I don't think you're being fair to Kennedy. I don't think any of his stupidity is to curry favour. His stupidity is simple stupidity. He is a true believer.
Absolutely. I actually like him, just a little bit. I think his intentions truly are the best and he honestly wants to help people. He’s just so absolutely fucking stupid and gullible that he thinks this is the best way. In my mind, that elevates him above the bottom-of-the-barrel cynical scum who are smart enough to know what they’re doing.
Yes. He absolutely looked at the numbers and/or discussed them with people, in order to settle on this statistic. Sometimes people are dumb and sometimes they're dumb *and* malicious. This is the second case.
Or that he has people under him who give him information, and they know what conclusion he wants to hear.
I'm not saying he's not dumb and malicious, but I am saying that merely being dumb and surrounded by people affirming his viewpoint adequately explains everything.
Bessent is my pick because he definitely knows he’s peddling total nonsense. He might not actually be a moron in real life, but he’s willing and eager to play one on TV, so that makes him the most “beta.”
Edit: he gets bonus points for looking like a smug earthworm in a wig.
The energy tweet may be dumb, but it's a little less dumb than you think regarding energy needs.
"The obvious example is cars: Electric cars become more viable if you run them on abundant and cheap solar power. Same with industrial processes; most people don’t think about industrial processes much because most of us don’t run an aluminum casting plant, but 23 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial processes, and much of that could be electrified."
Sure, but the problem currently is (1) renewables like solar and wind are not continuous. When the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, you are not generating electricity. That's why we're still reliant on conventional power plants to take up the slack for energy needs.
(2) Storage is the problem. Batteries currently aren't light enough and long-term enough to enable travel (such as the electric cars) over long distances. So, for instance, having electric trucks and lorries hauling goods across the continent? Not workable yet. Filling a vehicle with a tank of gas means you get immediate fuel access. Having to stop and plug in your vehicle to a charger- if you can find one - for several hours makes it less convenient than "urban car user who only makes short trips and can charge their vehicle overnight at home or while they're at work". Things like trams and trains work because they are in contact with external electricity supply (such as overhead wires or third rails). We don't have the likes on roads yet. All this is being worked on, but right now, our transport needs aren't going to be filled by electric vehicles.
(3) Hard to access places. Fine, you live in a city or the suburbs which are serviced by those vehicle charging ports. What about if you live several miles outside the city, or up a mountain, or in other locations where there isn't a convenient and reliable charging source?
(4) Manufacturing is a good example, it's a lot easier to convert a plant into running on renewable energy when you can set up your own solar panels farm or wind turbine. But again, currently very heavy demand users may not work so well:
"“Organisations with lighter electricity needs and stable finances will be best positioned to transition to renewables. Companies with high electricity demand, like furnaces for glass, smelting or other large-scale heating applications and companies with very large footprints – such as expansive warehouses and assembly operations – may have more difficulty,” says Paul Holdredge, Director for Industrials and Transport at consultancy Business for Social Responsibility (BSR)."
So yeah: if we tiled the planet in solar panels right now, we couldn't just effortlessly and immediately switch over to renewable power for all our energy needs. Not just yet, these are problems that are being worked on, but I'm going to extend maximum charity to the Department of Energy and assume they were providing a simplistic answer to the simplistic demands of "no more fossil fuels! switch to renewables right now!"
This is an excellent comment describing the challenges that solar power faces, but I think the funny thing is that Secretary Wright created a hypothetical that was damn-near the only situation in which those challenges wouldn't be problems. All of the (very real) challenges you describe boil down to proximity and abundance, and Wright described a situation in which solar power was abundant and everywhere!
There’s also the interesting problem that solar panels have no angular momentum. The stable frequency of the electric grid (60Hz in the US) is critical to its functioning. If one power plant’s AC is at high voltage while another’s is low, you’re just sending power from one to the other. They all have to be kept tightly synchronized, and the momentum of their rotating components is a key ingredient to making that possible. You can only have so much solar power before you destabilize your grid for lack of momentum. Wind power is surprisingly difficult largely because of the need to keep the blades rotating at just the right speed despite changes in wind speed. It’s pretty fascinating.
What you're looking for is called "synthetic inertia." Battery storage can do it relatively easily -- in many ways, *more* easily than spinning components, which have to be carefully synchronized to the AC grid. Modern grid-scale solar already uses inverters that digitally simulate an AC waveform; they just choose to do grid-following rather than grid-forming for regulatory and technical reasons.
Synthetic inertia just has similar hardware generate a waveform that can carry the grid at whatever frequency it should be carried at. It's better than spinning generators in many ways, since batteries are "instant on" and you can toss a bunch of peaker batteries at sustaining grid frequency almost instantly, which you can't do with generators (that can't be quickly connected or disconnected from the grid.)
Seriously, though, I feel like I don’t hear enough excitement around technologies like this for grid enhancement. This might be the single most important area for improvement that would unlock huge carbon savings, but it’s not sexy and not consumer-facing, so no billionaires will be made in it.
