A good therapist helps a lot

Funny thing is that, apart from recognising the name, most people forgot what the streisand situation was about.

Civillian ownership of drones will likely be heavily restricted

They’re very easy to DIY though. Much easier than a plane.

The point is to have a bigger car than your neighbour!

The mayor advantage of the European grid is the disconnectedness over long distances

I’d say the disconnectedness cross-border is a disadvantage as the grid already is saturated (1). It can be windy in poland, the generated power can’t make it to france.

7 days is an understatement if going solar + wind + storage is the plan. Germany has longer periods of no sun and no wind on record.

Same. It being on a board like eli5 makes it even more spammy.

Sadly, others have argued so and still are. Here in Belgium the Green party is still trying to close existing, running nuclear power generation. In favour of building new subsidised “emergency” gas generation 🙄

Until then grid battery storage can mature and demand adjustment projects can be rolled out.

In my experience, people tend to severily under estimate the size of the storage problem. To power germany for a week it takes about 7TWh. There’s around 0.1TWh of storage installed in the whole of Europe.

As far as I know, the power outage in Portugal and Spain did not start with renewables

Grids are best modelled as a system, jointly operating. Insufficient damping is the cause as per the grid operator (1).

Can be solved in multiple ways such as make it a france problem (stronger interconnects to a system with more turbines), storage, improved DC-AC transformers for small (<1MW) solar plants. (*)

Pumped storage is indeed one of the best known technologies for grid stability, as it provides both storage, and turbines with inertia. Hard to build though, finding funding and appropriate locations. Then solar suddenly isn’t as cheap if one takes into accou t the cost to make it a reliable source of energy.

(*) the report mentions an estimated 700MW of production auto-shutting down as grid frequency dropped. Most likely these are the inverters of small scale solar installations, which are frequency following (measure then adjust) rather than synchronizing, and simply shut off when out of bound. To quote:

The rapid schedule changes in photovoltaic generation driven by price fluctuations in electricity markets. From an electrical standpoint, such abrupt changes in inverter - based generation introduce significant imbalances into the system, because regulation mechanisms haven´t operated yet. These imbalances must be compensated mainly through interconnections, particularly the one with France . Severe imbalances lead to drastic shifts in power flows across the network, which in turn alter the capacitive and inductive behaviour of the grid. Consequently, system voltages can vary rapidly. This effect is further exacerbated when such generation oper ates under power factor control and doesn´t provide dynamic voltage control, as it limits the dynamic reactive power support that could otherwise help stabilise voltage

The worlds production of storage isn’t even sufficient to power germany for a week. Hence why germany is heavily dependent on gas. Mostly US liquified natural gas, and russian pipeline gas.

To me, it’s a surprising statement that, for the same amount of money, one can buy something that doesn’t exist. 🤔

In terms of engineering, it takes renewables + shitload of storage in order to have equivalent power generation characteristics to nuclear.

The recent portugal/spain power outage was due to the system being insufficiently damped (insufficient storage/inertia to buffer (the loss of) a high proportion of unpredictable power generation).

In Europe I think it’s mostly because of fear and fearmongering, for example by conservative groups such as greenpeace. (1)

They argue from an emotive point of view: nuclear energy feels unnatural, scary, industrial. Gas power generation on the other hand is the same old familiar technology, the enemy we know, with externalities we all seem to accept already (despite them being known to be worse for all).

For example, considering climate protection as the only goal nuclear power is a viable option for some. Most others however consider nuclear phase-out as a major Energiewende-goal. (Also from (1) )

Modern day lysenkoism, in essence.

Yes, it does. It’s scary how much perception changes

Except when it does (1)

Can you explain why and how? Do you imagine other (better?) batteries, or the disappearance of the need for batteries?

Show people that the left and center are able to provide

I wonder if they can, with the reversed population pyramid most EU countries experience.

In the early 90s something similar happened in Belgium (1).

What lessened the extremism in the following couple of elections was investment (in infrastructure, healthcare, economic opportunities, etc) outside of the cities as well.

It turned out that for every tax frank gathered, 80 cents were spend on prettifying the larger cities and the major port. People were mostly (rightly?) pissed off that government represented a terrible ROI for the same group of people for decades. They would’ve been better of without a federal government. They saw their lives get worse, whilst at the same time that government applauded themselves for the great things they achieved.

I’m not sure how feasible the same solution is today, as there’s very little investment budget anyways. Most of tax revenue goes to pensions and healthcare of a reversed population pyramid.

those thoughts are prevalent enough to cause this problem.

Can take people out of the soviet, but can’t take soviet out of the people (1).

Sadly it’s a system of thought that isn’t concerned with observable reality. It’s a sentiment I recognise in most (political) extremists: the idea that your problems must be someone else’s fault (the brown, women, billionairs, … pick your poison).

And, as you noticed, banning it will indeed only validate that sentiment.

(I grew up in DDR, luckily left in early 90s. A solution is therapy, as those people are stuck in generational trauma, which is known to lessen or completely void you of empathy. But that doesn’t scale to halve a country).

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I prefer someone with neither napoleon nor jesus complex.

There’s no room next to the onion. That’s where I keep my other onion.