> I feel like the most sensible policy is requiring licenses for e-bikes above a certain power level (not easy!) and then bringing parity to the treatment of cars vs e-bikes after that
Au contraire, it is fairly easy.
Around here, e-vehicles are classified according to weight, power amd max speed. These parameters define where and how you can use them, what features are required, what protective gear is required and what licenses or insurance are required to operate them.
> When French nuclear plants get shut down for months at a time for maintenance what happens?
You reconsider your life choices and hire the Finnish to run your nuclear power plants instead.
> The reason why batteries and pumped storage and syngas arent popular is because they cant beat the economics of gas for peaking capacity.
It’s not even just the economics that rule out batteries and pumped storage. Where are you going to put all that pumped storage? Where are you going to get all the batteries you need? Not that many batteries are produced compared to the world’s energy needs.
The jury is still out on syngas. So far it’s expensive and inefficient. But it’s still early days.
> the fact its a horrible peaker
Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful. You run a nuclear power plant at full tilt, all the time. Then you divy up any excess demand to other sources of power.
> So yeah, exorcising nuclear seems like a pretty fantastic idea, for cost, environmental and pacifist reasons.
This seems to be a wonderful idea, as long as you assume nobody lives above the 60th parallel and don’t mind on relying on CO2 producing power sources.
> Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful. You run a nuclear power plant at full tilt, all the time. Then you divy up any excess demand to other sources of power.
Because you have no choice. There simply are not takers for your expensive energy when competing against zero marginal cost renewables.
In Australia there are grids which sometimes are met to 107% with rooftop solar alone. [1] All utility scale renewables are curtailed, let alone expensive thermal plants.
In these grids what was previously "base load" plants running at full tilt 24/7 are forced to become peakers or shut down. [2]
>You reconsider your life choices and hire the Finnish to run your nuclear power plants instead.
The French made Finnish plant or the Moscow made Finnish plant?
It would be a cool party trick if Finland tried building its own nuclear power plants instead of just suing the French for cost overruns.
>It’s not even just the economics that rule out batteries and pumped storage
The economics dont rule them out - not unless you treat the environment as disposable.
They're much more cost effective when paired with solar and wind than nuclear power, they just dont get the subsidies.
>Where are you going to put all that pumped storage?
You might be confusing it with river dams for which the geography is actually scarce. There was actually a paper that identified a truly enormous number of potential sites globally for pumped storage. Google can easily find it for you if you have an ounce of curiosity about this.
>Where are you going to get all the batteries you need?
Make them? Did you think theyd fall out of the sky?
>The jury is still out on syngas
Syngas only makes economic sense once natural gas is banned/made cost prohibitive and solar+wind are regularly overproducing what can be otherwise stored or used.
It'd still be cheaper to only use syngas made with solar and wind than to use nuclear energy just coz nuclear energy is that absurdly, fantastically, stupidly expensive.
>Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful.
You wouldnt it's even more economically hemmoraging than using it for baseload but some people think it's a substitute for natural gas because technically it can peak.
Nuclear almost always pairs itself with natgas for peaking just like solar and wind currently do during dark, windless days.
>This seems to be a wonderful idea, as long as you assume nobody lives above the 60th parallel
A) Not many do live up there and B) there is NO shortage of available wind and hydro power options up there.
So I guess you admit it is a wonderful idea.
Of all of your critiques this is the oddest.
>don’t mind on relying on CO2 producing power sources.
Did you read the link I posted at the top? It was written before you responded to me but it was meant for you.
The straw man I referred to in that post was the one you just made.
> Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful. You run a nuclear power plant at full tilt, all the time. Then you divy up any excess demand to other sources of power.
When solar is producing, it's at a faction of the cost of nuclear. So when you say "you run it a full tilt", who is going to voluntarily pay the nuclear price for power when it costs far more?