Yeah, this stuff is amazing. And when you think about it, the idea that we rely on big spinning things to keep the grid on-frequency in 2025 is sort of ridiculous and analog, like seeing a steam locomotive driving along I-95.
There's extremely selective reporting on which grid failures are politically interesting, so it seems like it's a big problem which we didn't have before. Spinning generators have a set of characteristics, some of which are good for grid stability, some are bad.
The reason grids trip when the frequency drifts is a technical limitation of spinning generators. Spinning generators disconnect when the frequency drifts too far, which exacerbates the problem. However, we don't consider this to be an inherent technical weakness of spinning generators, that's just how grids work.
Invertor based generators work differently, but not worse, and can be made to work better.
Batteries are expected to strongly improve grid resilience, so some of the current failures are because new infrastruture is already planned to fix the problem, but is 1-2 years out.
Yeah, these are the technical hurdles in the way of the simplistic "just switch off the coal and gas burning generation stations and switch on the solar and wind power, easy!" calls. That's why even if the Department of Energy tweet may be dumb, it's not as dumb as it's painted. Tiling the planet with solar panels right now is not the easy, one time and it's done, solution that it seems.
I mean, nobody thinks you can tile the planet with solar planets in a month. China is currently installing 100 panels every second (92 GW in a month!) and even then it'd take years to replace 100% of their electrical consumption. But the point here is not to replace 100% of your energy consumption in a month, it's to do it by, say, 2050 or 2060. Doing that means we need to (1) catch up to China, (2) make major technical improvements in batteries and other industrial uses, and (3) install a lot of solar.
Wright's tweet is dumb in the same way someone in 1999 would be dumb for tweeting "haha, there's no way the Internet could ever replace fax machines." It's both technically true for 1999, and yet also embarrassing at the same time. Except that in this case there are (1) vast economic and life-or-death stakes and (2) the person making the claim isn't just dumb, he genuinely wants to stop the development of the Internet.
DOE is very very pessimistic about 2. And that's with some heavy investigation. I'd rather we just bite the bullet and build nuclear fusion reactors. Ten tries and we might get one actually working.
Yes, there are vast economic stakes. You're just looking at the wrong ones. Russia paid for the German Greens to win elections, because they wanted more wind/solar -- because those INCREASE natural gas usage (which means money for Russia!).
Yes, today's DoE is definitely who I'd look to for estimates on this. And sure, let's power the country with technology that doesn't exist, while our biggest industrial rivals systematically develop, install and dominate the real-world technology industries that do exist.
Europe's gas consumption has dropped significantly, and the share they pull from Russia has cratered. They're on track for another 25% reduction by 2030. Most of what they do consume goes to industrial applications, which still need to be electrified, but some of the 25% is going to be electrification.
You're saying this like the DOE of today isn't the same jackasses that were in Biden's DOE. I mean, that pretty much says it all, about your state of "liberal fanny waving."
Me, I'm going to listen to the Q-security clearance guys, over your "hope and dreams" level of "we can make this work, scale it up a thousand fold..."
Yeah, I will note there are these things called "sanctions" deliberately imposed on Europe in order to destroy their economy. (No, I'm not kidding on this -- the Biden Administration let Dick Cheney run things, and that's always bad news.)
I totally agree with you. Batteries are a huge conspiracy. There’s no such thing. This phone is powered by fleas on treadmills that I feed by shoving dandruff into the slot at the bottom.
Estimated annual battery production is projected to be 2,000 GWh this year. 3,600 GWh in 2026, and rising to 6400-7000 GWh by 2030. Numbers from BloombergNEF. It's important to understand that battery production capacity is rising on the same fast exponential that solar installation did, so none of these numbers should be viewed as a challenge.
Also you seem to be confusing Texas's *annual* power consumption with the amount of power that would need to be stored into batteries. In other words, you're presuming batteries that could supply the whole state with power *for a whole year*. Nobody is building that. This is like comparing the size of my car's gas tank to the annual gas sales of a big Mobil station on I-95. Nobody would use that statistic if they were being honest.
PS I'm really into battery and renewable tech! You seem really into tearing down renewable tech, but you don't seem to know much about what's going on. What's up with that?
So, yeah, take your numbers and divide them by ten, and then we get something that's used for storage and not creating "carlike objects" that are killing people in my city (electric cars aren't green if the power ain't green).
Everyone can make mistakes, and not pulling daily versus yearly is one of mine. Be charitable and don't think dishonest when "stupid" would apply.
I'm sure you're "really into" flashing your liberal fanny. That doesn't make it a good idea. There's workable, usable renewable energy that doesn't depend on slave labor or "rare earth" that we really don't have much of. It's called hydropower. It's capable of providing energy on a "relative moment's notice" (versus actually efficient gas power plants or nuclear), and actually helps the grid.
