Pumped hydro has been built to work with Nuclear in the past precisely because the flat output of nuclear doesn't actually fit the shape of demand.
Of course these days, you can feed the pumped hydro or batteries with much cheaper renewables.
31,051 karma · joined March 23, 2009
Of course these days, you can feed the pumped hydro or batteries with much cheaper renewables.
New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.
It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.
Things will not stay the same anymore than they could when people found oil.
And that EU scheme already covers aviation, though it's phased in with exemptions etc. so doesn't cover everything.
*Technically an emission trading scheme but these are basically equivalent to carbon taxes in effect.
The floating offshore stuff that one of these projects was doing was technically and engineeringly interesting, sad to see that one go in particular. I think there might be one other floating project in that area but clearly dark clouds over its future given the politics.
Even older supercharger sites in crumbling post-collapse USA are 1MW (4x 250KW stalls).
I think Tesla has an off grid(!) supercharger site in California with 168x 500kW peak v4 chargers.
It seems pretty doable to just spread the chargers around to meet the same throughput without causing any hot spots on the grid. The cars already have internet connected navigation systems that can react to how busy a site is and direct you to the next one.
It's basic game theory, you all commit to ramping up delivery of EVs at the same time because one of you could benefit in the short term if you defect, so without the law everyone does so and everyone loses.
e.g. a Hyundai Ioniq 5 might charge at above 200kW up to around 45% peaking around 260kW on a 300kW charger then taper down to about 50kW at 80% full.
But that's a relatively good car for charging, many others won't push the older, lower spec chargers that are only advertising 100-150kW to their max (which might actually be from a low of 90 to a high of 175 on the charger side).
Some chargers display whether the car or the charger is limiting the rate as people often inaccurately blame the charger.
This new BYD car, on a standard high speed charger is likely to flatline the existing 350kW chargers up to near 80% in a similar way to how the Ioniq does that on older 150kW chargers.
The same site has an overview post:
https://electrek.co/2026/04/26/beijing-auto-show-2026-insane...
> In a single hall at the show, there were more EV models on display than there are available ones in the entire United States. There are 17 halls at this show. Seventeen. And they all have more EVs than the US market.
> The show features 1,451 vehicles, including 181 world premieres and 71 concept cars, sprawling across a record-breaking 380,000 square meters of exhibition space at two venues. It’s now the largest auto show in the world — and it’s not even close.
China adding coal and solar + wind in equal amounts over the last decade. About twice as much solar and wind vs coal over the last 5 as it accelerates, you can scrub through the years and get a little animation of what is growing more over time, though lumpy deployments like nuclear can skew things on short timescales.
Nuclear not really standing out from the background noise for China.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
Since 2020:
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
France, the exemplar of nuclear grids, strangely has added renewables and reduced nuclear:
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
US, deploying about as much solar and wind as gas and removing as much coal
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
EU replacing coal and a little bit of nuclear with solar and wind:
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
I chose 2015 as a rough date for "when solar and wind became the cheapest source available" as that affects the kind of countries that roll it out. Wind probably hit that slightly before solar but at the same time people already predicted solar to get cheaper so it had pre-momentum.
But you can go back further to 2005 and see for example that the US was already swapping coal for gas.
There's a very clear signal in all that noise if people care to look for it.
There was an expected bump anyway due to the tax change but it seems that can't be the whole story. I'd guess we'll find out with the next months numbers which will have the downward side of any tax cliff effect.
https://www.desmog.com/mark-p-mills/
> Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a Strategic Partner at Cottonwood Venture Partners, an investment firm focused on technological advancements in oil and gas production
That's good progress but it does raise some new cost barriers to get over for each new thing we electrify.
EVs are over this hump, heat pumps replacing boilers are just about there. Some industrial uses are getting there.
Notably, in electricity renewables went through being cheaper than new build and reduced further in cost to being cheaper than running existing plants.
We're not quite at that stage for many electrification use cases, though for growing nations without lots of existing assets that's not as relevant.
The world did add 3GW of nuclear generation in 2025 but it also closed 3GW.
If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value.
The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes.
That's all great, until it isn't.
Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.
In other nations you can illegally sell arms to Iran in order to illegally evade congress's attempts to stop you supplying money to terrorists, illegally shred evidence and lie to congress under oath about it all and get a job as a pundit on Fox News.
The best selling car of 2026 is a Chinese non-EV.
So I think the cheap Chinese cars will can el out of the equation.
The local brands being forced to move down market to sell smaller/cheaper EVs as the sales requirements mean they can no longer hot required levels of EV sales by targeting the high end of the market is a bigger influence I think.
And I'm guessing they blame the US, both for starting this and (possibly more critically) for not being able to finish it, which drives them into the economic and political arms of anyone supplying solar, wind turbines, nuclear, grid batteries and EVs so they can secure their energy supply in future.
But, I think short term "we're hurting them even more" is a winning political tactic in the broken politics of the US that helps blind them to the long term repercussions.
> Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering.[18][19][20] The witness tampering charge arose from Kushner's retaliation against William Schulder, his sister Esther's husband, who was cooperating with federal investigators against Kushner.[21] Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranging to record a sexual encounter between the two and send the tape to his sister.
I think, though the article doesn't say this and only vaguely circles the point, it is likely that Spain gets concentrated bursts of solar energy that collapse the marginal price dramatically, while Germany has a more spread out renewable production and so is nearly always burning a little bit of gas.
The very similar amounts of gas burned as a percentage of the total therefore affect marginal price differently.
> An executive with a big Chinese tech firm says that, at their core, the robots are finicky devices which are liable to overheat and wear down. China’s infamous “996” working culture—9am to 9pm, six days a week—might overwhelm them.
Was the train of thought here "Oh No! Their tech executives sound sane, informed and reasonable, add a weird dig to undermine them immediately afterwards"?
Citing this guy:
> Steven Sailer is an American far-right writer and blogger.[1][2] He is a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy.[3][4][5] Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer
On this site:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unz_Review
> The Unz Review is an American website and blog founded and edited by Ron Unz, an American far-right activist and Holocaust denier. It is known for its publication of far-right, conspiracy theory, white nationalist, and antisemitic writings.[1]