It can be both and I don't know how much I would trust the USG as the canary in the coal mine given their technical readiness typically seems low across most institutions in that they are probably more exposed because they haven't shored up their systems.
Yes, indeed it does. I didn't feel this way until I worked for a YC-backed startup tho. I mean, YC is the first to admit that not everything needs to be VC funded and some things just aren't good fit for that funding model. I think a code editor is one of them.
> I mean, YC is the first to admit that not everything needs to be VC funded and some things just aren't good fit for that funding model. I think a code editor is one of them.
Fully agree. I also feel like a lot of companies do not need to be on the stock market, especially if they're reasonably profitable, feels like the stock market is where you go to let go of more of your company just to get rid of the VCs whom you owe a lot of money to.
I remember when I was learning about entrepreneurship in college I was baffled by their insistence of an “exit strategy”. The idea just seemed so foreign to me. See I naively thought the point of starting a business was to do the business, not to not do it and sit next to a pile of money instead. Silly me.
Not at all a wild bet. German electricity prices *routinely* swing by over 150€/MWh on a daily basis year round. That's a massive spread to make money off of.
For a good chunk of the year (April through to October), the prices even go negative at mid-day most days of the week. This will pay itself off very quickly
Why wild bet? It seems to be a safe bet that intermittent solar and wind availability will continue to create huge price swings, which storage can exploit and reduce to almost everyone's everyone's benefit. The investment just takes a while to break even, that's all. And with LFP or other long life battery technology, it will pay off for quite a while after break-even.
BESS asset life isn't great so a longer paypack period runs up against product life. Without running the actual model (volume, frequence and price differential) its tough to tell how quick it happens though I am sure I could build that relatively quickly if I wanted to (assuming granularity of public data).
My main point is that its a very large asset so you can't external forces come and mess up the financials (such as policy, regulatory changes, or large infra jump in that area) to make good on that bet. Certainly some public dollars being put to work to de-risk the bet.
Couldn't ask for better unintended outcomes from that Iran war than to fast track deployment of renewable and nuclear energy.
Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds.
Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...
Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.
The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
Saying gas has relatively little emissions reminds me of the joke german car manufacturers are making about their latest combustion cars using relatively little fuel ('hocheffizienzverbrenner'). It's marginal gains. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-... Gas is 200gCO2e/kWh, plain old diesel is 260. Better than nothing but not going to make a big dent
Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)
> all the three renewable power generation sources drop below 10% of their capacities for a substantial period of time (approximately ranging from 30% to 50%). Typically, offshore wind power production has a higher capacity factor in comparison to its onshore counterpart. On average, the Dunkelflaute events account for around 7%–8% of the time per year. These numbers do not vary much across the years.
That's a heck of a lot of gas still, and that's ignoring the "intermittency" part (that might mean every day after sunset, not a rare sequence of weather events). But yeah I guess they didn't mean it as an either-or that replaces other storage options
All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.
One upside -- is that SONGS being decommissioned gave the energy storage market the ability to level up in a big way back then. They filled part of the gap with some large MW procurements. Allowed BESS to be part of the collective energy solution. Nuclear + Solar + BESS + some small amounts of NG is a dream team.
"Ironically, what originally motivated pumped storage installations was the inflexibility of nuclear power. Nuclear plants’ large steam turbines run best at full power. Pumped storage can defer surplus nuclear power generated overnight (when consumption is low) to help meet the next day’s demand peak."
Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.
There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.
We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.
The difference between different generations is wildly different and regulations aren't structured to allow for upgrading. It becomes a cost and regulatory burden thing - might as well rebuild then upgrade, very little to do with safety.
And I agree. I think this is a place where the regulations are broken. They should be changed to encourage new gen nuclear be built. Ideally, they could be tweaked so that the sites of old nuclear plants can be reused to produce new nuclear plants.
> Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.
That's a bit of an impossible ask.
To give you a comparison with airplanes, F16 aren't "upgraded" to F35s. But there is an upgrade process, and F16s today are vastly different from F16s as they were in 1978.
Likewise for nuclear plants, reviews are done following incidents and new discoveries, and overhauls are done, both in terms of process and material changes. Gen2 plants aren't the same as they were when they were built.
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