If you're right, we'll get the batteries eventually -- from China, apparently. And if you really want to be blackmailed on our electric infrastructure, maybe that's a good idea. Or, better idea, why not let the Army Corps of Engineers do their job, and make power-producing dams?
Current battery installations aim for intra-day storage, so they move usage from the day to the evening/night. The standard for that application is 1/6th of a day, i.e., 4 hours (at full discharge capacity.) So you're talking about 167 GWh of total capacity for that usage. That's a "big number" but not really that big; keep in mind that most of the currently-installed number was installed in just the last couple of years. There's no real reason (except for government policy) that this couldn't all be built out by 2030/2035 even with conservative estimates of future production and cost.
The technical challenge is getting to a full day, and then beyond it to weeks. There are some real challenges there! But the low-hanging fruit of reducing fossil fuel consumption by 90%+ and also making electricity a lot cheaper (and moving many applications like transportation onto electricity) is now looking completely achievable in 2-3 decades. The question now is which country gets there first, and owns the future?
On that topic, yes, that's China right now. The correct attitude isn't to go around posting loudly about technical facts you're wrong about. And it isn't "be thrilled we're not getting blackmailed by China." Instead it should be: "another global power is about to 10x its energy availability in a short time, and the last time that happened the slow-moving parties ended up being dominated both industrially and then militarily, so let's not be the losers this time."
167 Gwh is still double the world's actual batteries used for this purpose. And that's just texas.
The current solar is offloading most of it's carbon production (which is significant) onto the gas turbines needed to run the power grid with the significant "bad behavior" of the solar "plants."
Say we get ten years worth of "install as much capacity as we have globally right now." That's still not enough, and by then you'd better be doing a better job than "keeping 4 hours" (which I read as "leveling out the daytime curve, so that we don't need to use inefficient gas" not "powering the night").
You're at 2-3 decades. Nuclear (fission) is at Today. Moonshot Fusion is at "we started this in 2000. Fund it for real, and we can have 5 prototypes pretty soon -- let's say five years"
Cite your sources on "ten times the energy availability"? Are you talking England and industrial revolution?
Yes, there are batteries, but as I mentioned, the problem is that they are still not capable of storing enough energy to meet needs for long distances/heavy work:
"Top 3 Drawbacks of Storing Solar Energy in Batteries
While storing solar energy in batteries offers numerous advantages, it also comes with several drawbacks that need to be considered. Here are three significant drawbacks of storing solar energy in batteries:
Initial Cost:
High upfront investment: The initial cost of purchasing batteries for solar energy storage can be substantial. Quality batteries designed for solar applications can be expensive, especially for larger storage capacities needed to support residential or commercial energy demands.
Installation expenses: In addition to the cost of batteries themselves, there are installation expenses involved in integrating battery storage systems with existing solar power setups. This includes labor costs, electrical components, and system design considerations, all of which contribute to the overall initial investment.
Limited Lifespan:
Battery degradation over time: All batteries experience degradation over time, which reduces their storage capacity and overall performance. This degradation is influenced by factors such as usage patterns, temperature fluctuations, and the type of battery chemistry used. As batteries age, their ability to hold a charge diminishes, requiring more frequent recharging.
Replacement and maintenance costs:
Due to the limited lifespan of batteries, they will eventually need to be replaced, adding to the long-term costs of solar energy storage systems. Additionally, regular maintenance is required to ensure optimal performance and prolong battery life, which incurs ongoing expenses."
There's a lot of work going on to make batteries feasible for replacement of current energy needs, but we're not yet all the way there.
Battery technology is advancing so quickly now that most of these issues are disappearing. Price has dropped 90% in a decade and continues to plummet by a significant percentage every year. Number of cycles keeps going up. We're already at price points where failing to install storage is just financially a bad decision, and we're very obviously moving to a point (within a few years) where it's obvious that this technology is going to be dominant. Current installation costs are below $66/kWh in China fully installed, and that's going to hit the whole world in a couple of years.
I just can't get too excited by posts like this. Once a technology hits a certain level of maturity and production development, saying "we're not quite there" isn't really a criticism. It just means we have a relatively well-defined (and short) period of time to wait before it becomes inevitable. It's like arguing in 2005, that the current version of the PlayStation isn't fast enough to run [game that requires 5x more compute than is affordable.] Even teenagers know that the PlayStation +2 is going to be able to do that, and we're well into that cycle with storage batteries.
We've been waiting 15 years. If this was going to get solved, it probably would have been solved by now.
Are you familiar with the 20 years of protein folding research that was completely and utterly worthless? Millions of hours of supercomputing time... and all of it wasted?
Consider that battery technology, as it's currently running, may be just as dead as a doornail, and in need of "complete breakthrough". (As was the case with protein folding. Try telling chemists "you need to take quantum effects into account").
I'm confused. Have you looked at installation numbers for batteries and PV solar? They're all on an exponential curve. The thing about exponential curves is they always look slow for a bunch of years, then shoot up.
