yodelshady

It's such an easy, relevant question to ask that it boggles the mind that investors don't have their own engineers to ask it. I know you're money people not tech, but how do you know you're not being ripped off if you can't check figures that basic?

Anyway, apparently 3 MWh/tonne is a not-unrealistic claim, so they're only demanding 1.5 MW (on average, though if solar-powered it would make sense to oversize) and a km2 of solar panels could reasonably generate 50-100 MW on average (this is conservative for most places, though not for Iceland). A km2 of tress, by their calculations, gets 1,000 tonnes, so DAC comes out ahead, although you're right to observe that trees do have a synergistic use for the carbon they capture.

We've spent in excess of 900 euros per MWh this year on fossil sources to back up renewables this last year, Europe-wide, because there IS NO OPTION to sacrifice reliable power - if there is shortfall, society collapses, quickly. There is no even vaguely credible plan to replace those sources. At this point, the European "market" is so stuffed with subsidies out of wholly predictable "temporary necessity" the whole god-damn concept of a "market price" is a lie.

Germany chose coal and gas. They should be held accountable for that.

Any chart that misses 2022 in Germany's consumption is just mendacious.

Poland isn't a rich country LARPing as environmental saviour whilst increasing its coal consumption in 2022, after decades of being warned about reliance on Russian gas.

Germany does not get on iota of good faith on that. They knew.

That's just a lie.

England has ~25,000 sqft per person. That's the simple inverse of population density.

Everything has to come out of that budget.

Dockerfile would be a really good idea.

Followed instructions to letter, got : main.go:7:5: no required module provides package github.com/jepson-io/maelstrom/demo/go $GOPATH is correctly set, I can see the package there, I've spent half an hour looking through incorrect internet answers and frankly I have better things to do than debug build scripts. Actually, no I don't. But I still normally get paid.

Someone absolutely did, and wrote controls for it, down to the calibration of the torque wrench.

Just as they thought of the failure modes of:

  - cold fluoropolymers in rocket boosters
  - graphite moderated water cooled reactors
  - live ammunition on movie sets
  - insurance products assuming uncorrelated risks in a correlated market
  - etc

All of these things were known and controlled risks long before the event that realised them happened.

> So the basic solutions are to massively overbuild renewables,

And who the fuck is doing that? Because they're not god-damned cheap if you do that!

I do not care if you can sell your product for cheap if I have to buy a much more expensive, planet-killing fossil-fuel product to make up for your SLA of "ha ha ha oh my god they think we have an SLA", which is why none of these academic ideas actually fucking include storage or SLAs! And no, cheap storage is not a fucking thing! Someone earlier on HN today was boasting of a solution that cost $800,000 per MWh, and if it exponentially decayed in cost at a rate greater than any industrial improvement ever for the next decade, it would still be more expensive than nuclear!

And yes, I'm angry, because empirically, on the very grid I use, that is exactly what has happened. We're paying, not the "extortionate" $100 or so nuclear promised, but over $500, because something needs to keep the lights on at moments not convenient for the intermittence. And I've worked with the industrial consumers of their product, conferences where literally everyone has academic AND industry experience in real engineering, and they're fucking suicidal because of the losses incurred by this shit, Europe-fucking-wide.

This is not okay. This is fraud.

No, they can be cheaper.

Sod off with this, I've seen someone literally hospitalised because of an army of private sector contractors we've had to deal with finding ingenious efficiency savings, powered by ideologues like you. Now our costs have tripled.

Oh, and guess f*king what; now several other suppliers are bankrupt, taking their already mostly-worthless support contracts with them, because they never invested a cent in resilience, and, get this, are blaming us for giving them that power. The same power they were so adamant, just like you, that they were so good at wielding. Their only efficiency ever was stripping all resilience, not inefficency - deliberate resilience.

The private sector is made of goddamn children at times,

I would very happily have one in my neighbourhood, so kindly stop slandering me.

Here's the deal: I get that, and am connected to the grid, you don't, and no fossil back up for either. Virtue signalling over a gas grid is killing people, people I know, and I don't like people who support that. No "batteries maybe in some mystical future". We had carbon free tech forty years ago. If you frustrated that you too are responsible for the destruction I now see everywhere.

To add context, the described plant was a weapons programme that predates any civilian nuclear energy. In fact it also predates the hydrogen bomb, so that war planners vastly overestimated the amount of plutonium needed.

"The unit... generates round-the-clock energy... producing energy in all weather conditions."

Can someone explain to me how, whenever wind energy is mentioned, any sort of of scepticism, and I don't mean "snarky internet contrarian" scepticism, I mean "human being who has lived on Earth" scepticism, ceases to exist?

Is there actually a large population out there who has never experienced outside weather conditions in which there was no wind?

Or do you... think that bad things will not happen to you if you just believe in transparent bullshit hard enough? Because I'm sorry, but they will.

How. Does this Shit. Get Written?

The best, most reliable sources of wind, FYI, are known by anyone in industry to be very far away from most built structures, and high.

