chelical

People keep touting the low cost of renewables plus storage, but this is incredibly misleading when most regions (Germany, Denmark, California, etc.) that have high renewable adoption have some of the most expensive electricity in the world.

Storage (especially at the current rate of growth) is nowhere close to meeting our capacity needs for a 100% renewable grid. We can't store enough energy for a single day of consumption. Keep in mind we would need to store enough energy to handle long periods of low production. We're an order of magnitude away from that. On top of that, the vast majority of global energy storage is not actually provided by batteries, but by pumped-storage hydro (expanding this capacity would run into environmental issues and physical limitations; we don't have enough water in convenient locations).

Battery tech seems way off from providing us the needed capacity. Even Tesla is bottlenecked by battery production. We'd need to see Moore's Law level growth to have enough storage capacity to mitigate climate change, but we're only seeing 30% to 40% growth, which is just not enough given that it's currently less than a fraction of a percent of our total energy storage needs for 100% renewable power.

People are also seriously overestimating the time table needed to build a nuclear power plant. India, China, and Russia have been able to build plants in a few years vs 10 years in the West. If we're not pushing nuclear now, we'll be burning coal and natural gas for the next century.

There is a massive difference in interpreting law vs code. Code can be patched immediately. New laws or changes to an existing law can take months, even years or decades to pass.

To be fair, solar mix places more stress on the electrical grid and likely requires more expertise to maintain in countries struggling with brain drain. That said it's still preferable to building more coal plants.

Germany is hovering around 41% renewable electricity, but its primary energy supply is still 78% fossil fuels.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/germanys-energie...

Fair point. I hadn't considered the time to install all the batteries on a massive scale on top of the time to reduce the production cost.

To be fair, nuclear power plants can also take a decade or more to build.

That situation will need to be handled by the law. Let's say stores are required to accept cash. Are they allowed to charge more for someone who pays in cash? Will they be required to provide change? If they run out of change, would they be subject to a fine?

If stores wanted to weasel around this law, they could keep their supply of coins and dollar bills low so customers are forced to either leave or pay without getting change back.

I worked on an application that converts HTML to PDF and font rendering on Windows was incredibly frustrating. The kerning made text unreadable at smaller fonts. It's difficult for me to believe someone would actually prefer the way Windows does font rendering.

China has actively promoted and condoned IP theft as a way of catching up to the US. I'm surprised you're unaware of the widespread coordinated Chinese industrial espionage, especially by Chinese students studying abroad in America. The IP laws and protections in China exist primarily so they can claim they're following the rules.