Day ahead electricity prices for EU

That's is, that's what I do not understand the partisanship reaching a fanatic state to the point of completely distort reality. Yes, UK have lost the "empire" status in the 20th century BUT the Commonwealth is still there. They are still a talassocracy even if their grip on some of the most important colonies (Canada, Australia) is faded. Now they start facing a real threat to them and can't defend them in any way. China overpower Australia to a point UK can't logically even try to defend it. Russia overpower Canada to a very similar point. So far both power have no reasons to go to war, of course, but they can and UK know it very well. USA are the sole former colony very able to defend itself but is also the less keen to serve UK.

However both UK and USA are failed states, their extreme capitalism put too much of their population in poverty and without immigration they simply fall on their own weight.

As before they NEED a war to overthought the table and start over. And they have actually created that, it's not a secret, it's written black on white if only you read their publications from RAND to G8. They use a slightly strange vocabulary but it's clear what they state. They call themselves "the international community" or "the civilized world" but it's clear they just mean their fragmented former colonies. The same have happened in the recent past with the Korea war, as it happened their former colonies start to decide it's time to detach a bit, like SK an Japan themselves https://asiatimes.com/2022/08/japan-korea-defy-us-with-big-r... and even New Zealand https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/new-zealand-will-not-join-th... Australia itself suffering the submarines scam the UK and USA essentially have imposed to them ditching modern but limited French subs to exactly nothing since for a decade at least that's what they'll get (less than nothing since they have payed compensation for the late choice) start to falter undecided witch side to take. Only high treason neoliberal government in the EU keep the USA/UK side against their own Citizens interests.

Some in US and UK have already understood that their war is lost and they menace them to go nuclear in that case, see https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-truss-nuc... and https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11110441/Henry-Kiss... but the rest of the world, the BRICS start to unite knowing that it's freedom or death for them. They have all tested the "freedom" neoliberal nazi means, to a point in eastern Europe many would welcome back Soviet Union...

The above are NOT political or ideological positions but simply facts anyone observing with honesty no matter the personal political position can't avoid to see.

Yes. But those shutters are pretty expensive + extra moving thing to maintain.

EU countries are actually interconnected, but when it's night in Berlin it's also night in Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, ... so all EU p.v. do not produce, while the whole EU keep consuming.

So no, if you want a world that run on p.v. you need a global grid to harvest enough energy AND I doubt even if such monster can be done in a snap and work flawlessly that we can even harvest enough power at ground level.

Harvesting from orbit beside the fact it's so far mere theory have various major issues, not just in environmental terms (a catastrophic impact, probably higher than a nuclear war on ground) but in mere technical terms: without the atmospheric shield anything in orbit at a certain scale have a very short life span. Substitute them demand a very big quantity of fossils and an industrial capacity we do not have in the entire world so far.

Nuclear fusion on ground is the most promising tech but so far it's far from being ready, seen the actual status PERHAPS we can have it at an initial general availability around 2060-2070. Before we have just fission. Now if we invest in fission witch is far from cheap and simple to build on scale it's a nonsense also investing in p.v. witch is far less expensive but for what? Once a reactor is started you consume uranium anyway, producing energy from steam or not. p.v. might play a role in averaging the load, theoretically, that means "please all loads that can be run just when the Sun shine do run them only with it", but doing so for now is pure theory and at a nationwide grid scale it's already almost impossible. Beside that we have an enormous issue: climate change. Did you know how vulnerable are infra on ground?

We try the small reactor path NOT because they are safe (it's the opposite), not because they are cheap (again, it's the opposite), but because they are flexible: instead of depend on LARGE infra we can deploy small one so reducing the impact of any outage.

In the nearer future we have the nightmarish problem of replace oil and gas sparing them for the use we do not know how to do without them. In the mid-term future we need resiliency and nuclear fission, another nightmare. In a mid-long term we hope for fusion, but we do not really know and we anyway need to essentially rebuild the changing world coping with sea levels rises, floods, landslides etc that push people in altitude locally and world-scale migration in general. That's the actual sore reality for what we can see directly and read from so many sources with contrasting interest to being able to call them very likely true.

To be autonomous? Seeing the actual meteo I need something like 40kWp p.v., 10k liter of hot water as a reserve, subdivided in 500l batch to being able to re-heat only some reservoirs depending on the meteo, around 400kWh storage since to make it last I should not normally go more than 85-90% SOC every day.

Did you ever try the real autonomy game? Just consider that in winter you can count on few hours of Sun let's say one day yes and one no, if you live like me in France south. In those hours you need to run anything together. You have postponed dishwasher, washing machine, you have to cook, heat both sanitary water and reserve for night and early morning home heating, recharge the batteries, car's battery included etc.

For instance to heat enough water to heat my home a single day (~2000 liters at 60℃ to get in the morning at 32-33℃) I need a powerful heat pump, let's say 3kW absorbed. I need ~2kW per home appliance (dishwasher, washing machine, coffee maker, induction for a single pot etc) I might have good enough Sun from 9.30 in the morning to let's say 14.30. Some appliance are very quick (like a coffee maker) but some are not (the dishwasher heat water few times for 8-10' a time over 90' timeframe, the washing machine normally only one time) recharging a massive battery demand both a certain amount of sustained power to avoid unbalanced cells, demand little power for a not that short time to balance them at the end of the charge etc. Essentially I need around 25kW for around 4+ hours per day. Being able to count casually passing clouds in the meantime. Not only. Such system need to be constantly managed to lower quickly and mount quickly the load following p.v. production. Some appliance can potentially and practically (for instance modern heat-pump water heaters are already made to be controlled by some modbus/mqtt automation), some can just potentially (nothing on sale do that, but it's possible), some can't.

Really try the game, including home heating in winter, NOT counting on the grid even for small loads.

> but rather that the NUM destroyed the domestic coal industry, which became totally uncompetitive relative to more or less any foreign producers. It wasn't Russia specifically, it was that UK mining became dysfunctional and unreliable.

If you think miners should not be fairly compensated for their work you're free to go work as one for one of those foreign producers that less "dysfunctional" and more "reliable"