You see that play out in countries with lots of solar now. Where I live the wholesale price goes negative most days [0]. I think driver behind this is coal makes it's money overnight, but can't ramp down quickly. Consequently when the sun comes up they have to dump power onto the grid while ramping down, forcing the other suppliers (solar, wind) off. The coal generators end up paying for the privilege of doing that. It's even worse than it seems because by the time that dumped power arrives at the consumers, it's had transmission and other changes added to it - which means the consumer is still paying something for it. Therefore any consumer that has solar doesn't take it, which reduces the market still further. That mechanism has sent a number of coal generators into early retirement here.
Nuclears ramping is worse than coals, so if the invisible market forces are left to operate freely, if the are going to have to pay someone for the privilege of running full tilt as you suggest. That can only work if governments artificially subsidise the price, or force consumers to pay more.
It is getting worse for coal here as batteries get cheaper. Coal makes most of it's money between 4PM and 9PM - which is both peak consumption and there is no solar. So they charge like a wounded bull. But batteries have halved in price over the last 5 years or so, and 5kWh battery will get you through that high price period. Because the price is so high, the battery prices have just crossed the line - it's now break even to install a small battery. In a couple of years, it will become a "no brainer". And with that coal will lose it's major market.
I have no idea what the end game is. May the price coal charges for 9PM .. 8AM goes through the roof - but that will just make a 20kWh battery cost effective. So then what? Does coal shut down completely? How does that work for industries that need a lot of power overnight? I don't know - maybe it becomes cost effective to build pumped storage at that point. I know for me personally coal shutting down won't not matter. We have a 25kWh battery (and once V2G becomes a thing we will have a gob smacking 150kWh of storage for the house), we have over provisioned solar that means even on dim days we make enough power to get by is we are careful.
I have no idea what happens for everyone else - but I'm pretty sure whatever it is, it won't be nuclear. It's too expensive, and too inflexible. So inflexible the nation with most pumped storage per unit generation was ... Japan. Because it used mostly nuclear, can't even ramp well enough to cope with the day / night transition.
> When solar is producing, it's at a faction of the cost of nuclear. So when you say "you run it a full tilt", who is going to voluntarily pay the nuclear price for power when it costs far more?
Nuclear have high fixed cost, but very small marginal cost. So once you have a nuclear power plant, the more you produce, the cheaper it is.
It doesn't matter if the running costs are minimal if the capex is sky high, the site clean up costs are sky high, the insurance costs are sky high and the lifetime is fixed.
The total cost is what matters and the total cost is absurdly expensive.
If you used a nuclear plant during its entire lifetime as a peaker at, say, an average of 50% of max capacity, the average kilowatt hour would be TEN times the cost of the average kilowatt hour sourced directly from solar panels or a wind turbine, ~7-8x the cost of the average kilowatt hour generated from gas and probably about 4-5x the cost of the average kilowatt hour sourced from solar/wind via battery/pumped storage and over 2x the cost of the average kilowatt hour from solar/wind via syngas.
The fixed cost might be sky high, but the marginal cost are not. And so it doesn't matter if it also produce when electricity is cheap. (To a certain limit)
And if you compare the total cost, you also need to compare to the total revenue. Nuclear can produce a lot of power at the time where power is the most expensive when there is no sun and no wind.
I did count and compare those things. That was my entire point. Even on the darkest most windless night it cant match the cost of solar and wind and storage.
Those ongoing costs are not so low anyway. France spent an absolute fortune on maintenance.
What’s the big deal? It’s just a content cache. You can get dedicated cache appliances directly from Netflix for free if you have a large enough customer base.
Nothing wrong with the concept of net neutrality. Implementations may be lacking, but I do not recall any major issues with the EU regulations. Perhaps all the perceived silliness is a result of the US legislature?
Isn't "preferential caching" just Netflix providing a caching server for free to the ISP? Is this that different from Netflix building more CDN servers worldwide? It is Netflix paying in either case without exploiting their monopoly powers.
Clearly not a pro but I think it comes down to who Netflix is paying, or even helping out. Because they gave Nextlight a free caching server, any competitor who can't afford to do the same now has decreased performance.
That is an interesting way of looking at things. Netflix adding a cache has absolutely no impact on what any competitor does, or the quality of their service. It will function precisely the same the day before and the day after a Netflix cache is installed.
