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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • A lot of this dives deep into wishful thinking territory. We will need to spend trillions of dollars to make a pure renewable energy solution viable. People will find out that nuclear is not magically guaranteed to be more expensive. If it wasn’t the case, why are new nuclear reactors still being built and more are being planned?

    Germany is definitely rethinking it’s anti-nuclear position. Ignore the viewpoints of the current political group in charge. They are deeply unpopular. Politicians outside of that group are advocating for a return to nuclear.

    France is keeping and building more reactors. This is not a “more complicated story.” It is simple proof that nuclear is viable.






  • In the end, the solution will be to just ban most firearms and make it nearly impossible to get one outside of specific circumstances. It’s the same way gun violence was stopped in every country, and the rhetoric against that is the same broken record for 30+ years.

    Eventually, the concept of a “right to mass-murder/terrorism” will self-destruct, no matter how deeply embedded it is in legal the system. Even the constitution will eventually self-destruct if it gets too far away from meeting the necessities of modern life, something it is well on the path to doing so. So it’s time to stop pretending there is a trick solution to the problem, and start recognizing the problem exactly as it is.












  • At the end of the day, you are just turning sunlight/wind and water into a fuel. The marginal cost is nearly zero. Which is why the development trajectory will be the same as the rise of wind and solar energy. Both of those ideas also had nearly zero marginal cost. As a result, you can expect hydrogen fuel to be extreme cheap and basically inexhaustible. That is a major advantage and there is nothing batteries can ever do to match that.

    I wonder if you are projecting here: Hydrogen, not batteries, have many more applications. You can’t even make the steel used to make a car without a reducing agent like hydrogen. Same is true of the metals in the battery itself. So if we want to hit zero emissions for real, hydrogen is mandatory, but batteries are not. In fact, BEVs are totally dependent on green hydrogen to real reach zero emissions. Everything from industry to long-duration energy storage all requires hydrogen. You can skip BEVs altogether but you cannot avoid hydrogen.


  • Those are wildly exaggerated. The main limitation is that society hasn’t invested enough in hydrogen infrastructure. At least not yet. The problems would quickly go away if we did.

    You also forget that we’ve poured many billions of dollars into electrification and battery production. That amount of investment would have solved a lot of those limitations.

    As green hydrogen is made from water, there is basically no battery chemistry that can rival it in terms of availability. It is basically the best energy storage mechanism of this type already. Saying that batteries can get better is just misdirection. Also, you can have plug-in hydrogen cars too. The natural path is probably hybrids -> PHEVs -> plug-in FCEVs. Pure BEVs are in many ways a side-trip.