The forests near mine and just about everywhere else on the entire planet have elevated levels of BEING ON GODDAMNED FIRE thanks to coal-burners.

No there's not history. There's not emotions. There's god-damned stupidity and a refusal to evaluate risk at the top level of government, that has condemned hundred of millions.

I've lived near irradiated areas too. There was zero justification for this.

This still brings up one of my bugbears for factorio - the inability to write comments/documentation.

I want to be able to make blueprints with complex, but well-defined and documented, input / output structures that I can look at in six months' time and still know how to connect up.

Europe's crisis is wholly self-induced; a deliberate decision to switch off in favour of coal (Germany), or defund (France), or delay replacement of (UK) nuclear power stations in a region with cold dark winters and not the almost embarrassing excess of oil of Canada/Texas/Russia/Venezuela.

That's it. A power grid cannot be allowed to fail and no financially credible projects to store the required amount of energy (minimum, tens of TWh) exist, so renewables in such an environment have left us wholly dependent on gas. Nuclear fuel can be stockpiled, wind simply cannot, again at the required scale. If you think it can be within the next 30 years you're an idiot, a liar or a data scientist, it's that simple.

And yes, I've been to engineering conferences in EU where almost the entire topic now is "how do we minimise the damage from unreliable power". It takes zero financial acumen to realise the capital cost of the plant is not decreasing, the output is, and the best case is a reduction in output proportional to the interruption in power. That is the best case, much more frequent is a far greater loss of product. Quite a few people, myself included, were visibly on the verge of crying, because the writing is on the fucking wall. Quite honestly, the Energiewenders do not seem to give a shit, nor do they seem to about Germany's reversion to coal, a move that permanently make's Europe's position on the world stage re climate change laughable.

This is not a Russia-induced crisis - comedy shows were mocking the certainty of Putin using gas as a weapon fifteen years ago. This is entirely self-induced.

Honest question for renewables advocates:

Where would you rank US-west in terms of "industrialised places where its easiest to phase out fossils or nuclear for renewables"?

Because for my money, it may be the best-suited place in the world.

- Lowish latitude, so winter nights are never that long, and usage peaks are in summer; - Fair amount of land - even in CA, especially if we cheat a bit and assume NV is playing ball; - Lots of money.

And even there, nuclear or gas are still necessary. Maybe Australia beats it.

I can say this, Europe - including the UK - has over the last two decades made the worst energy decisions, probably ever. Winter peaking with 16 hour nights, and last year we had week-long periods with generation of, to all intents and purposes, zero useful power from wind during that period. For what its worth, this year Germany restarted 8 GW of coal, and I'm sorry but no other country in the world should be listening to European lectures on climate ever again after that. Wholesale costs have exceeded $500 per MWh, they briefly peaked in London at $9000, and the same amount of battery storage costs $100,000. I have talked to investors on the latter figure and none expect that figure to decrease significantly. Raw materials will not humour your optimism.

Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do?

Indeed. Airlines do well, and they're heavily regulated. But they don't have armies of engineers doing nothing whilst court cases are worked out.

The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which once there were, they wouldn't blink at telling Boeing's transparently awful MAX design to go whistle.

Also Germany: repoens, I believe approx. 8 GW, coal plants.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliecoleman/2022/07/08/germany...

I'm sorry, but this is hearfelt: the German greens are climate criminals. And they were fully warned of exactly this situation decades ago, so no, they have zero "circumstances forced our hand" defence.

You knew, and you chose to burn coal anyway.

I genuinely think this is part of the reason for cycling-as-hobby, aka Middle Aged Men In Lycra.

I want a hobby vehicle to present some sort of challenge. Now maybe you shouldn't ever be "challenging" yourself on a public road, but doing so in an old sports car at 45 mph, is clearly not the same level of risk to others as pushing equivalently in the modern version. It's just less acceptable, even before environmental concerns. So that leaves you with "push the throttle for maybe five seconds, then back off before you plough into a shared-use bridge at 120 mph" (something I've unfortunately seen, recently). Neat trick, but really a skill as such, is it?

Meanwhile, I hit 40 mph yesterday, on a twisty road, using gravity and oatmeal. That's my accomplishment.

Then there's the noise. An old sports car made noise because the designer wanted, was singularly focused on, making a powerful engine. A new car makes noise because, after the team of engineers make a powerful engine, then design an efficient suppressor system to comply with laws, the marketers come along and find regions of the engine map the laws do not cover, and order the engineers to make it very loud in those regions specifically. The former is charming, the latter is just cheap. More so when you're embarrassed by an EV - scratch that, a practical EV, with storage space and stuff - during acceleration.

And for all that, the sports car is still usually pretty rubbish on a track compared to a purpose-built vehicle. Pro tip: real mechanical engineers worry about heat dissipation. A lot. Really a lot. Your road car almost certainly doesn't have enough for sustained track work. They manage a few laps, then important components - the brake discs, brake pads, brake fluid, dampers, maybe even some of the sensors and power steering - start fading. Again, in comparison a few thousand on bike stuff gets you something entirely race-worthy. Yes I know it's still just a bicycle - it is - but you do notice the sense of purpose, that things are there because they make the vehicle better at its one job.