Actually at the very large ISP I worked at customers saw better performance because the back haul wasn’t congested with Netflix traffic.
Doesn’t matter. If a real war starts you want a lot of men and the only reliable way is conscription. No one could have fought WW2 with a volunteer military. Ukraine aren’t relying on volunteers. Israel don’t rely on volunteers. You do the best you can with what you’ve got available.
Peace-time armies will not ask for that, that’s for sure, but when a real war is on the table (like it looks to soon be the case here in Europe) then things change.
This is definitely one of those citation needed comments.
Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
Secondly, the above comment completely sidesteps the moral aspects. Why should the burden of military service fall predominantly on the poor and the desperate? Why should decision makers be able to only send other people’s children to war?
To your first point, it really ought not require a citation to understand that people who have been training full-time for years make better soldiers than people you pull out of civilian life and ship off to the front after a few months, and who want nothing more than to exit the service.
There is no modern, professionalized army that wants conscripts. None. Conscripts are a liability, and a measure of last resort.
To your second, it’s far from just the downtrodden that fill the ranks of professional armies. In many countries, e.g. France (where I served), the upper classes of society (grande bourgeoisie and nobility) are over-represented in the ranks.
> Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
This isn’t true. The US and UK conscript armies of WW1 and WW2 were significantly healthier and better educated than the general population. Lots of people grew up in wretched poverty and had deficiency diseases or were malnourished or had parasites. Those people were rejected.
It is illegal for the US military to accept recruits with an ASBAB score of ten or below, roughly equivalent to IQ 83. The military is in some sense representative but it is not a random sample.
Why do you imply that non mandatory conscription means that the poor or desperate will be the ones to enroll?
In Romania around 2008 mandatory drafting was removed from the constitution and yet we still have an army. The reason why we have such a small army is in a significant part due to pervasive corruption in all of the state's structures, low salaries and abusive higher ups. We have an interesting documentary about the subject (has english subtitles) about the ridiculous state of the army due to reasons mentioned. https://youtu.be/0_YnxJJcC7M?feature=shared
That's a very un-European view that would mark you as crazy here. Nobody goes to the army to get a job, not even those who can't find a job, and the unemployment office won't try to suggest it - it's not considered a job here, it's a service duty.
In my country we don't have mandatory military service. The "employer of the last resort" is the unemployment office and welfare, not army. I have never heard of anybody going to the army for any other than duty/ideological reasons, desperation for a job might even disqualify you - they want people who are motivated to join the army, not poor desperate people looking for money.
I am in the United States. It isn’t a categorical truth here, but many people here have and do join the US military because that is the “ticket out” that they have access to. I saw it a lot in my high school. I had some friends who were good people but they were not terribly academically gifted, their families were poor, and college wasn’t a realistic option for them. Several of them joined the military in part due to the recruiters that would visit the school. During my senior year of high school one of those guys ended up being the recruiter that visited my high school. It was interesting to see a bit of a cycle there.
It’s almost a trope here. I expect that’s why the original commenter said that the military is the employer of last resort. In the US that is often the case for many young people.
Yeah I know it is in the US, but military recruiters visiting a school class would be a major nationwide scandal here, comparable only maybe to visits of some political or religious figures. The only approvable way is a moderated discussion where both positives and negatives are (must be) voiced in age-appropriate way.
The entire culture around the separation of state, its components and citizens is very different here. We really don't want another 40 years of dictatorship - best to stop it right at the beginning.
Different culture and society. Here you get paid better as a supermarket clerk with overtimes than a soldier, or clearly better if you get promoted from a clerk to/pick another role (shift manager, or warehouse work). And our desperate also use the travel flexibility to work in Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, than here. We used to be the source of manual labour during summer in many of those countries.
This topic was talking about conscription though, a measure of last resort.
If we really reach a point where conscription is required, it also means that carrying an uterus is probably irrelevant: it's either kill or be killed.
Hopefully that's never going to be a thing again in as many countries as possible
What you are looking for is charging passengers per weight.