just thinking: why stop at 2? I suppose a grid of heat towers with mirrors beneath would provide maximum utilization of the solar radiation

its the marginal cost of running existing plants, mainly from fuel cost.

The political context here is that the Australian conservatives (the liberal coalition I suppose), who have been vividly against climate policies and renewables, are now trying to propose nuke projects on coal power plant sites. Many of these coal power plants are soon to be phased out with renewables plus storage in the queue for the freed transmission capacity, so there isn’t really any advantages these sites can offer for nuke projects decades from now.

Of course, any realistic realization of nukes in Australia would be no earlier than 2040 (some even suggest 2050), by then they could already get 100% renewable in energy system easily.

my understanding is that Taiwan buys weapons from the us, so he is demanding something that is already a common practice

just a reminder if they put the orange diamonds for wind and solar it would probably lie somewhere near zero $/MWh

It is highly dependent of the local geological conditions. Convection-based geothermal plants (those with hot spring flowing around) probably have less constraints on heat extraction limit. Conduction-based geothermal plants will face more problems.

In some shallow geothermal use case the ground is used as seasonal heat storage so heat renewable rate is not an issue.

The moemorphic character shown in the picture is Archchan, created by ravimo. I wonder why show her in a discussion about Mint?

It’s not a good analogy. A better analogy might be a community that promotes a Linux distro that runs exclusively on Chromebook and claims that that is the ONLY private and secure way to use a computer.

Some people are still using current primary energy supply share of renewables to bash wind and solar. Given the rapid adoption of these techs, such unfair metric will become more and more irrelevant. Once thermal electricity generation becomes the exception, electricity becomes the main primary energy carrier. Some forms of secondary energy carriers will still exist (in form of green chemical molecules) but overall efficiency of the energy system will no doubt improve.

because simplified Chinese characters borrowed many words directly from Japanese kanji, so google translate still recognizes it.

Meanwhile the world still building wind solar battery faster than ever…

Since android are not subject to the risk, I wonder what happens if one connects the computer with hot spot from android.

Edited: just found out in the original report hot spot was also mentioned as a mitigation technique.

I hear you can self host sth called photovoltaic on your rooftop to get it for free!

If you are serious with this relationship (or you expect to still have Chinese partners in the future), I strongly recommend you buy a separate device for all the Chinese spywares required to maintain communication with your partner(s). At some point you will have to enter China, and it is best that you take only this device with you into it then.

Why don’t we store it and use it another time? Or we let other type of more meaning electricity demand do the load shifting?

Of course, if you are doing the computation for some vital services, it make sense to do VRE availability based demand side management as much as possible. But doing computation for some proof of work algorithm is basically computing for the sake of computing more, and I just cannot grasp the rationale behind it.

And this type of article reinforce the “too much renewable” myth. The problem is conventional power plants are still getting in the way and there is insufficient amount demand response and storage. The problem is not too much wind and solar.

And the article doesn’t even mention renewables once… I mean, the technologies that are actually bringing down electricity prices and emissions

To triple the RE capacity by 2030, we need to double the current speed, or linearly increase the deployment speed until it reach 1.5TW/yr by 2030.

Ambitious but totally feasible.

I remembered vividly when some people predicting soaring high coal electricity generation would occur in Germany for 2023 back in April. Of course, those who had been studying the actual Energiewende for a while knew that would never be the case.

Interestingly, most of Germany import in 2023 was also from renewables. One could say that German coal has been beatened by growing renewables both at home and abroad.

As for the ownership of wind energy, there were some famous cases of community owned wind projects in Germany and in Denmark, e.g. Wind Park Wiemersdorf and Middelgrunden (I just checked their website and they are still running quite well after more than 2 decades). The continual increase of single unit size has made community ownership less and less possible nowadays in these countries.

There are still some cases coming out, such as the proposal of a community windpark in Heidelburg and the one in NRW.

Recently other mechanisms are being proposed. In NRW a “citizen energy law” is being discussed so local residents near windparks might get discount in electricity or direct payments.

What surprised me was how little solar had been in Portugal and Spain. Most renewable growth had been wind. But that has been drastically changing in very recent years. This is a good thing in terms of citizen participation and cooperative ownerships, since solar is the easiest technology for ordinary people to possess and fully control. In terms of tech level, unless compared with diy small hydro or wind turbine, it is also the simplest among all the options for people who are not trying to build everything from scratch.