yodelshady

I'm happy with whatever actually delivers carbon-free watt hours, which yes, in Australia should be solar.

Clearly you want something else as well.

apparently circa. $ 40 billion, for, right now... one GW. On average - and be assured I have checked this - five, which puts it in the same cost / GW as nuclear, and a capacity factor, not of sixty percent as advertised, but twenty-five. And we don't dump a megatonne or so of CO2 into the atmosphere a week running gas plants to cover nuclear variability. As alluded to by someone else, big wind projects are starting to run into the same levels of NIMBYism as nukes, because the footprint is huge.

You want to advocate for less nuclear, that megatonne a week is something you answer for.

So no you don't support them.

> Mount an SSH or NFS drive

I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do these things seriously as a computer.

As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering, which... fair enough. But moving bytes is something any general purpose computing device should be good at. It's almost something you have to actively design out. It's certainly a deliberate, non-budget-constrained choice from Cupertino to be bad at this.

Crap like "should Apple be [scanning for CSAM | scanning for copyright | scanning for anti-CCP | whatever I've almost stopped caring ] before uploading to iCloud?" exists primarily because the devices are so bad at moving bytes around without relying on iCloud.

There will always be people who cannot afford to drive. Others are making a conscious decision to impose the enormous burden on everyone that is inherent to driving. And this is how you want to treat them.

Sorry not sorry - that is appalling and I'm glad I'm not in that country.

I've seen the investment pitches. Nobody is seriously considering it for a reason, it's a terrible, terrible, idea.

Covering intermittent sources is pretty much 100% public sector's responsibility, everywhere.

No, because then you have the Russia situation times ten - namely that a foreign power can cripple your society at will.

Some places don't have deserts. Or even large unpopulated areas. Definitely not large unfarmed areas.

Experts are pinning their credibility on the line - not even if they issue every guess under a giant glowing banner saying "THIS IS JUST A GUESS WE DO NOT HAVE THE DATA TO BE DEFINITIVE YET". So: they're slower. I am not, incidentally, saying WHO's response is perfect.

I'd expect some - actually probably quite a lot - of excess CAPEX on wind+solar, and some deficit (less CAPEX, but buying some electricity at retail) so you don't have electrolysers and thermal plants just lying around.

You're still stuck with the investment issue: either you pay (Hinckley-scale!) fees to providers to just lie around, or the public sector runs it itself, and the "private more efficient" bollocks is exactly that, because the private sector isn't providing the value. The people providing SLAs are.

If it is on the high street, it's expensive in order to fund advertising, not higher quality.

But... people do use a very similar term, overengineered. Quite appropriately. You are absolutely allowed, encouraged, to call out someone specifying a product to the nines because they can. See Juicero, I'd argue Peloton, a.. decent proportion of products that involve Heroku or Kubernetes.

But so are engineers allowed to call out someone playing financial find-the-lady to obscure what they're really doing: using trust relationships built over decades, if not centuries, to fuck over customers.

private market analysts, government strategists, and scientists.

As always, please show me a credible plan that says otherwise. I would be extremely happy to be proven wrong.

I *know* that the money I've given to a gas company to cover periods of low wind and solar in the last twelve months has funded those rockets, and the emissions have turned fertile ground into desert, the latter being if anything more lethal.

That is a cold certainty.

And I came off a conference call on battery tech today. So let me say this: anyone who says batteries will replace that blood money is a liar.

That's not demand response. That's failure.

150 MW currently.

I'm sorry we're just living in fantasy land now.

We're not weaned off fossils. Not even close. That's just a lie.

Nevertheless, the >30-year old nukes still delivered what every single technology you have listed categorically failed to deliver. I have provided ample, repeated evidence of that. They failed and fossils came to the rescue. Repeatedly.

Why should they get even half the subsidy nukes get (which is what they do get), when their output is simply useless.

I've posted numbers. Please, you want to show me storage can be economically done, today, do so. Or admit you can't because it can't. We no longer have time for utopianism.

The low-wind periods last December had a peak of 1.2 GW solar.

Combined wind and solar right now are producing only very slightly more than a tech that has had zero real investment in thirty years. I wouldn't brag about that.

currently 0.63 GW.

That's interesting that they disagree. Gridwatch has been around a while but I'll have a look.

edit: yep, electricitymap's free figures are not even close to live.

Last calendar, it produced > 1 GW for 784 hours.

In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with > 100 GWh shortfall.

The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating.

Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.

edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they've been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just feel like the right amount. We're all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn't get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.

And I'll bet money that, couple of days ago, the carbon put out by the spinning reserve that is necessary to cover a day like today wasn't counted.

If you're going to advocate for wind, great. Can we examine your plans honestly, please? Because if you want to deliver an equivalent service to France, one where "SLA" and "disconnect the customers if convenient" are treated as different things, then our current plan is not wind. It is gas.

If you have a competitive advantage in launching, why limit your exploitation of that? Worst case, you find out that your satellite engineers were coasting off that advantage. Best case, you make money proving they aren't.

Plus you're now antitrust-proof, if that's ever a thing again.

If party A operating multiple tonnes of high-speed steel hurts party B who is not, the dangerous party is party A. They might have been careful enough to discharge any direct liability, but they are *always* the party who bought multiple tonnes of high-speed steel into the situation.

I have to downvote you, because requiring others to spend their time explaining basic technologies as a rhetorical tactic is *rude*.