Battery storage installations basically didn't exist until 2020, so of course the last fifteen years looks like a flat line. Here's what it looks like now:
(Note that 2025 isn't over, so the rightmost line is incomplete. It will be much higher once the year is over.)
So if you've "been waiting fifteen years for the problem to be solved", congratulations: the problem has been solved! And it's increasingly being more solved as prices drop and installation shoots up.
Some other interesting exponential curves, just for comparison:
But, you know, it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to hear 1000 TIMES the number of new rheumatoid arthritis diagnoses, and say, "Hm, I wonder if the Biggest Public Health Intervention caused this?"
And isn't it funny, how we're only getting this out into the World At Large when the Biden Administration left? It's almost like there was deliberate news suppression on the topic. It's been four years, that's plenty of time for us to have done a significant, large-scale study on the immunological effects of an Unproven Technology. I wonder why we didn't do that? Could it be the liability issue?
66 people total in that study. 22 controls. You really have to be joking to accept that as science. It may suggest that it needs more study, but accepting that as fact is nonsense.
And no, the rate of diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis is not 1000 times more than before or whatever you are trying to say there.
Now, here's the fun part: see the little explanation about "even those people without covid19 symptoms"? Seems like that's hard to distinguish from "person who got injected with the vaccine." After all, 50% of the jabbed continue to produce spike proteins, permanently.
Everyone, by now, has gotten covid19. Not everyone is getting rheumatoid arthritis, obviously. Someone (non-military) ought to pull the data based on vaccination status.
Here's a rundown of why there's multiple working hypotheses, and credible "contributing evidence" based on the development of other autoimmune diseases after vaccination.
It is obvious you don't even read what you are quoting. The pub med article you just quoted stated the benefits far outweigh the risks of COVID vaccination. It quotes the story of 2 people who got RA after the shot. I suppose when you vaccinate a billion people, there are going to be people who got diseases after getting the shot.
And the rheumatologist article talks about long COVID, not the vaccine. It seems clear that quoting an article and then saying something that the article doesn't say is what you are doing here.
And no, 50% of people don't produce spike proteins forever. That is preposterous.
130 studies citing "producing spike proteins" for over a year after vaccination. If you think I'm being preposterous, feel free to do the metaanalysis yourself.
What's your source on the deidentified data, and which ICD10 codes are you using for your analysis?
What, do you want me to start citing other papers? I can, if you want. It's hardly the only one that demonstrates that the CDC lied to you about the mRNA disappearing. You continue to see spike protein production in about 50% of the vaccinated (as in it never stops). Next, you do get immunological issues from this -- in the best of cases, you've taught your body that covid19 is "an allergen." (and, you're producing it... so you're constantly allergized. Puts a strain on the immune system). In the worst of cases, any cell that expresses the spike protein is on the "kill list" (and that can include irrecoverable heart muscle, which doesn't regrow).
sorry to "um actually" you, but Bessent doesn't say in that clip that the tariffs will improve the GDP, he's saying that the tariffs will improve the deficit to GDP ratio. I don't know if they will, but the potential cause and effect there is possible, and it's through the numerator, not the denominator
I don't think you're being fair to Kennedy. I don't think any of his stupidity is to curry favour. His stupidity is simple stupidity. He is a true believer.
Fair.
Absolutely. I actually like him, just a little bit. I think his intentions truly are the best and he honestly wants to help people. He’s just so absolutely fucking stupid and gullible that he thinks this is the best way. In my mind, that elevates him above the bottom-of-the-barrel cynical scum who are smart enough to know what they’re doing.
The thing he said about 23% more people dying in the vaccine group than the placebo group strikes me as dishonest more than stupid.
Yes. He absolutely looked at the numbers and/or discussed them with people, in order to settle on this statistic. Sometimes people are dumb and sometimes they're dumb *and* malicious. This is the second case.
I agree. I think the key here is that he used a number that's technically true but extremely misleading. This suggests intentional deception.
Or that he has people under him who give him information, and they know what conclusion he wants to hear.
I'm not saying he's not dumb and malicious, but I am saying that merely being dumb and surrounded by people affirming his viewpoint adequately explains everything.
Bessent is my pick because he definitely knows he’s peddling total nonsense. He might not actually be a moron in real life, but he’s willing and eager to play one on TV, so that makes him the most “beta.”
Edit: he gets bonus points for looking like a smug earthworm in a wig.
Yeah, he is the brightest of the three contestants, but that's a very low bar.
Any competition for Trump’s Beta Moron that doesn’t include Howard Lutnick is obviously rigged.
Maybe this should be a running feature — “top three movers THIS WEEK.” Kind of a power rankings thing.
Heh. At least Trump is on the list of "Most Powerful People in Washington." For four years, Joe Biden never made that list (too senile).
Thank god you explained the joke or I would have been completely in the dark.
Damn, you're right! Lutnick is the top trump Nutlick(er).
The energy tweet may be dumb, but it's a little less dumb than you think regarding energy needs.
