If you're working for a grid operator tell me how many TWh you need to sustain a 1-in-20 - A 1-in-goddamn-20 - dunkelflaute in a single large European nation, multiplied by cost of storage. Not the "decline", the absolute cost, and what percentage of GDP it would be. Compare and contrast to military expenditure at a time of near-war.
Yes, I have some numbers. Wholesale electricity costs since 2020 have repeatedly exceeded 700 - SEVEN HUNDRED - Euros per MWh (1). Because it was dark and still, a condition every single European in the last ten thousand years has known to exist. That's your number.
I won't ask you what impact you think that has on, say, steelmaking, because I've lived it. I've picked the tenders and the Euro steel was not competitive with Chinese steel if it was free, due to uncertainty in delivery date.
China spent approx 2x Hinkley Point on nuclear. It has 30 GW of capacity in return. That works in winter. I would do nasty things to get that for my country.
(1) Naturally, French nuclear is literally not allowed to access this price, and must sell at 45. Because FREE MARKET.
I don't see how your numbers (for which a source and some additional context would be appreciated) support your original point ("solar in Germany makes no sense").
As an actual counterpoint, please consider this recent study by Fraunhofer ISE [1], which provides average generation costs for various types of power plants. Even with current battery prices, large scale PV plants supported by battery systems are significantly cheaper than coal, gas and nuclear plants -- and this advantage is expected to increase with falling prices of both battery storage and PV systems.
The most valuable company in Europe is Louis Vitton. Forgive me, I don't think Putin's quaking in his boots about when they'll weigh in.
GDP was a good war metric for an industrial economy, and fucking terrible for a services based one. There's never one metric that describes all. You know it, Goodhart knew it, anyone was worked with metrics ever knows it. This is rather important and frankly I don't get the glibness. Russia's not an unstoppable force but it's not a joke either.
Those transmission components are expected to cost the taxpayer at least £54 bn (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62085297). Transmission, of course, doesn't solve storage, which, to quote the article, "can’t really be stored or stockpiled on an industrial scale". Because it can't. Batteries are orders of magnitude less than what is needed, as is hydro.
Do you think anyone would be building mammoth turbines in the North of Scotland without access to the Southern markets? Oh yes please, I really want to invest several billion pounds in order to serve Ullapool and Wick, that makes my capitalist bones tingle.
But "nuclear expensive", and of cause that isn't to do with the planning process at all. Not if you have a competing product to sell.
The UK has the most expensive electricity in the developed world, and approximately 10 times the CO2 footprint per kWh of France, or of France since the 1980s. If the goal of the renewable energy policy was to be a world leader, it has dramatically failed.
> Batteries are orders of magnitude less than what is needed
The Chinese are about to do to the battery market what they did to the solar panel market: they are going to make the bottom drop out.
Even with current battery price projections, the German transmission operators got applications for 240 GWh (peak output of 160 GW) of new industrial battery storage capacity, in 2024 alone [0]. Not all of those applications will result in realized batteries on the grid (they probably can't even connect that many), but as of today, the financials work out and now investors want to connect more industrial storage to the grid.
So batteries in Great Britain will grow - by orders of magnitude. And the nice thing is that a battery build-up like this takes a lot of strain out of the transmission lines. It allows local renewable production to be used to an even greater extend, and if local production falls short, the existing transmission lines don't need to deliver peak loads cross-country, but instead can charge the local batteries before and after a projected peak demand.
£54 bn over eight years is around 0.2% of the UK's GDP. A lot of money, but doesn't sound unreasonable for a major overhaul of a central price of infrastructure.
Ruling out the possibility of storing energy at industrial scale might also not age terribly well.
Especially if the energy being stored is heat. Heat is embarrassingly storable, much more cheaply per unit energy than electrical energy. Any industry that uses heat can be a target for thermal storage of renewable energy.
They do work. My best analogy is it's like working at TSA except there are three terrorist attacks per week.