If OEMs want ICE sports cars, arguably any sports cars, to have a future, then the Top Trumps needs to stop. Rediscover that sense of purpose. Either the point is "fun at socially acceptable speeds", in which case manuals are just better because they're more fun, or it's "prove I have lots of money", in which case stick an electric motor in and coat the interior in gold, because the current crop of go-fasts don't have long for this earth, legislation will see to that.

> The most common angle of attack is territorial: "get off _my_ road".

Yeah, but why do you think it's your road when in a car, especially when the same attitude exists in places without the tax, or with drivers cars that are exempt, or hell, if you've just not bothered paying it? My bet is it's nothing to do with ~£100 of tax, and everything to do with not wanting to admit you were misled by advertisers into thinking spending tens of thousands of your hard-earned cash on something you thought would give you effortless, fast, convenient transport.

To be fair, bicycles probably did lead to more marriage breakups. Certainly in the UK they're considered a key part of emancipation. No longer, as a woman, is your dating pool limited entirely to the boys in your village. And if the boy you did marry turns out to be an angry drunk - well. Bicycles aren't fast, but they're faster than walking. And they're cheap.

And the latter, if we're honest, is the real reason for bicycle hate. The banker or tech bro on a carbon frame is both conspicuously consuming more than you and actually spending less than you. Much less. And, in a city, going faster. Hell, the homeless guy with three steel tubes lashed together might be too. That should be a right wing dream - a private investment, low regulation, small business friendly, with rewards going to the individuals who work harder.

But sometimes, we're just not nice people, and we don't like having our egos punctured.

I read the original report, which still includes figures of >$100 per kWh for storage, projected for multiple decades (if not in this report, in others). For a higher-latitude nation, we need TWh, probably tens of, for even a small nation. Be assured I have crunched these numbers and confirmed against our current best wind+PV resource data.

In other words, if we run a nuclear plant and deliberately induce a, as you say, "Fukushima-style cleaup", we are about comparable.

That's how expensive proper storage is. "Storage will save us", is frankly, an irresponsible lie that has killed.

> 5GW of solar [in Finland]

Okay I'm afraid that's it for me. Being on a discussion board that has to debate "is deploying solar in Finland a good idea?" is not worth it.

Incidentally, yes, it took Finland 10 years to build their last reactor. They commissioned it a week or so ago, mere days before Russia disconnected them. Literally nothing we can effectively do to mitigate climate change takes <5 any more, including a fair few GW-scale wind farms I know of. Refusal to face that is why we are facing the calamity we are. Cheers.

For the record, tabloids in Britain are the equivalent of Fox news / MSNBC, they are gossip because they are for-profit organs responding do demand. It seems... not wrong, but a little odd, to open with that as a criticism of insufficiently pro-business cultures.

Big question: do you think business ultimately needs to make stuff? If you do, then the challenges include securing reliable raw materials now that just rocking up somewhere with a big boat full of men with guns doesn't work. Not to mention reliable energy - most customers do not like it if your delivery date depends on the weather. In fact, they really don't like it and will happily pay for some other less carbon-conscious nation to produce it on time. Oh, and having good trade relations with the exceedingly industrially capable neighbours, who should be a manufacturing ally.

But solving those requires having enough people who care. Was it Tim Cook who said something along the lines of "you could fill a conference centre in China with people who just knew about fasteners"?

If you think business doesn't need to make stuff, or "pay enough taxes and abide by enough regulations", well... I'd have to agree with neilwilson. Why should I care, because frankly, what I've seen from the last decade has been Ponzis, gambling for children, money laundering for the worst people in the world, labour law dodges, and 140 character parodies of "debate", and I'm not impressed.

Ukraine hadn't applied, until recently arguably didn't meet the military requirements, and - even before this year - had a border dispute in Donbas.

The latter is important, NATO is not a hired gun. Finland does have a stable border.

Did you misspell "world" as "US" ? Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures? The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land, and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive.

Agreed, absolutely not true of Australia.

> I’m sure they’ve grown, but it’s still a big world out there people. I

No, it just isn't. Humans have transformed seventy per cent of the land on Earth[1]. Including the deserts. Suburbs are the second most land intensive thing we do, after farming, and for almost every other developed-world country, this problem is more acute than in the US. Get some perspective.

That is a "wind turbines cause global warming" level of bad take. More succinctly, so close to a lie I no longer have the patience to differentiate them.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/

2. sounds an awful lot like "renewables are not a viable form of energy and require gas". One gas replacement - nuclear - needs no backup. The other - renewables - needs backup of a scale that exists only on paper.

I've asked time and again for costed *TWh-scale* storage, the proposals are never forthcoming. Because, on first principles, they're far too high and unlikely to ever decrease. Ask actual investors - which I have - in private, and they'll admit it.

Almost nowhere are renewables outcompeting nuclear. What is outcompeting is greenwashed gas.