"The obvious example is cars: Electric cars become more viable if you run them on abundant and cheap solar power. Same with industrial processes; most people don’t think about industrial processes much because most of us don’t run an aluminum casting plant, but 23 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial processes, and much of that could be electrified."
Sure, but the problem currently is (1) renewables like solar and wind are not continuous. When the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, you are not generating electricity. That's why we're still reliant on conventional power plants to take up the slack for energy needs.
(2) Storage is the problem. Batteries currently aren't light enough and long-term enough to enable travel (such as the electric cars) over long distances. So, for instance, having electric trucks and lorries hauling goods across the continent? Not workable yet. Filling a vehicle with a tank of gas means you get immediate fuel access. Having to stop and plug in your vehicle to a charger- if you can find one - for several hours makes it less convenient than "urban car user who only makes short trips and can charge their vehicle overnight at home or while they're at work". Things like trams and trains work because they are in contact with external electricity supply (such as overhead wires or third rails). We don't have the likes on roads yet. All this is being worked on, but right now, our transport needs aren't going to be filled by electric vehicles.
(3) Hard to access places. Fine, you live in a city or the suburbs which are serviced by those vehicle charging ports. What about if you live several miles outside the city, or up a mountain, or in other locations where there isn't a convenient and reliable charging source?
(4) Manufacturing is a good example, it's a lot easier to convert a plant into running on renewable energy when you can set up your own solar panels farm or wind turbine. But again, currently very heavy demand users may not work so well:
https://www.reuters.com/plus/how-manufacturers-can-transition-to-100-renewable-electricity
"“Organisations with lighter electricity needs and stable finances will be best positioned to transition to renewables. Companies with high electricity demand, like furnaces for glass, smelting or other large-scale heating applications and companies with very large footprints – such as expansive warehouses and assembly operations – may have more difficulty,” says Paul Holdredge, Director for Industrials and Transport at consultancy Business for Social Responsibility (BSR)."
So yeah: if we tiled the planet in solar panels right now, we couldn't just effortlessly and immediately switch over to renewable power for all our energy needs. Not just yet, these are problems that are being worked on, but I'm going to extend maximum charity to the Department of Energy and assume they were providing a simplistic answer to the simplistic demands of "no more fossil fuels! switch to renewables right now!"
This is an excellent comment describing the challenges that solar power faces, but I think the funny thing is that Secretary Wright created a hypothetical that was damn-near the only situation in which those challenges wouldn't be problems. All of the (very real) challenges you describe boil down to proximity and abundance, and Wright described a situation in which solar power was abundant and everywhere!
There’s also the interesting problem that solar panels have no angular momentum. The stable frequency of the electric grid (60Hz in the US) is critical to its functioning. If one power plant’s AC is at high voltage while another’s is low, you’re just sending power from one to the other. They all have to be kept tightly synchronized, and the momentum of their rotating components is a key ingredient to making that possible. You can only have so much solar power before you destabilize your grid for lack of momentum. Wind power is surprisingly difficult largely because of the need to keep the blades rotating at just the right speed despite changes in wind speed. It’s pretty fascinating.
What you're looking for is called "synthetic inertia." Battery storage can do it relatively easily -- in many ways, *more* easily than spinning components, which have to be carefully synchronized to the AC grid. Modern grid-scale solar already uses inverters that digitally simulate an AC waveform; they just choose to do grid-following rather than grid-forming for regulatory and technical reasons.
Synthetic inertia just has similar hardware generate a waveform that can carry the grid at whatever frequency it should be carried at. It's better than spinning generators in many ways, since batteries are "instant on" and you can toss a bunch of peaker batteries at sustaining grid frequency almost instantly, which you can't do with generators (that can't be quickly connected or disconnected from the grid.)
Current systems don't do this, mostly for regulatory reasons, but the capability isn't terribly difficult to add and it's going to be widely available soon: https://larissa-fedunik.medium.com/what-is-synthetic-inertia-968c3e865b96
A simpler way is to put your batteries on a turntable.
Seriously, though, I feel like I don’t hear enough excitement around technologies like this for grid enhancement. This might be the single most important area for improvement that would unlock huge carbon savings, but it’s not sexy and not consumer-facing, so no billionaires will be made in it.
Yeah, this stuff is amazing. And when you think about it, the idea that we rely on big spinning things to keep the grid on-frequency in 2025 is sort of ridiculous and analog, like seeing a steam locomotive driving along I-95.
There's extremely selective reporting on which grid failures are politically interesting, so it seems like it's a big problem which we didn't have before. Spinning generators have a set of characteristics, some of which are good for grid stability, some are bad.
The reason grids trip when the frequency drifts is a technical limitation of spinning generators. Spinning generators disconnect when the frequency drifts too far, which exacerbates the problem. However, we don't consider this to be an inherent technical weakness of spinning generators, that's just how grids work.
Invertor based generators work differently, but not worse, and can be made to work better.
Batteries are expected to strongly improve grid resilience, so some of the current failures are because new infrastruture is already planned to fix the problem, but is 1-2 years out.
