This is, I suppose, what you get when you elect a guy who went bust running a casino. So much winning.
US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
421–430 of 933 posts
Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
That leaves a lot of free energy sources untapped - especially hydro.
If you can set up a hydro/pump dam without wrecking the ecosystem and don't need handouts to function, I'm all for it.
Every time they do that you just redefine wrecking.
First it was the fish ladders. Then it was a bunch of whining about how reducing the water level variation on the river is bad (particularly illustrative because this is the exact opposite logic your ilk uses when talking stormwater). Lord knows what the complaint is these days.
Why don't you just be honest and say "no"
Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly , anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money. Windmill farm outputs tend to dip during summer and peak over winter. With a given minimum power output windmills + photovoltaics…
> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. The northernmost point in Texas would be at the extreme southern edge of Europe. The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain... If Europe can make solar work, so can the stat…
> If Europe can make solar work
Can you cite a region in Europe that physically independently covers its energy needs with solar+storage alone?
Stress on physical. Even if some regions claim renewables fully covering energy needs, that's at best on accounting level, those regions are still fully dependent on power import/export and simply could not function in an island mode for any extended period of time without at the very least brownouts. Quite importantly, it's always renewables, not solar.
The dispatchability problem is a real pain. Pool together wind + solar + hydro and the variability in power (!) output drops to levels possible to tame with realistic grid-scale storage sizes.
I am not talking about intra-day balancing here. It's the yearly cycle that comes to bite you. In my corner of Europe, if I wanted to go completely off-grid with solar+storage I would need storage well into the mid single-digit MEGA watt-hours, for the house needs (HVAC and DHW taking the lion's share) alone. That's laughably unrealistic.
> The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
Yes, the southern states could probably make do with something like 3-4x overprovisioning, but that's still massive. So massive that any sort of windmill capability will outcompete any sort of COTS storage.
Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is your contingency plan for if the groundwork that has been laid to falsify election results works? Wait harder? The ethical US has rolled over already.
Funny how at this point election fraud is a bipartisan issue, everyone seems to believe it's happening or will happen!
It's because everything Republicans say is projection. They want to cheat, so accuse the Democrats of doing it first. In actuality it's the current admin that's laying gound-work for election fraud in November.
Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#425I conducted a fun experiment.
Prompted an AI this:
It's year 2005, and you're an AI on an alien planet. you get a piece of news from the future from a planet called Earth. Tell me what you understand from the text and what you think about it: (then pasted the article text)
Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
All kinds of power generation are typically heavily subdized in some way. I do not think this "common sense" strategy exists.
Indeed. Energy is at the core of everything we do. Make it more expensive, you immediately make some people go hungry, and then you also make everything else in the economy a tad more expensive, slowing things down, and as market readjusts and contracts, this makes even more people go hungry. There's a really strong incentive to keep energy generation cheap, because pretty much every social and political issue is dow…
Yes. "The economy is energy, energy is the economy".
China understood this and is not just betting on both solar and nuclear like mad, they're also burning coal (so that the EU btw can cosplay being green, while offloading the production of many things it consumes to China).
As a result energy prices in China are something like 7x cheaper than in Germany.
Those with lots of energy saw their GDP growth in the 21st century while those like the EU, with ultra pricey energy (due to stupid decisions like closing nuclear power plants only to then reopen them) saw hardly any GDP growth, inflation-adjusted in USD, in the 21st century.
No GDP growth means ever more poor people and ever more indebted governments.
I'm all for transitioning away from fuel and coal, but do it pragmatically. We don't need communists (that'd be the "green" parties [1]) who want to make the lives of everybody miserable taking decisions related to energy.
[1] green people who, like watermelons, are only green on the outside and then bright extremist red on the inside
Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
All kinds of power generation are typically heavily subdized in some way. I do not think this "common sense" strategy exists.
"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense" So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess to not being able to use experts that refine their knowledge and position about a topic. A "common sense" strategy is therefore what is most popular and on the basis of the understanding of laymen without deeper understanding or knowledge.
There will always be a place for common sense - the Greeks used to call it phronesis or "practical wisdom".
You also need to distinguish between expert opinion and elite opinion. The two are not the same.
Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#428Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#429The USA is governed by evil people, and the people of the nation are too stupid and expecting someone else to stop them. Plain as day light.
I'm baffled why Germany would allow this, you'd think they and the rest of Europe would understand the importance of energy independence at this point.
Re: US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest. It sure looks stupid when you look at America or the Roman Empire as a whole. But when you look at the specific individuals doing these "stupid" things, and the individuals enabling them, it is perfectly aligned with their own best interests.
and your point?
perhaps their point is 'cui bono'