But surely it's not an apple to apples comparison?
Wind farms can only generate electricity when it's windy. While you might be able to get cheaper energy from wind when it's windy, but unlike other technologies such as gas or nuclear with wind you still need to build out and maintain infrastructure for base power load when it's not windy.
Surely you need to factor that double build cost in with wind and solar since it's not required if you were to build out say nuclear power plants with similar output?
It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity. And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt. Most of the cost is drilling wells, liquifying gas, shipping it, unloading it, etc. All those other costs are much lower because the generators only run a small fraction of the time.
If you go to https://winderful.uk and set the date range to a year, you can get a sense of how many long dips there are.
> It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity.
The expected load factor for offshore wind power is around 50%. Much better than onshore wind (~35%) but still far from perfect. You can compensate some part of it by installing more power than what you need, but then you must pay for the unused capacity (£1.5B paid last year).
> And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
A day maybe, but in winter night last up to 16 hours. And wind droughts can last more than two weeks.
> But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt
But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Renewable are an important leverage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are also really challenging to work with, far from the simplistic view people can have on the internet.
> But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Gas peaker plants are extremely flexible and fast to turn on and off. That's the style that will fill the gap until batteries (or whatever else) takes over the last ~10%.
My understanding is that base load tends to refer to a source that produces constantly to cover base usage levels round the clock. That’s what nuclear is good for, and then you have other technologies that service the peaks it can’t quickly scale to.
That’s not really a relevant model any more with renewables, what you need is in-fill for times the main power source isn’t producing well. As a complementary power source you want something agile and switchable. Usually this is gas generators which are easy to spin up/down more or less instantly. Obviously gas is not ideal as it’s still a fossil source, so some countries are looking at batteries etc to service those loads.
That is correct. Which is managed by the day ahead market. If you can produce electricity when the grid is strained you will be paid a lot.
The problem with for example new built nuclear power is that it is essentially only fixed costs. Therefore it does not complement renewables at all.
Why should someone buy expensive grid based nuclear power when renewables deliver?
We've seen people starting to muse on the "unraveling of the grid monopoly" now when renewables allow consumers to vote with their wallets rather than accepting whatever is provided.
You need to have the right levels of energy available at all times. But that doesn't mean baseload any more. Hasn't for ages. It means having a variety of different sources that tend to be available at different times, backstopped with something like gas turbines.
The gas and other base load infrastructure are largely built, it just needs maintenance which is a lower cost than building something new. The CfD is a competitive process, so the price (should) fully incorporate the cost to build the infrastructure, maintain it, operate it and make a profit.
Correct, this is the problem that the Tories failed to identify when they started to reduce fossil fuel usage. It was a political decision taken to shore up support with people who ended up moving to the Lib Dems anyway (and everything unravelled anyway with Brexit for Cameron, who was probably the biggest proponent of this...Lib Dems incidentally also played a key role in blocking nuclear).
Comparing the prices of these two things does not tell you what the eventual cost is going to be.
To explain the context: the UK had to cap electricity prices because costs have risen so much, government is paying huge subsidies to providers, minister made bombastic claims in the last election that he could fix everything, nothing has worked out, he has now set up a range of quangos to employ his friends (reducing quangos was one of the promises in the election) who are now briefing the press aggressively with other lobbyists that costs are going to drop...despite the government having no political ability to do anything that will reduce costs (the latest briefing is that new gas plants are too expensive, an obviously misleading comparison on many levels).
UK electricity prices are extraordinarily high, the political context is that you have to say this will reduce them. This is obviously not going to lead prices to fall but the context has to be the same.
The other question is why we are doing this if this isn't going to actually cause prices to fall? As with many similar problems in the UK: too many people making too much money. Government is now subsidizing retail electricity prices to pay for private sector investment in high-cost technology that guarantees a high ROI. Most of the people quoted in the government's presser are lobbyists, as I said above a cottage industry of quangos has now sprung up surrounding Miliband. There is no way back.
In terms of macro, it is definitely quite interesting because the last few years of this have essentially made it impossible for the UK to operate as a modern industrial economy. How do you maintain employment with essentially no industrial function? Energy prices are so high commercially that some services businesses are actually struggling too. It is incredible employment and wages are so high in the UK (although the level of economic support the government is providing, particularly in services, is huge).
I often wonder what Aaron would think of the internet today.
For those here who are younger there was a very a different culture online in the mid-00s. It was very optimistic about how access to data and global communication could create a better world – The Arab Spring being one of the best examples.
This was even a view largely shared by Western governments and "The great firewall of China" was ridiculed by almost everyone at the time.
