tfourb

Remote places don’t have a lack of jobs because of a lack of energy (many of them have a lot of it), but because they are remote. Exploration of a new resource might change how remote they are (Dubai is less remote today than before oil was discovered), but only if the resource is sobering with developing linkages for. Not sure why it would be worth tapping underwater volcanoes in a currently remote place when there are plenty of geothermal sources in less remote places available.

Meanwhile, New York exports its trash to the mid west and microplastics are found on the top of Mount Everest.

I live in Germany and my 12 kwp solar produces more energy than I need throughout the year for a house and a family of four including charging my car. Even if it would produce only 6 months a year, it world be a decent Investment and I get more like 9 months worth barely any grid supply out of it. The only reason we don’t go full offgrid is that the wood stove for heating in winter would be much more expensive to build and run than buying energy from the grid. What the hell are you talking about?

By the way: the number of power cuts I have experienced in the past 10 years is 1, because some idiot rammed a powerpole somewhere. The number of times I read about a power cut in the USA somewhere is more or less daily.

Managers bet their companies on more stupid stuff all the time. Elon Musk just bet SpaceX and Twitter on datacenters in space …

In the political reality of Germany there is literally 0 chance that these tax cuts won’t be extended. Low investment by BASF has many reasons, but their inability to get politicians to extend that tax cut isn’t one of them.

It's most likely due to a rebate or cash back when changing providers. You can save a lot of money by switching providers every 12 months and taking cash back into account. If you have dispatchable loads (i.e. flexible charging of an electric vehicle) and a suitable electricity meter, you can also save a lot of money be choosing a dynamic tariff that tracks market prices (plus taxes etc).

Not exactly the same. Buildout of the grid in Germany lacks behind buildout of renewable capacity. Thus, when we have strong winds or a lot of sun, a lot of renewable production actually gets blocked at the source and/or the price of electricity goes to 0 or even negative (though you still pay taxes, so for the conumser, usage isn't free even with dynamic tariffs).

In these scenarios, using more (renewable) electricity actually has no net effect at all, as it is purely from additional production, which is only available because you use it. I live in a region in Germany with a lot of wind and solar and I regularly see my PV plant be capped by the local energy company and the wind turbines around my village standing still despite a stiff breeze. Every kwh I use from my own PV in this case is free energy in the most expansive meaning of the word.

Same effect for green (planted) roofs. They can increase pv production above them by around 5% annually our installer told us.

1.8 MWh, highest production since we built our 12 kWp system five years ago.

Hungary just instituted quite extreme power savings policies (including stopping all industrial train traffic during the day), because it can't cool its nuclear power plant due to a lack of water in the Danube and 40% of its electricity production went bye bye. Same situation in Romania and France had similar problems a few years ago and will likely have them again this year.

"Green" supporters prefer renewable energy, because it allows you to build a resilient and distributed network of production, distribution and storage that can't be easily disrupted by any one shock event at the fraction of the cost of nuclear (if you count subsidies and government financed research, not even considering the socialization of insurance against accidents).

The tax reduction will almost certainly be extended and not be allowed to sunset. Industry electricity costs are more or less in line with other highly developed countries around the world and will remain so. Also, many larger industrial companies do not source their electricity from the common grid, but have dedicated power plants and increasingly their own investments in renewable energy production.

Civilized countries regulate the rates that lawyers can charge for standard work. Also lawyers get only reimbursed for reasonable costs by the loser. Still expensive, but not absurdly so.

> In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:

The website does not open for me. Are the quoted prices consumer prices including tax or wholesale prices before tax?

If it’s the latter, 8 cents is not that cheap and comparable to the average price per kWh (all sources) in Germany. In most cases in most places, the lion’s share of electricity costs is tax and infrastructure refinancing, not actual production. Levellized cost of PV+storage is well below new nuclear virtually in every deployment scenario.

> For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:

Because NG is one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity, if you are not producing NG yourself locally AND don’t have to pay for environmental costs.

> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?

Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).

And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.

> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?

I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?

We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.

> The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days.

Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.

> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.

You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.

>> Power transmission is a thing. > It is not a thing you can trust.

You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?

For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.

> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.

Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?