaux simply adds that to the tab of batteries that we would need to decarbonize.

The point of the natural gas stove ban in new construction is to stop building additional natural gas infrastructure. Building new pipes to new housing will lock us in to decades of additional natural gas use.

I expect natural gas for heating will be the long pole of greenhouse gas emissions. Eventually we'll have to disassemble what we already have. For some areas, it may make sense to do that soon.

Boston, for example, has old and leaky natural gas pipes that have been found to be leaking tons of methane into the atmosphere and causing occasional explosions. The city will probably have to invest billions of dollars into repairing its natural gas distribution pipes in the next 10-20 years, which would remain in use for 50-60 years more.

Or, they could spend a bit more money, convert everyone to induction cooktops and heat pumps, and get rid of the natural gas altogether.

The 4-hour batteries are most profitable right now. They're used both for frequency regulation and price arbitrage: buying cheap power like midday solar to discharge at dusk, or cheap wind/nuclear/coal at night to discharge in the morning.

For days/weeks storage -- it's not a problem yet. We already have plenty of natural gas plants in the US. I'm perfectly happy, environmentally, if we have to run natural gas plants two weeks a year but it means that we get to 80 or 90% clean energy a decade or two faster than Plan B.

> Together, wind and solar provided 16.1% of US electrical generation in the first two months of 2023; by comparison, electrical generation by coal dropped by 32.7% and provided 16.0% of total US electrical generation.

The firming cost of renewables is paid running grid-scale batteries or by running a natural gas power plant during the hours in which renewables are unavailable, right?

The natural gas power plants don't need to be built, because that is the marginal electricity provider that exists already and is being replaced by renewables.

Meanwhile, grid-scale batteries are the fastest growing electricity provider on the grid because it turns out that they are cheaper to run than natural gas peakers.

That isn't quite fair. Most of these selections about what goes into a new house are not being made a la carte. The construction is performed according to the specifications of development companies. Individuals then go on to buy the homes which are available, at which point they are making choices based on the entire package.

The city's ban is largely aimed at changing the design specifications made by the developers. It has the benefit of preventing additional decades of lock-in and new development to infrastructure they'd like to remove anyway.

I agree that the Achilles Desjardins torture porn was disturbing, but I've always interpreted it as an argument against Utilitarianism, and not BSDM porn per se. It's a more vividly disturbing version of The Ones That Walk Away From Omelas.

Watts sets up Desjardins as a Utilitarian demon, an evil that we tolerate because his specific evils are less than the overall good he provides the world.

In the end it turns out that the overall good he provided the world was a deception, and the man was revealed to have been pure villain for the entirety of books 3 and 4.

But yeah, I agree with you that I'd prefer to have not read those scenes. I'll still recommend Starfish, but not its sequels.

From the data you cited, between 2020 and 2022, in terms of thousand megawatthours per year:

Natural gas increased 62,675 from 1,626,790 to 1,689,465.

Wind increased 96,874 from 337,938 to 434,812.

Utility-scale Solar increased 56,399 from 89,199 to 145,598

And the deployment of solar seems to be rapidly picking up speed.

The overwhelming majority of deaths from dam failures in living memory were the result of one disaster in China in 1975 which was suppressed by the communist government. It wasn't until 20 years later that Westerners started to learn about it.

Malicious no, suspicious yes. There likely were parts of the world a century ago without accurate records. It also appears that supercentenarians are concentrated in places that didn't keep accurate birth records around the time they were born.

There have been people who attempted to adopt the diets of the "blue zones" where many supercentenarians have lived, but maybe in our search for long life we should have been adopting regional poverty, low incomes, and dodgy record-keeping!

I suspect that every dance competition community has equivalent software.

The West Coast Swing community has:

* steprightsolutions.com

* danceConvention.net

and probably others that I'm less familiar with.

I like to listen to podcasts or audiobooks while I drive. Usually I do this through Bluetooth.

Occasionally I want to use Android Auto so that the maps will show up on the car's screen. I have to plug in my phone through USB to make this happen. The audiobook will now play over the USB connection.

When I disconnect from USB or when I turn off the car, it switches from my audibook to SiriusXM ads. At twice the volume. It's incredibly obnoxious.

Point of clarification: nuclear does not have low OPEX. Nuclear operators in the US (Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania) have been reporting that their 40 year old nuclear plants were no longer competitive with natural gas (before the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove up prices).

