coryrc

That's fine, but you need to include the cost of having barely-used gas peaker plants when calculating the cost of "renewables+storage". Laymen keep using arbitrary "marginal cost of solar with sun shining" to say "solar is cheaper than everything!". If it's true that capex of 80% gas peaker (and LNG storage and employees on standby and so on) + solar + wind + batteries is cheaper, then people should make that argument and provide the data.

Hanford was nuclear weapons, not nuclear power.

Each of those existing plants were competitive against coal at the time without having the negative externalities of widespread radiation exposure (uranium in coal just released to the atmosphere); mercury contamination in all our freshwater lakes and the ocean, leading to strict limits on consuming fish for children and pregnant women; and a half-century of CO2 emissions.

Orders of magnitude more people are killed by rooftop solar, but we haven't raised safety standards on all other sources of electricity to be the same level we require for nuclear.

Botfly. Don't cut, they dig deeper.

The proper solution is a thick layer of petroleum jelly over your skin. The larva has to come up to breathe eventually (~hours). Use tweezers and grab it. Gross, but perfectly safe.

You could design in an electric autonomous-returning JATO-like system to allow for extended distance flights.

Oh, even better, you're always going to have enough propeller power to take off. Extremely high power-density batteries on a glider which detaches at cruising altitude and flies back to the airport? Oh, you fly even higher than normal before detaching to transfer even more energy into PE?

Hmm, shouldn't electric be able to fly even higher? But they're short range, so probably not worth it ... yet.

That's not that much higher energy density and, IIRC, low power density, so not powerful enough to be useful in an emergency.

The jet planes are flying much higher and are loaded; I'm assuming this one was empty. That would account for the power discrepancy.

Finally, I think you might be still high on the power cost. $.10/kwh is retail cost in the PNW, they might be, um, bullshitting a little and have purchased power at a very good rate at a particular time just so they could say $5. They didn't say every flight would be $5. So energy could have been 3x more than you estimated.

Why do you believe that?

No. The closest I can think is to have a solid rocket booster and that has obvious risks as well.

Standby generation -- "spinning reserve" -- doesn't count as generated energy, because it's not. Until you're at that point you still can reduce natural gas consumption with more renewable.

Relatedly, I made an embedded product. I built a live CD (yes this was a while ago) for my employer with the entire development environment. As long as you can find an x86 machine with CD-ROM you could build, compile, test, and program using the exact environment I did twenty years ago.

Maybe today I'd do micropython on ESP32. Download text file from device, edit, upload back on.

Another way to look at the social model is kids playing in neighborhoods. It's not unsafe to walk from one place to another because of lousy sidewalks or excessive leaves: it's the roads we put between any place they want to go. This might've been tolerable when each household only had 1 car and it was gone all day, but not now that everybody has a RAM Child-squasher 2500. In my neighborhood the sidewalks also just... end randomly, would be awful to live here and be blind. Would be a lot better to be blind if you weren't a misstep away from getting run over.

No, because the phosphors glow for much longer than human persistence of vision.

Long distance trucking gets heavily subsidized by all other road users. Damage is caused by the fourth power of weight, but trucking only paid 35% of maintenance while being responsible for 99% of the cost.

https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...

I hate having to come up with different variable names than `list` so I don't shadow the function `list`. Repeat that for a lot of common words: count, first, length, map, max, min, search, string; that you would then actually consider calling said function after declaring a value. Happens to "list" the most, but definitely the others on rarer occasions.

That's a stupid point to be trying to make and irrelevant.

Building interconnects costs money. What's the ROI on building more?

Positive ROI becomes present if Texas has large amounts of nondispatchable power and the neighboring areas do not have the same. So if Texas builds more wind and solar than they can consume themselves, then it makes sense to invest in more interconnection capacity. But that's predicted on excessive production first.

Finally, let's just say they built 70 GW of interconnection, because you seen to think that number is important. Do you think Louisiana and Arkansas have that much generation and transmission capacity themselves? Let alone EXCESS?