As far as privacy goes, by the same analogy, I can guarantee the operators don't care what porn you watch. Doing the job is more important. But still, treat your work machine as a work machine. It's not yours, it's a tool your company lent to you to work with.
That said, on HN your workers are likely to be developers - that does take some more skill, and I'd advise asking a potential provider frank questions about their experience with the sector, as well as your risk tolerance. Devs do dodgy stuff all the time, and they usually know what they're doing, but when they don't you're going to have real fun proving you've remediated.
Nobody cares. bryanlarsen has it correct, you need to satisfy demand.
Germany is exporting because it produces useless renewable power. It is useless because it does not satisfy the demand. The demand is on dark, cold days, it is for processes that are useless if they are interrupted.
Have you honestly tried buying steel for a project? I have, the vast majority of European suppliers are now borderline useless. Delivering early is as bad as delivering late, bad enough that if the product was free I'd think twice, and they do both.
And no, storage of energy is not cost-competitive. Not even with nuclear. Not even within two orders of magnitude at the scale required, which is not kWh, not MWh, not even GWh, but tens of TWh. The best I've seen gives you time to cold start a gas plant, and that's it. That is what the battery sector gives as achievement. It's not enough and it's not close.
Assuming they're at least a good a judge of what makes them happy as you are, how is this resource not being used for whatever "humanitarian" purposes are? Or are we only allowed resources as far as FEMA tents?
Sure, maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy, but I put it to you the burden of proof for that's on you.
I'd further put it that the resources used for these data centers, like Meta engineers, would in fact be pretty bloody useless at solving Sudanese famine, even if by some miracle they're actually good at the farming part, so can we please drop this weird argument that the cost of these things is automatically an opportunity cost in humanitarian purposes? Because it isn't.
Facebook has literal psychology experts on staff to make the platform as addictive as possible. Treating it as matter of willpower is uneducated and naive.
75% of the west is obese/overweight thanks to their own free will too. Because A: free will doesn't exist and B: the top mind of the world are all paid $$$ by companies to make sure you consume their shit no matter the social/health cost
> maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy
Is that all there is to life ? Then high fructose corn syrup must be paradise
Interesting, "the Office of Rail and Road ... issued Network Rail with an improvement notice"
For the benefit of readers not versed with UK regulation, an improvement notice is a formal instrument under the powers of the Health and Safety Executive. Whilst short of a prosecution notice, it definitely indicates that the powers that be are Officially Not Happy with, in this case, Network Rail.
Right, I think the industry is too self-critical at times.
I onboarded a new client recently, and within five minutes of guessing a Wi-Fi password I had sensitive financial data using stock tools. Anyone with physical access to the office could do the same. Contrast an existing client, after a month of trying and writing custom shellcode loaders, spear phishing campaigns, my entire team had... some graduate CVs.
Really, you're saying that because the NSA could probably do a better job with the latter than us by intercepting and hardware-hacking networking gear, that no value has been provided?
That's a lovely saying, although the main issue currently seems to be that, in the West, we are currently not good at making more humans. See various demographic crises.
It is not surprising that the message of "We are facing demographic collapse" correlates strongly with "We need highly capable robotic workers". Especially among certain high profile people. I just don't see it coming together like those proponents say it will.
Any other comments about the truthiness of those statements or the truthiness of the correlation will just get into politics, so I'll stop before that.
Nah, we've just outsourced production to countries with cheaper labour costs.
It's a great deal: somebody else somewhere else deals with changing the diapers, and yet there will be a tax base to keep the country running when I'm retirement age.
You're just stealing from another pool of limited size. Birthrates all across the world have dropped significantly. You only have so many decades left of people importation.
If you're working for a grid operator tell me how many TWh you need to sustain a 1-in-20 - A 1-in-goddamn-20 - dunkelflaute in a single large European nation, multiplied by cost of storage. Not the "decline", the absolute cost, and what percentage of GDP it would be. Compare and contrast to military expenditure at a time of near-war.
I also know these numbers.