Nuclear has high CAPEX and high OPEX. Nuclear plants have lots of employees and maintenance on an irradiated nuclear reactor is expensive.

What they have is low fuel costs.

15 years ago it looked like solar thermal might be the way to go. But it turns out that, once people started manufacturing a lot of solar PV panels, they got really good at it. Solar PV costs dropped 90% in a decade.

At this point, in most cases, it would probably be foolish to build a non-PV solar power plant.

If you are running your webserver and your database on the same box, how are you big enough to have an infrastructure team?

The "Putin did it" hypothesis was that he did it to prevent internal replacement. Suppose that some Russian rival wanted to replace him. They could kill or imprison Putin, end the war in Ukraine, restart the gas pipelines, and have a lot of gas money from Europe to distribute to supporters.

Destroying the pipelines removed the potential reward for an internal rival to replace him.

Japan's plan has been to import hydrogen. Probably from Australia.

Nuclear is unpopular since Fukushima, and Japan doesn't have great renewable resources. The country is extremely land constrained -- and although the "renewables require too much land" argument is silly on the American Great Plains, it does hinder Japan.

Additionally, the solar irradiance is mediocre, and their offshore wind would have to be truly floating wind turbines (which are more expensive) because the continental shelf drops away so quickly.

The United States added more battery energy storage to the grid in 2021 than the United States had at the beginning of 2021. The situation here is one of rapid transition.

Japan as a whole bet heavily on hydrogen. The rest of the world is going to battery electric vehicles, and the Japanese auto manufacturers are way behind the curve.

Yes, a 100% solar grid would be very expensive. But a 90% renewable grid backed by 10% natural gas would be pretty cheap. And it's already rapidly under construction right now, and the natural gas infrastructure for it already exists. It would get us 90% of the carbon benefits, and buy time to figure out how to clean up the last 10% of the grid.

90% nuclear plus 10% hydro would be a fine end state. But we're at a standing start. The incremental change from "we're building 1 nuclear power plant which is years behind schedule and wildly over budget" to "we're simultaneously building 50 new nuclear reactors" is immense and I do not see how we get past it.

The EIA almost always projects boring linear growth for everything. Their data is a terrific resource for what is currently happening, what has happened recently, and what is already scheduled on the pipeline. I would not put much stock in their projections beyond their Short Term Energy Outlook. I would certainly not describe them as the most optimistic industry projections.

They project that the solar growth rate will drop after 2023 when the ITC would have expired, but it was extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. From there, they expect the growth curve of solar to slowly decay. It's basically all a linear projection and scarcely any more insightful than that.

They expect that electricity generation from coal will be flat (except for already-announced early coal plant retirements). They expect nuclear to be flat. They expect generation from natural gas to increase (unless renewables are cheap, in which case they expect it to be flat). They fail to anticipate the replacement of coal by natural gas or renewables and they fail to anticipate the replacement of natural gas by renewables.

Finally, as a point of comparison, take a look at their projections for EVs and hybrids. The EIA projects that EVs and hybrids will still only make up about 20% of the market for new cars in the US in 2050. (See page 9 of [1]).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/AEO2022_ChartLibrary_Tr...

Global production of lithium has doubled since 2015.

I think it's reasonable to expect energy storage to become cheaper purely by the mechanisms of capitalism. The market for energy storage scarcely existed 4 years ago -- there were a handful of pumped hydro storage plants and one compressed air energy storage plant and that was it. The US had 1.5 GW of battery capacity in 2020; we added 5.1 GW of capacity this year and currently scheduled projects will bring 30 GW of battery capacity online by 2025 (per the EIA).

It's clear from the current buildout and the current price of solar that there will be a large market for energy storage in the next 10-20 years. That means there is a large market opportunity to build grid energy storage and to increase production of the entire supply chain for grid energy storage. I would be surprised if it is not met.

I think you have to be very careful with the word "we" here.

Coal's market share in the US has been eroding for 15 years and will likely fall below nuclear soon. It has been replaced by natural gas and, more recently, renewables.

The reason that we "worldwide" have been building lots of coal plants is that China has been building lots of coal plants. This is despite China also building world-dominating quantities of nuclear, wind, and solar.

The reason China is adding so much coal appears to be that provincial officials get to book coal power production as economic growth internal to their province. By contrast, the electricity from renewables in Xinjiang shipped over HVDC transmission lines does not boost their province's economic growth numbers so they do not want to use it even if it would be cheaper.