Yeah, these are the technical hurdles in the way of the simplistic "just switch off the coal and gas burning generation stations and switch on the solar and wind power, easy!" calls. That's why even if the Department of Energy tweet may be dumb, it's not as dumb as it's painted. Tiling the planet with solar panels right now is not the easy, one time and it's done, solution that it seems.
I mean, nobody thinks you can tile the planet with solar planets in a month. China is currently installing 100 panels every second (92 GW in a month!) and even then it'd take years to replace 100% of their electrical consumption. But the point here is not to replace 100% of your energy consumption in a month, it's to do it by, say, 2050 or 2060. Doing that means we need to (1) catch up to China, (2) make major technical improvements in batteries and other industrial uses, and (3) install a lot of solar.
Wright's tweet is dumb in the same way someone in 1999 would be dumb for tweeting "haha, there's no way the Internet could ever replace fax machines." It's both technically true for 1999, and yet also embarrassing at the same time. Except that in this case there are (1) vast economic and life-or-death stakes and (2) the person making the claim isn't just dumb, he genuinely wants to stop the development of the Internet.
DOE is very very pessimistic about 2. And that's with some heavy investigation. I'd rather we just bite the bullet and build nuclear fusion reactors. Ten tries and we might get one actually working.
Yes, there are vast economic stakes. You're just looking at the wrong ones. Russia paid for the German Greens to win elections, because they wanted more wind/solar -- because those INCREASE natural gas usage (which means money for Russia!).
Yes, today's DoE is definitely who I'd look to for estimates on this. And sure, let's power the country with technology that doesn't exist, while our biggest industrial rivals systematically develop, install and dominate the real-world technology industries that do exist.
Europe's gas consumption has dropped significantly, and the share they pull from Russia has cratered. They're on track for another 25% reduction by 2030. Most of what they do consume goes to industrial applications, which still need to be electrified, but some of the 25% is going to be electrification.
This graph shows the start of the cratering: https://www.cedigaz.org/wp-content/uploads/Image1-2-2048x1221.png.webp
This graph shows overall fuel imports from Russia on a longer term: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1345775/eu-oil-and-petroleum-imports-from-russia/
You're saying this like the DOE of today isn't the same jackasses that were in Biden's DOE. I mean, that pretty much says it all, about your state of "liberal fanny waving."
Me, I'm going to listen to the Q-security clearance guys, over your "hope and dreams" level of "we can make this work, scale it up a thousand fold..."
Yeah, I will note there are these things called "sanctions" deliberately imposed on Europe in order to destroy their economy. (No, I'm not kidding on this -- the Biden Administration let Dick Cheney run things, and that's always bad news.)
"Sure, but the problem currently is (1) renewables like solar and wind are not continuous."
Gee, it's not like there are these things called batteries ...
No! There are NO Batteries!
To have enough batteries to support the grid, you need to have just as much capacity in batteries as you do in solar power.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/07/15/worldwide-battery-storage-installations-up-54-in-first-half-of-2025-june-sets-monthly-record/
(87Gwh)
That's worldwide battery storage, which isn't even enough to support the total power from Texas. One State.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection (~428,000 Gwh).
You're off by a factor of ... more than a thousand? To power Texas, we're not even talking Boswash.
I totally agree with you. Batteries are a huge conspiracy. There’s no such thing. This phone is powered by fleas on treadmills that I feed by shoving dandruff into the slot at the bottom.
Still better than the FIRE phone, which, yes indeedy, caught fire.
Estimated annual battery production is projected to be 2,000 GWh this year. 3,600 GWh in 2026, and rising to 6400-7000 GWh by 2030. Numbers from BloombergNEF. It's important to understand that battery production capacity is rising on the same fast exponential that solar installation did, so none of these numbers should be viewed as a challenge.
Also you seem to be confusing Texas's *annual* power consumption with the amount of power that would need to be stored into batteries. In other words, you're presuming batteries that could supply the whole state with power *for a whole year*. Nobody is building that. This is like comparing the size of my car's gas tank to the annual gas sales of a big Mobil station on I-95. Nobody would use that statistic if they were being honest.
PS I'm really into battery and renewable tech! You seem really into tearing down renewable tech, but you don't seem to know much about what's going on. What's up with that?
So, um, let's look at daily consumption. That's divide by 365, right? You're at roughly 1000 Gwh (I'm not pulling the calculator) for Texas.
That's versus 87 Gwh.
Yep, that's still crazy.
I'm not sure where you're getting the "estimated annual battery production" but I think you've misunderstood that 90% of batteries are for cars.
https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-too-many-numbers/
So, yeah, take your numbers and divide them by ten, and then we get something that's used for storage and not creating "carlike objects" that are killing people in my city (electric cars aren't green if the power ain't green).
Everyone can make mistakes, and not pulling daily versus yearly is one of mine. Be charitable and don't think dishonest when "stupid" would apply.
