adrianN

27 ms·

721.
by adrianN 1y ago
Except black holes can be a lot more massive than the biggest stars.
722.
by adrianN 1y ago
The people paying the professors need to arrange for this
723.
by adrianN 1y ago
The point is that solar panels in landfills are not a problem and nuclear is not a panacea.
724.
by adrianN 1y ago
The radioactive material doesn’t go away, it’s either diluted until safe or concentrated until you can bury it somewhere safe.
725.
by adrianN 1y ago
Nuclear waste is not biodegradable either...
726.
by adrianN 1y ago
This is the first time I hear that there is strict (or any) electricity rationing in Germany and I've lived here all my life.
727.
by adrianN 1y ago
We can start worrying about storage once we reach 60-80% renewable and just keep using fossil fuels as backup. Nuclear doesn't replace storage (at least not if you don't want to run your nuclear plants at like half capacity)
728.
by adrianN 1y ago
Using it in aircraft cheaply is an unsolved problem. We know how to turn CO2 and water into jet fuel with enough energy input. It's just an order of magnitude more expensive than the fossil alternative.
729.
by adrianN 1y ago
Pretty hard to see precipitated dust at concentrations in the ppm range.
730.
by adrianN 1y ago
Germany has like three months worth of nat gas reserves. See for example https://www.intellinews.com/how-many-days-of-gas-consumption... . Building bigger gas tanks is not rocket science either.
731.
by adrianN 1y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if having bridges with 90 degrees angles is often better than having no bridges.
732.
by adrianN 1y ago
Hungary enters the chat.
733.
by adrianN 1y ago
As long as China keeps making the panels and selling them for cheap there is no problem at all with that. When they decide to stop doing that other countries can pick up after a short ramp up time, for a little more money.
734.
by adrianN 1y ago
Are old solar panels available at scale? They last for decades.
735.
by adrianN 1y ago
Solar panels are not that hard to produce. China just does it cheaper than other countries. Any industrialized country can easily set up the necessary infrastructure if they choose to do so for strategic reasons.
736.
by adrianN 1y ago
Power2Gas and using the existing infrastructure for gas storage is a known solution for storing months of power. It might not be the cheapest solution though.
737.
by adrianN 1y ago
To be fair, many countries have several months worth of gas reserves.
738.
by adrianN 1y ago
To be fair, renewables are only competitive after untold billions of subsidies have financed R&D
739.
by adrianN 1y ago
I did not claim that it's the cheapest method, I just pointed out that storing months worth of energy is feasible.
740.
by adrianN 1y ago
Most of the cost is capex, so you want to run them at full load all the time to recoup investments. That is a bad fit for a market that increasingly rewards flexible generation.
741.
by adrianN 1y ago
I think the point is that it looks like economics beat ecologics and renewables are getting built.
742.
by adrianN 1y ago
Most of Polands heating is probably not electric. But it’s not unreasonable to store months worth of power, many countries have gas reserves in that ballpark. You just have to replace natural gas with a synthetic fuel.
743.
by adrianN 1y ago
Germany has similar climate to Poland and manages around 60% renewable (and growing) with very little storage. A mix of wind and solar with fossil power plants for backup works reasonably well.
744.
by adrianN 1y ago
You can go to like 60-80% renewable with barely any storage in the system. Few countries are at the stage of the renewable rollout where they need to think about storage. Poland can easily double the amount of renewables without additional
745.
by adrianN 1y ago
Renewables are just really cheap. Unless the government is actively harming them for ideological reasons they get built. Baseload power plants have a harder time making a profit every year.
746.
by adrianN 1y ago
Areas with censorship will simply ban such services and make it a crime to participate.
747.
by adrianN 1y ago
Two hundred years ago London already had 1.4M inhabitants.
748.
by adrianN 1y ago
That’s very good news. I wonder whether we have the tools to follow up on this research. Designing interventions and measuring success seems exceedingly difficult to me as a layman.
749.
by adrianN 1y ago
Yeah that sound about right given that we’ve burned enough coal already to lower whole regions by dozens of meters.
750.
by adrianN 1y ago
Turning it into charcoal has the slight benefit that you get a little energy out of it.

More ›