Washington and Oregon are on the same grid, with about peak generation of 31 GW and 18 GW, yet only about 7 GW of transfer capacity exists, and it's only that high because of sales to California because of seasonal hydroelectric oversupply, an oversupply which doesn't exist in Texas, Arkansas, or Louisiana.

Significantly higher interconnection capacity does not yet make financial sense. They're right to not yet waste money on them.

GGP didn't say ERCOT, they said "Texas". Which further demonstrates how ignorant it is to say there are "no major connections".

Every place I'm familiar with has demand charges on large-scale users that is supposed to pay for that equipment.

The real problem is boomers have stopped allowing things to be built efficiently, so supply is limited, had been limited for decades, and demand still grows, so prices spike disproportionally with demand increases.

Additionally we subsidize wind and solar heavily, but the fixed costs of large plants don't drop, so we end up spending for our power twice and for natural gas plants to replace coal, because that's the only solution we will do to keep power during the winter in Northern states.

Texas is the second-biggest state. Where are they going to make major connections to -- the Great Prairie? There's a whole New Mexico-worth of sparse population between Dallas/Austin/San Antonio before you get to New Mexico itself, which you would then need to cross halfway before you hit a major population center.

Enron fiasco put a local power company here in WA in insurmountable debt because they couldn't ship power to California because the lines were already overloaded. If you build a major new power-consuming plant in Washington, you'll need to get power from someplace closer than half the width of Texas (and only even that far because historically we had coal power plants in Montana, so there's existing long-distance transmission).

I'm not saying they haven't made mistakes, but saying a place had "no major connections" is both wrong and ignores why. El Paso has "major" connections to New Mexico. It shouldn't be surprising Dallas doesn't have "major" connections to New Mexico, just like Denver CO doesn't to Portland OR.

You're looking for "deep adaptation"

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

> because there is no realistic path for nuclear reactors to compete with PV+batteries

It's not that in Northern climates, it's PV+batteries+Natural Gas turbines, because PV doesn't supply enough power for winter heating. In more tropical locations, you're correct.

Have you considered electric heaters to run for a few hours just if temperatures are consistently low for multiple consecutive days?

I was thinking the same thing 10 years ago, but people are still buying houses, the stock market keeps going up. It doesn't make sense. But I lost a lot of money not being more heavily invested and buying a house I could easily afford. I also feel like we're a zombie economy that doesn't know it's dead yet, but all I know is somehow I'm going to be screwed and I won't see it coming.

> In 2013 you couldn't say that prices have nearly doubled since 2013 under ZIRP, which is the argument that buying now would be buying high.

But in 2013 you could say they've nearly doubled since 1998 under ZIRP, and then everything you say applies.

It's also an option on continuing to live in your same COL but a different city, with a nice large house. Worse case, prices fall enough you can afford a new mortgage even if your investment is wiped out. Worst case of renting is you can never buy because houses appreciate faster than you can save. You said

> then you'd still have the entire $380k plus whatever interest it earned.

And it's not enough to buy a house if prices continue up, and you've lived in a cheap (so probably small and undesirable) apartment for years while your friends are building up their household.

It's the same. Dextromethorphan gets you high; there were only 17 deaths from 2000-2010, as I said. That's per-week numbers for acetaminophen.

Nothing you said is wrong, but you could say that in 2013 too, and in that time apparently prices have nearly doubled and you missed out if you didn't take advantage.

Mortgages are "heads I win, tails you lose" in non-recourse states like California. You're not down more than your down payment, but the upside is huge, and for the past fifty years it has been more financially advantageous to use that leverage to buy the most expensive home they will allow you to.

That's the bank's problem.

Lets say housing appreciates +50% everywhere.

Your podunk home went up $50k.

HCOL home went up $500k.

Better deal would be to hold the expensive house.

Why is it a sin in America to take advantage of economies of scale for cooking but not for anything else?