And the giant money incinerator!

The problem, as I often say, is that just because something demos well and it’s easier to buy something doesn’t mean it’s going to be good in production. If you have a solar farm but you need to build a coal plant large enough to power the island anyway because you don’t have dispatchable power, then you end up with Australia, California, or Ontario, where “the cheapest power” causes electricity costs to rise. Meanwhile, In places like Norway, Quebec, and iceland, those renewables actually drove down electricity costs because the marginal cost of energy is very low and you don’t need to double up your infrastructure even if it’s expensive and difficult to build up-front.

Imo one of the examples of renewables that someone needs to push (and I don’t care who, whichever team does it takes the win) is geothermal in hawaii. They import massive amounts of coal to generate 90% of their electricity and thus have some of the most expensive electricity in the US.

Easy win, it would make everyone on the islands life way better, and of course it isn’t even on the radar because it wouldn’t cost that much and it’d be really effective immediately.

Ya got me.

I registered a domain 23 years ago, maintained the site in various ways, set up a threadiverse instance with the least used federated link aggregator back around 2021, Expressed opinions that got me defederated by tons of instances and pissed off most of the remainder, and stayed following this community for years, all so that I could use a bot to respond to a post.

I don’t even know why I needed a bot at that point, since apparently I’m friggin Xanatos the chess master.

Feels like a category error to say that Trump is necessarily against renewable energy rather than just against specific types of renewable energy.

A lot of greenies are against hydroelectric because even though it provides base load power for decades or even centuries, the building of reservoir and the damning of a river typically has major environmental impacts that they feel override the benefits.

If there’s concern about offshore wind because of the potential – the actualized potential by the way in a limited number of cases – then that would explain why there would be the pushback against offshore wind.

The problem with water is that unlike land which tends to be fairly localized, just a little bit of pollution can affect an absurd amount of water. That’s why they tell people not to dump their motor oil in the ground, because one drop of motor oil can pollute thousands of gallons of water.

I tend to be less interested in solar because empirically speaking it seems to drive up electricity costs for actual consumers regardless of the cost of a specific kilowatt hour of electricity at peak production, and less interested in wind because sometimes it is bright or cold and the wind doesn’t blow, the Germans already have a word for this because it is relatively common.

That being said, there’s no reason to be against good technology that actually does what it’s supposed to do, and that can mean hydroelectric, it can mean well regulated nuclear, it can mean geothermal, but just because something is marketed as green doesn’t mean that it is actually good for the environment. Everything at an industrial scale is a out trade-offs. Different people will look at things through different lenses and find different trade-offs more example and other trade-offs less acceptable.

Let them eat cake, n’est pas?

interesting piece of trivia: In 2003ish, there was a major power outage across the northwestern US and much of eastern Canada. One major issue was that the grid became desynchronized so resynchronizing was a major problem they had to solve to bring the grid back up. The province of Quebec uses high voltage DC lines (and also massive amounts of hydroelectric power, but that’s a conversation for another day) so they didn’t have that same problem and had returned their power to normal long before the rest of the region.

I really like this post, it gets down to nitty gritty brass tacks and brings some data.

That’s usually the thing that gets me grumpy about such conversations, people don’t bother discussing the realities of actually doing the thing, they just trade feel good articles about how everything is fine.

One thing about the paper is, the cost of high voltage DC lines is likely assuming you’re on land. Bringing the energy in from sea could be even more expensive, since you need much more expensive equipment, the environment is brutal, repairs involve sending people and material into that environment, and I have a feeling but I don’t know, I think that the movement of the offshore wind turbines could be mechanically stressful on cables that are relatively safe up in the air only dealing with wind (and they still can cut right through insulators swinging in the wind and vibrating at 60hz)

It really isn’t.

Hydroelectric and geothermal are utility scale renewable energy. Solar just drives up electricity prices.

Hydroelectric.

I always end up looking like I hate green energy because I’m critical of wind and solar, but geothermal and hydroelectric are actually super practical.

My NFTs may be down 98%, but they’re going to the moon!!!

I bought my pets.com stock on this logic back in 1999, as well as my beanie babies.

They’re focusing on NFTs now.

Look, if you want to argue with me that the US healthcare system is broken, you’ll get no argument from me.

The US government spends more public money per person than Canada, and yet most people in the United States need to pay for entirely Private health insurance. It’s a fantastic example of the brokenness of the US system. For the amount of money being fought for in the US healthcare system, there should be one of the world’s best single-payer options.

And you can’t even get partisan on it because the current system was put into place by supermajority democrats. Most people forget that.

But that’s the problem. When you’re dealing with a corrupt government, it doesn’t really matter what nice ideas are on the table. They take your money or the money from your great-grandkids, and they hand it to their buddies, you ain’t in the club.

And that goes for healthcare, that goes for green energy, it goes for whatever you’ve got.

All you’re seeing here is a changing of the guard where money stops being sent to one set of rich people who probably could have afforded to do something on their own so that it can be sent to another set of rich people who probably could have afforded to do something on their own.

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You can’t break even you can’t break even.

How many guys shovelling shit for a living get taxed to high heaven so some farmer can have 800,000 in government money?

The only ones that seem to not be like that are hydroelectric and geothermal, since they’re baseload. Which is why they’re the two I advocate for the loudest – why not use stuff that works?

Ideally the ground should be as close to the cold water pipe entering the house as you can get, yeah.

Honestly, I wouldn’t want to just use my cold water line well into the house as a ground for exactly that sort of reason.

In many jurisdictions, connecting to the copper cold water line is acceptable. The copper line runs through the ground and so is essentially the same as a grounding electrode.

IMO, AI is a really good demo for a lot of people, but once you start using it, the gains you can get from it end up being somewhat minimal without doing some serious work.

Reminds me of 10 other technologies that if you didn’t get in the world was going to end but ended up more niche than you’d expect.