Yup, love the adrenaline rush, the simple "get up with this heavy shit on you" on it.
After running for a decade without any spectacular performance to speak of and constant weight issues, one year of powerlifting 2x a week - not only is every single health metric better with less running, possibly the best they've ever been, at a point where they should be declining; my running is hitting PBs as well.
Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects.
Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap".
You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
They're absolutely dual use, which is why the greens have always been against them.
But that's like trying to prevent cow rearing by outlawing mince. You don't rear a cow for mince, you rear it for steak. The customer will pay for steak pretty much whatever.
My country just had ~180 GWh of lost load from wind, in winter. That's not even a 1-in-5 event, that's a multiple-times-per-year event, and it's billions in cost to the economy. Industry is dead, I've personally seen steel orders go to China because even if renewables were free we could't handle delivery estimates of "lol idk", and nor can anyone else. I just can't comprehend the levels of denial around this, as if my and literally everyone with industrial experience is irrelevant. Data centres want SMRs and that's the easiest, most trivial task to time-shift around I can imagine. Electricity that is not reliable is not the same product, it is not even a comparable product, in no other field would it be treated as such, and if you can't provide an actual monetary estimate for turning it into a reliable product, not just "iT's gEtTiNg cHeApEr BRO", you should not be in this conversation.
More efficient, but much more expensive. I'm sick of people handwaving $100 per kWh. That is two orders of magnitude off where it needs to be to do anything more than virtue signal.
Meanwhile multiple grids are now paying renewable to curtail, because guess what, the variability is correlated (it's the exact same damn mathematics we used to fuck up the entire global economy in 2008, which is why I'm so surprised people are handwaving that too, but whatever). If you want to minimise cost without relying on gas to save you on dark still days, you want a cheap use for the surplus, round-trip be damned.
They may never have been amazing, but that's the point - they were a representative, middle-of-road brand and you could just assume their clothes would last. I've got a >10 year old shirt that's still fine and a new one that's holed after a single wash. It's not a QA fail, the loss of quality is very clearly deliberate.
Aspiration for 20 GW of power by 2040, or in 15 years time.
In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago, France installed 34 GW of nuclear.
All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available.
Or to agree that we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating carbon-free energy.
If there's a single watt demanded by the grid and NOT supplied by gas, or coal or nuclear, because there sure as shit aren't batteries within three orders of magnitude of competitive at TWh scale, the entire grid fucking stalls and dies. At best guess, we can restart it, once.
Your renewable energy is worth 0 if it can't meet that need. No other power supply anywhere works on the principle of "yay maybe!". It's not a fucking game, it's our capacity to heat, to operate industrial processes that are equally worthless if interrupted. I've been involved in ordering steel. The UK-spec was uncompetitive if free, because of the unpredictability in delivery, directly downstream from the unpredictability in power. THERE IS A WAR ON.
It certainly leads to less sex. Seems a lot of vaguely-defined experts (economists/demographers/??) are very concerned we're not having enough, so more impulse-regulating drugs seem relevant.
Then again, maybe everyone being a 10 would level that out a bit?
> What do you mean by "metals don't actually withstand temperature"? As in the raw metal would melt were it not for the cooling vanes?
They creep. Have you seen, for instance, Blu-tac or glue fail? It doesn't go at once, but slowly, over a period of time. At high temperatures most metals (others on this thread have mentioned single-crystal blades) behave a bit like that.
Although steel is also weaker at temperatures far below its melting point, yes. A simple observation of a blacksmith at work should tell you that. And a think some new jets may be running hotter than Tm for steel now?
> The lower power setting on shutdown does what? Spin it at a low RPM so it doesn't decrease in temp too quickly?
Yup, or more relevantly evenly, although those tend to be related. Given almost all materials expand as they get hotter and contract as they cool, different cooling rates between parts -> different contraction rates -> different relative shape -> Very Bad in precision machinery.
And that's why Georgism exists! You can't offshore a plot of land.
If you've really managed to generate trillions in profit without using any, including indirectly (mining, showrooms, etc), fair enough. If your economic model is quite literally rent seeking, you can fuck off and give all those proceeds to whatever government ensures that land is not overrun by whatever raiders are historically a problem in your area. If you work for a living, you should be able to spend your earnings on a fancy apartment if you wish, and if a landlord wishes to make one instead of just sitting on land, they keep the profits from that too.
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.
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.
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.
After running for a decade without any spectacular performance to speak of and constant weight issues, one year of powerlifting 2x a week - not only is every single health metric better with less running, possibly the best they've ever been, at a point where they should be declining; my running is hitting PBs as well.
The downside, I'm a bore about it.