I'm sure you're "really into" flashing your liberal fanny. That doesn't make it a good idea. There's workable, usable renewable energy that doesn't depend on slave labor or "rare earth" that we really don't have much of. It's called hydropower. It's capable of providing energy on a "relative moment's notice" (versus actually efficient gas power plants or nuclear), and actually helps the grid.
If you're right, we'll get the batteries eventually -- from China, apparently. And if you really want to be blackmailed on our electric infrastructure, maybe that's a good idea. Or, better idea, why not let the Army Corps of Engineers do their job, and make power-producing dams?
Current battery installations aim for intra-day storage, so they move usage from the day to the evening/night. The standard for that application is 1/6th of a day, i.e., 4 hours (at full discharge capacity.) So you're talking about 167 GWh of total capacity for that usage. That's a "big number" but not really that big; keep in mind that most of the currently-installed number was installed in just the last couple of years. There's no real reason (except for government policy) that this couldn't all be built out by 2030/2035 even with conservative estimates of future production and cost.
The technical challenge is getting to a full day, and then beyond it to weeks. There are some real challenges there! But the low-hanging fruit of reducing fossil fuel consumption by 90%+ and also making electricity a lot cheaper (and moving many applications like transportation onto electricity) is now looking completely achievable in 2-3 decades. The question now is which country gets there first, and owns the future?
On that topic, yes, that's China right now. The correct attitude isn't to go around posting loudly about technical facts you're wrong about. And it isn't "be thrilled we're not getting blackmailed by China." Instead it should be: "another global power is about to 10x its energy availability in a short time, and the last time that happened the slow-moving parties ended up being dominated both industrially and then militarily, so let's not be the losers this time."
167 Gwh is still double the world's actual batteries used for this purpose. And that's just texas.
The current solar is offloading most of it's carbon production (which is significant) onto the gas turbines needed to run the power grid with the significant "bad behavior" of the solar "plants."
Say we get ten years worth of "install as much capacity as we have globally right now." That's still not enough, and by then you'd better be doing a better job than "keeping 4 hours" (which I read as "leveling out the daytime curve, so that we don't need to use inefficient gas" not "powering the night").
You're at 2-3 decades. Nuclear (fission) is at Today. Moonshot Fusion is at "we started this in 2000. Fund it for real, and we can have 5 prototypes pretty soon -- let's say five years"
Cite your sources on "ten times the energy availability"? Are you talking England and industrial revolution?
Yes, there are batteries, but as I mentioned, the problem is that they are still not capable of storing enough energy to meet needs for long distances/heavy work:
https://arka360.com/ros/drawbacks-storing-solar-energy-batteries
"Top 3 Drawbacks of Storing Solar Energy in Batteries
While storing solar energy in batteries offers numerous advantages, it also comes with several drawbacks that need to be considered. Here are three significant drawbacks of storing solar energy in batteries:
Initial Cost:
High upfront investment: The initial cost of purchasing batteries for solar energy storage can be substantial. Quality batteries designed for solar applications can be expensive, especially for larger storage capacities needed to support residential or commercial energy demands.
Installation expenses: In addition to the cost of batteries themselves, there are installation expenses involved in integrating battery storage systems with existing solar power setups. This includes labor costs, electrical components, and system design considerations, all of which contribute to the overall initial investment.
Limited Lifespan:
Battery degradation over time: All batteries experience degradation over time, which reduces their storage capacity and overall performance. This degradation is influenced by factors such as usage patterns, temperature fluctuations, and the type of battery chemistry used. As batteries age, their ability to hold a charge diminishes, requiring more frequent recharging.
Replacement and maintenance costs:
Due to the limited lifespan of batteries, they will eventually need to be replaced, adding to the long-term costs of solar energy storage systems. Additionally, regular maintenance is required to ensure optimal performance and prolong battery life, which incurs ongoing expenses."
There's a lot of work going on to make batteries feasible for replacement of current energy needs, but we're not yet all the way there.
Battery technology is advancing so quickly now that most of these issues are disappearing. Price has dropped 90% in a decade and continues to plummet by a significant percentage every year. Number of cycles keeps going up. We're already at price points where failing to install storage is just financially a bad decision, and we're very obviously moving to a point (within a few years) where it's obvious that this technology is going to be dominant. Current installation costs are below $66/kWh in China fully installed, and that's going to hit the whole world in a couple of years.
I just can't get too excited by posts like this. Once a technology hits a certain level of maturity and production development, saying "we're not quite there" isn't really a criticism. It just means we have a relatively well-defined (and short) period of time to wait before it becomes inevitable. It's like arguing in 2005, that the current version of the PlayStation isn't fast enough to run [game that requires 5x more compute than is affordable.] Even teenagers know that the PlayStation +2 is going to be able to do that, and we're well into that cycle with storage batteries.
We've been waiting 15 years. If this was going to get solved, it probably would have been solved by now.
