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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Actually China is leading the planet on renewables deployment.

    I haven’t combed through the data in a minute, but I want to also say that they’re also leading in fossil fuel deployment too. Probably is due to their population size than anything else.

    Don’t worry though: America can’t stand that China is doing better than them at something, so we’re going to try to punish them and frame them as the bad guys since America can be the only one espousing leadership, not the Big Bad East.



  • I like to think of the distinction in a de jure vs de facto way.

    If all the evidence we have of a species is them consuming autotrophs, then we do mental gymnastics and induce that they are 100% herbivores.

    Of course this also leaves room for an herbivore’s potential to consume heterotrophs, in which case our knowledge would have to update and reflect reality. Maybe 99% herbivore, 1% carnivore.

    And at that point, we may still do mental gymnastics and call species herbivores because that is their normal behavior, where their abnormal behavior is shown due to abiotic or biotic factors, perhaps from loss of habitat or removal/introduction of species in the food web, etc.

    Edit: for humans, I’d say we can classify different humans differently because of the times we live in (it’s so easy to be a vegan nowadays) and our natural, higher moral concepts and empathy.


  • I guess it comes down to whether we want to primarily communicate battery size in terms of charge (Coulombs = Amps * Time) or energy (Joules = Watts * Time).

    The first metric you multiply by your operating voltage to get the second metric, whereas the second metric you have to divide by your voltage to get the first. Depends on what comes easier to most people.




  • Unfortunately I think casting away Kamala as the pick would do more harm than good. She is the likely candidate. Joe can even make the transition smooth by entrusting the rest of his legacy with her, which is the reason he chose her as a VP in the first place.

    People also know the name Kamala Harris, and they’ve known it for years now. It’ll be a huge turn to bring in a new candidate on top and do all of the rallying needed to get votes.

    I think Kamala’s success will spend on the VP choice, her administration, and her campaign team more than her herself.




  • I mean, if anything, the fact that the Oil & Gas industry uses hydrogen for refining means that there is a possible, robust market for green hydrogen to get into (don’t like this because it means oil is still the focus, when we need to consider green chemistry and stop with oil).

    The O&G industry also helped usher in solar PV at an early stage because of the needs of remote power in hazardous environments such as offshore rigs and near potential sources of release like oil tanks (I used to work as an engineer in O&G myself).

    There’s actually a lot of work by GE and Mitsubishi to start shipping new gas turbines to be capable of firing a non-zero amount of hydrogen in addition to natural gas. I think some plants are even capable of doing 50/50 hydrogen/natural gas, with that former number increasing year over year.

    Hydrogen could outstrip conventional fuels someday. The bottleneck has always been supply though.

    If renewables are so abundant and cheap, then we’ll finally have a reason to deploy hydrogen infrastructure on a massive scale (at least in the US). Hell, you look at the major inverter manufacturers for utility PV like Sungrow, and they have containerized electrolyzers ready for implementation. I haven’t done a market survey, but if they’re in the game, then so are other players.

    If you want to be convinced of the progress of hydrogen, I would look into the project that Sargent & Lundy is working on in Utah. They’re planning on using a salt cavern for hydrogen storage, and I believe there is a CCGT onsite as well to make use of the generation.

    Hydrogen is even on the minds of offshore wind developers like Siemens.

    The substance isn’t doomed like others in this thread make it out. There is active interest in the market to develop a supply chain and economy.

    Edit: The one thing I don’t see a lot of people talk about though is where the raw materials for this hydrogen will come from… Likely groundwater unfortunately. Since groundwater is already a highly sought after resource for consumption and agriculture, I’m not sure if hydrogen in this way will take off. This is why offshore hydrogen seems to be more promising, but as we see with wave and tidal power, the ocean environment just sucks for any commercialization.

    It’s an uphill battle, but the same can be said for the climate crisis in general. Hope we make enough progress before it’s too late.










  • One of the ways solar and wind can become more reliable is by expanding the grid.

    I’m not sure where you’re from, but in the US we have three grids: the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and Texas. These grids aren’t connected despite their names, and there have been many attempts in the past to connect them to little avail.

    The benefit of larger grids with distributed energy resources is that even if local environments are cloudy or calm, those conditions usually are locally concentrated. This means that if one DER is underproducing, another DER can make up for the loss if that DER’s locale is sunny and windy.

    This gets better the wider a net you cast to collect energy (i.e. grid).

    On your counterpoints to wind, “the view” is in the eye of the beholder - I’m young and I love the look of modern wind turbines; wind turbines reduce the overall amount of bird deaths from the energy industry as we transition away from fossil fuels; no significant evidence has been found to link wind turbine noise to health issues; and shadow flicker has not been correlated with any adverse health outcomes either, leading me to believe that this propaganda is being propagated by either NIMBYs or the fossil fuels industry or both.

    Point is: solutions to climate change will come in a silver buckshot, not in a silver bullet. We need an all hands approach to this so we reverse damage as soon as possible and get to restoration as soon as possible.

    Other I agree with you though. I would love to have a backbone of nuclear through the American Great Plains where population centers are low. Only issue there though is groundwater use, but I’d imagine future reactors could make use of geothermal-type solutions to cool instead of surface waters. Maybe there’s a radiation risk there. Idk, need to research more


  • This is the other issue about thermal plants including coal, natural gas, concentrated solar power (CSP), and nuclear: water cooling.

    All of these plants boil water to pass over a turbine and crank a generator, but that steam needs to be cooled so it condenses and makes a closed loop. You need cooling water to do this, and a lot of it.

    If water is becoming scarce, and we have other needs for it like residential or agricultural uses, then that can greatly impact thermal generators, leading to outages like you say if cooling can’t be done.

    Chris Nelder with the Rocky Mountain Institute has a good podcast episode on this on his The Energy Transition Show podcast. Check it out!