You have this idea that problems are either solved or not solved. This is a big problem, and it will take a long time to solve.

Is constructing nuclear power plants the solution? Maybe, but today, pound for pound, solar, onshore and offshore wind are the cheapest and fastest way to reduce carbon. Even if they will not, nor would ever be the complete solution, they would still be the best thing to do today, because reducing carbon today is better than the same reduction. The interesting discussions to be had here are a) whether solar and wind can provide all our energy needs b) if not whether we also need other existing technologies (including nuclear) and c) whether we need additional new technology to maximize the value of solar and wind.

Your secondary argument is "don't worry, stop talking, the free market will fix it all". You can use this argument for anything, of course. The free market is nothing more than people talking and deciding what to do.

I feel that you get frustrated because your argument is always the same: nuclear power is the solution to all our problems. People contradict you because you are wrong.

Rivers do it all the time. The panama canal is taking advantage of something that would happen one way or another, I think.

Why do read them then?

I think that climate change is the greatest story of our generation: understanding the problems and see about how they will be fixed is also fascinating. That's why I read them.

I think that the problem is that the lake is fresh water, while the canal will be brackish. Pumping the water back destroy all life in the lake as it becomes more and more salty.

Additionally, I'd guess the costs are high. The panama canal currently uses the water cycle to power it's activity. I'd be curious to know if anyone has worked out what the costs would actually be.

You are making an odd argument. First you say that the shade provided by solar panels and the run over water used to clean them will enable plant growth where it wouldn't be possible elsewhere. Then you note that agrivoltaics is not profitable and rarely done. I think that it is rarely done because it is relatively new.

It is possible to grow food in desert areas. But it's expensive and not profitable. A solar installation will change the local ecosystem and that might allow new plant growth. Whether the solar farm will result in a long term shift in the environment such that the plant growth would remain if the panels were removed is a rather more difficult question to answer. Solar farms do not produce new desert areas though, because they do not cut out all of the light; so you will get vegetation underneath them.

Oh sure. You have to wait for your weather window and off you go. I think they can use a relatively standard tug boat though, rather than one of those jack up cranes. Which is fortunate because it's too deep for them.

As far as I can tell, they are not disassembled. They just disconnect them, then tow them back in one piece.

It's one of the big points for these kind of device -- build them on shore and tow them out.

That is straight-forward enough. It's the first commercial pilot for floating wind farms. They have never serviced these before and it has a capacity of about 32MW -- which is small enough that they are likely to be more interested in the knowledge gained about the performance of the wind turbines than the opportunity cost of lost energy production. It's not that complicated.

This doesn't make sense. We haven't solved our global warming problem because we are still producing CO2 at an unsustainable rate. Do we have the technology that we need to solve the problem? Probably not all of it, but we do have a lot of it. The question is mostly not how do we produce enough energy, the question is how do we transition in the fast enough way.

Your idea is that we should build lots of nuclear power plants. Okay, but that is slow, expensive and opens us to issues with the supply chain for Uranium. At the current time, the fastest and quickest route to reduce CO2 production is solar, then wind, with batteries for stablisation. Do these technologies have a route to complete decarbonisation? No, not at they stand. So the question is what new technologies will develop the fastest; will that be better batteries; floating wind turbines; SMRs; fusion; agrivoltaics. That's a difficult question although wind, solar and batteries is my guess for the moment.

People are paying for PV on agricultural land.

The costs vary significantly depending on the degree of integration with the agriculture -- if it consists of using horizontal PV, lifted up a bit so the sheep can get underneath, it increases costs about 20%. If it is putting panels over grape vines a bit more. In addition to the electricity, though, the grapes will also grow better, with reduced water requirements. In addition, the generation is often used to replace residential or commercial costs of energy (i.e. the farm uses the electricity) rather than wholesale costs, so it is economically viable even if it is expensive. It's not all about LCOE.

David MacKay is, unfortunately no longer with us and his book is now fairly old. It is unlikely to be having much of an impact on the current government. Their recent support for nuclear power is, also, a statement from a dying government; there will be an another new initiative along next week; either way, the current government have been in power for a long time, supported nuclear power for a long time, and done little about it for a long time.

The design for Hinkley Point C is not new. It's a copy of reactors that have been installed in at least three different countries, The engineers involved have been building these power plants consistently, so it isn't new to them. The parts of the plant which are new -- like the sea wall, and the water intake system -- are new because they are site specific. The argument that nuclear power is expensive because it is all new is strange; it's old, mature technology certainly when compared to offshore which came from a standing start 20 years ago.

Most forms of energy production also involve at least a trivial amount of storage. A gas turbine has a big flywheel.

The battery is a component of an energy supply system which is what we really care about in this case.

I think your 10wm^2 for solar is a bit off. They produce rather more than that -- about 1kW peak, 100W sustained in the UK.

The cost of offshore wind varies significantly depending on distance and depth. It isn't more expensive than nuclear fission in the UK for sure, even if the costs have risen sharply in the last few years because of the cost of steel and other components.

The question of energy density really comes down to whether there is enough energy for the way we want to live. For the UK, the answer is clear now: we have the space to displace all fossil fuels in electricity production, because we are already 1/3 to 1/4 of the way there. Energy, well, that is a different question.

Curtailment is a problem with many grids. The UK has the same problem with wind power. We need more batteries, and we need more battery technologies. Both are happening.

The land use question assumes that land can only be used for one thing at a time. A wind farm, for example, covers a large area but a relatively small impact on that area if you are using it for, say, sheep. Hawaii, you are right, is short of land. It does have quite a lot of sea, though, and that is probably where the future for it's power supply lies.

You are confusing "reliable" and "intermittent". Both solar and wind are pretty reliable, even given the problems that the massive scaling that we have seen in wind turbines.

Neither solar nor wind are dispatchable, in the sense, that you can't get them to produce power at a particular time; that isn't really a measure of reliability though. For that you would need to know when wind or solar does not work, when it could reasonably be expected to.