Are you familiar with the 20 years of protein folding research that was completely and utterly worthless? Millions of hours of supercomputing time... and all of it wasted?
Consider that battery technology, as it's currently running, may be just as dead as a doornail, and in need of "complete breakthrough". (As was the case with protein folding. Try telling chemists "you need to take quantum effects into account").
I'm confused. Have you looked at installation numbers for batteries and PV solar? They're all on an exponential curve. The thing about exponential curves is they always look slow for a bunch of years, then shoot up.
Battery storage installations basically didn't exist until 2020, so of course the last fifteen years looks like a flat line. Here's what it looks like now:
https://www.ess-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/volta-foundation-chart-4-jpg.avif
(Note that 2025 isn't over, so the rightmost line is incomplete. It will be much higher once the year is over.)
So if you've "been waiting fifteen years for the problem to be solved", congratulations: the problem has been solved! And it's increasingly being more solved as prices drop and installation shoots up.
Some other interesting exponential curves, just for comparison:
Here's PV solar installations: https://i0.wp.com/solarquarter.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/image-4.png?w=1392&ssl=1
And here's battery storage price (already outdated, it's dropped another 50% in China in 2025): https://www.energy-storage.news/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/BNEF-battery-storage-cost-survey-2024.jpg
"Estimated people saved" is a funny way of saying "we made this statistic up." It's going off "If This was Actually Effective."
You can actually look at hard numbers if you want.
Here's a different take: "Prolonged Inflammation based on spike proteins in the vaccinated population."
https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/yale-study-links-persistent-spike-protein-to-post-vaccination-syndrome-immune-dysregulation/
But, you know, it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to hear 1000 TIMES the number of new rheumatoid arthritis diagnoses, and say, "Hm, I wonder if the Biggest Public Health Intervention caused this?"
And isn't it funny, how we're only getting this out into the World At Large when the Biden Administration left? It's almost like there was deliberate news suppression on the topic. It's been four years, that's plenty of time for us to have done a significant, large-scale study on the immunological effects of an Unproven Technology. I wonder why we didn't do that? Could it be the liability issue?
66 people total in that study. 22 controls. You really have to be joking to accept that as science. It may suggest that it needs more study, but accepting that as fact is nonsense.
And no, the rate of diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis is not 1000 times more than before or whatever you are trying to say there.
https://www.the-rheumatologist.org/article/months-after-covid-19-infection-rheumatic-like-symptoms-persist/
Now, here's the fun part: see the little explanation about "even those people without covid19 symptoms"? Seems like that's hard to distinguish from "person who got injected with the vaccine." After all, 50% of the jabbed continue to produce spike proteins, permanently.
Everyone, by now, has gotten covid19. Not everyone is getting rheumatoid arthritis, obviously. Someone (non-military) ought to pull the data based on vaccination status.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9458755/
Here's a rundown of why there's multiple working hypotheses, and credible "contributing evidence" based on the development of other autoimmune diseases after vaccination.
It is obvious you don't even read what you are quoting. The pub med article you just quoted stated the benefits far outweigh the risks of COVID vaccination. It quotes the story of 2 people who got RA after the shot. I suppose when you vaccinate a billion people, there are going to be people who got diseases after getting the shot.
And the rheumatologist article talks about long COVID, not the vaccine. It seems clear that quoting an article and then saying something that the article doesn't say is what you are doing here.
And no, 50% of people don't produce spike proteins forever. That is preposterous.
https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/young-adults-continue-to-produce-spike-protein-one-year-after-receiving-covid-vaccine/
130 studies citing "producing spike proteins" for over a year after vaccination. If you think I'm being preposterous, feel free to do the metaanalysis yourself.
What's your source on the deidentified data, and which ICD10 codes are you using for your analysis?
What, do you want me to start citing other papers? I can, if you want. It's hardly the only one that demonstrates that the CDC lied to you about the mRNA disappearing. You continue to see spike protein production in about 50% of the vaccinated (as in it never stops). Next, you do get immunological issues from this -- in the best of cases, you've taught your body that covid19 is "an allergen." (and, you're producing it... so you're constantly allergized. Puts a strain on the immune system). In the worst of cases, any cell that expresses the spike protein is on the "kill list" (and that can include irrecoverable heart muscle, which doesn't regrow).
I will give the title to you. Everything you said is through your extremely biased viewpoint.
God how depressing. Overall I mean.
The jokes were good!
How did I miss "Chain Reaction"
back in 1996?
Oh yea, it flopped.
I bet some electronic DJ calls him or her self Chimp Booty first.
So edge.....
sorry to "um actually" you, but Bessent doesn't say in that clip that the tariffs will improve the GDP, he's saying that the tariffs will improve the deficit to GDP ratio. I don't know if they will, but the potential cause and effect there is possible, and it's through the numerator, not the denominator
The limit does not exist
Oh, Kennedy definitely Alpha Beta Moron today. Such a wealth of idiocy on any given day.
@Substack please stop recommending morons like this clown in my feed. Thank you.