Today it feels like very few of us still believe in Aaron's vision of an open internet anymore. As someone who is around the same age as Aaron and shared his optimism, it's been hard to watch the internet become an increasingly closed, restricted and regulated place in recent years.
I understand that most people disagree with me on that which is fine, but it's also why I'd love to hear Aaron's take on it – did we just get it wrong? Is the internet today with all its bad actors, AI bots and big tech algorithms fundamentally a different place than it was back then? Would Aaron still view open access to data the same? How would he feel about tech companies scrapping the web to build AI models for their own financial gain?
> In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand.
This isn't international law though. It's an authoritarian move by the Italian government. "Technically" and "legally", you're correct that Cloudflare is wrong for not building infrastructure to help Italy censor the web from Italians, but sometimes you should break the law if you disagree with it strongly enough.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I find it interesting that no where in your comment did you try to justify the behaviour other than to say "it's the law". But that is the problem. Why is it the law? Do you think the law is justified?
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
Completely agree with you there. Seems like a pretty stupid move to be honest. If I were CEO of Cloudflare I'd probably just shut my mouth and censor the internet.
How is that weird? If American's can't compete with the wage expectations of foreign workers then they're not going to be hired.
If US workers can't compete then vote for less immigration. It's not the corporates or the foreigners fault, it's the government that's putting those groups first over US workers.
its not that they're putting people who are immigrants over US workers, they are putting corporate profits before US workers.
the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans. i am not overly educated on this but it seems like a lot of countries, europe specifically, are extremely protective of their jobs.
i don't think americans are somehow inherently more worthy of employment and opportunity than people from other countries, but it does seem like it may be a playing field that isn't very level if a lot of other countries are protecting jobs but the US isn't. in addition to our cost of living being tremendously high compared to the countries we outsource our work to, it isn't even an option for an american to go get a job in (for example) india and send home paycheck to support family in the US.
Have you considered that those "protections" you mention in Europe are in fact counterproductive and actually are a large reason why they are less productive, and therefore less competitive and less wealthy (even when accounting for hours worked)?
I personally would like to see some sort of system where we account for discrepancies in regulations related to worker protections, government subsidies, and environmental standards through taxation (e.g. Chinese crap is no longer as cheap as it is right now because we account for the substandard worker conditions and environmental damage being done), but I think restricting the labor market too much would be incredibly damaging.
>the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans.
I recently finished Peter Zehan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning and in it, it explicitly says that the American economic order was created in such a way that the loss of American jobs over time was by design.
Basically, as the American worker and consumer expects more and more, we need a larger international system to support that ("a rising tide..." analogy). However, we let the profits derived from such a system wind up in a smaller and smaller group of self-interested people who don't give a damn if the whole system goes belly up, because they've "got theirs". Such short-sighted thinking.
You shouldn't trust the messengers of "the science", however the science speaks for it's self.
I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.
Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.
If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
This is like going to a bar then getting mad because the bar owner really wants everyone to consume excessive amounts of overpriced alcohol.
Meanwhile there are people are going to the bar having a decent time and meeting interesting people.
Obviously I think you should do whatever is best for you, so this isn't a recommendation or criticism, but X is fine if you use it right. The issue you describe really only applies if you're mindless scrolling on the "for you" page – something X is very happy to let you do if that's how you want to use it. However this problem isn't unique to X, you'll find most businesses are happy to exploit people like this for profit.
On X if you curate lists of interesting users or look for content within specific communities you'll find it much, much more productive.
The reason sites like xcancel.com even exist is because people know there's some really interesting stuff on X which they want to view. You can improve the signal to noise if you decide to actively curate your own experience on X rather than handing that responsibility to X and your limbic system.
I think there are some people who genuinely can't control themselves though, so for them, yes, I agree – say out of the bars, stay out of McDonalds and stay away from X.
I guess it would be like that, if the bar owner was a seig-heiling nazi [0] who always brings his nazi friends [1][2], and spends most of his time in the bar actively trying to start fights between other patrons, to the point that people who used to go just for fun have left for other bars [3].
Also the bar makes and distributes child pornography [4][5][6].
I know this is a deeply unpopular opinion, but I don't get humans sometimes. Why does this need regulating? Am I the only person who just doesn't use services which do this?
This is so obviously a free-market problem. The reason these ads exist is because there's a significant percentage of people who are happy to put up with them and those people mean that products can be better funded without requiring subscriptions.
If people want to use products with unskippable ads, then who cares? This "I want X without Y" regulation is so stupid. You can't have X without Y. Just go buy Z product and stop asking regulators to find ways to keep you coming back to products of consumer-hostile corporations.
I clicked the link and assumed that you must have been using some JS OS UI library because of how nice it was.
This is impressive!
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