It also requires geographic conditions that are absent almost everywhere on the planet. Geothermal is more available than pumped hydro at scale. Which is why there's a lot of babble from the Green crowd about pumped hydro for intermittent storage for decades at this point, and very little to show for it.

Turns out no amount of tongue wagging can generate mountains with empty reservoirs that aren't permeable.

1. Does not exist in meaningful volumes. Will not exist at relevant scales for decades if not centuries. See: mining company reports.
2. Going from supposedly cheap to hilariously expensive due to building costs, maintenance costs and the fact that you're going to need to move it a very long distance before intermittents are in opposite phase of "on/off". As we have seen in European grids, which are exceptionally interconnected, and we're still getting the extreme variability in spite of that.
3. So you can burn cash in your boiler to generate steam and spin the turbine to get electricity?

Everyone who understood how power grids work told Green idiots that this is what would happen if you keep shoving inflexible intermittents into the grid with not a thought about grid stability.

But for people for whom food comes from supermarket, electricity from the socket and reality has a left wing bias... trying to get through to them with actual reality and what it is like is all but impossible. They're far too sheltered and decadent to see reality for what it is.

It's going to get much worse before it gets better, because big solar is hilariously oversubsidized, while being exceptionally damaging to grid stability under current rules of being able to sell all intermittent power before any of the stable generators can sell anything to the grid.

Which leads to Danish scenario of stable generators that are desperately needed for grid stability going bankrupt due to being legally banned from selling what they produce much of the time in favor of intermittents, while intermittents overload the network with massive oversupply for short bursts, and then go nearly fully offline for short bursts. End outcome is what African nations that were blocked from getting loans for anything but intermittents are struggling with in spite of having absolutely massive energy investments. Grid that only works a few hours a day.

Virtue signalling to the vegan / greenie crowdz. Or, pandering.

Pick one, or both, as both are equally plausible

It's a similar concept to Alternative Minimum Taxes [*], which you probably haven't experienced with your own taxes. Basically, deductions that corporations can normally claim are disallowed and then their taxes are calculated at the lower rate. If the result is more than they would pay with the higher rate and broader set of deductions, then they have to pay it rather rather than the normally-calculated amount. So it doesn't apply to all corporations, or maybe even most, but it extracts additional revenue from those that would otherwise be successful at using extensive deductions and credits (also known as "loopholes") to reduce their tax liability.

In some cases they're already committed to the behavior and won't be able to avoid the tax. But, yeah, in many cases this tax may deter the behavior rather than raise revenue. The CBO's projections try to take that into account when projecting the revenue impacts, of course. But I think the main goal of this part of the IRA is to appease populists on both sides who think stock buybacks are bad, because they don't understand how publicly-traded corporations work.

The grants will also be paid out over time, so it's more like spending money in the future that will be raised in the future.

Yeah, it's probably inflation-neutral. The IRA does contain some inflation-reducing provisions in specific areas, notably healthcare, but it's mostly revenue-neutral and inflation-neutral. I suppose you can say it's inflation-reducing compared to its previous incarnation, the Build Back Better bill, which if enacted would have increased the deficit and potentially stoked inflation.

[*] Note that AMT is slightly different in that for most taxpayers AMT is actually calculated at a higher tax rate, in addition to disallowing a lot of deductions. But AMT also allows a much larger standard deduction (with a phaseout based on income).

I think we should celebrate this important day for you. The day you discovered marketing.

It's a true milestone. Most people in Western world hit it by age of 7 or so. How old are you by the way?

Triggered low intelligence china troll is the best china troll.

But you need to go harder.

It's still not paid for. And likely never will be. But you can buy a premium account with perks.

Which is a model taken straight from free to play games, that have been doing this for more than a decade. And a model everyone in social media is desperate to copy in some way after twitter demonstrated just how successful that model can be.

That was such a well-reasoned argument you made.

Expletives are the cheapest form of "I admit it, I'm wrong and have no argument." I note that you did not even have the courtesy to use your account to make your drive-by response and went [appropriately in this case] as "anonymous coward" but probably logged in and worked to down-mod the post to "Troll". The Ad Hominem attack constitutes a bright neon sign flashing a warning that you have nothing of value to contribute.

If your religion is so weak it cannot be questioned, you should consider that this might mean you need to re-think a few things.

When a person gets drunk and plows his car into somebody, killing them, we as a society say "You, drunk person, are NOT innocent; YOU chose to get drunk and therefore YOU are responsible for whatever bad thing YOU DID while you were drunk". We do not permit the drunk killer to say "I'm not guilty because I surrendered control, and then stuff just happened while I was blacked-out".

When a company outsources, transferring its work to some off-shore provider, NOBODY should allow the company to get away with a claim of no responsibility when bad things happen. If you are an American executive and you transfer battery production to a city in India and it blows up there killing lots of people, you absolutely should not suddenly get absolved simply because you arranged a level of indirection, you SHOULD be punished and indeed more severely for having increased the hazards by the very act of outsourcing (which leads to lessened control, just like drinking in the DUI scenario above). We need to end the despicable practice of allowing executives to escape accountability for their bad actions simply be moving those bad actions to some place far away where there is obviously going to be less control - the outsourcing act itself, deliberately reduces control and adds risk. If a sneaker executive outsources production to a place that then uses slave labor, the sneaker executive needs to be prosecuted for human rights violations. If an entertainment company executive outsources animation to a communist hellhole, the executive needs to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

If we were sure that we'll never go to war with China, I'd agree. Right now we're facing a situation where we may end up in another world war, but we'll be on the side fighting against the manufacturing powerhouse. If it weren't for such strategic concerns, I'd be all for dropping all the tariffs (well, we should add some carbon tariffs) and outsourcing all the manufacturing to China. Trading electronic dollars that we invent as needed for hard goods? Hell yeah. I'll take all of that they want to give us.

But I don't think the geopolitical situation can be ignored. I'm not sure that propping up the US auto industry is the best way to maintain vehicle manufacturing capacity, but until a better alternative is proposed we should probably stick with it.

It really won't. We already know how battery degradation works. Unless they bought trucks with too-small batteries to begin with, the trucks will wear out before battery capacity drops enough to require replacement.

My point is that expanding the acronym isn't useful, except perhaps to chemists who would already know what the acronym expands to. Explaining what PFAS are is useful. And the article did that:

PFAS are a class of 15,000 chemicals used across dozens of industries to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. Though the compounds are highly effective, they are also linked to cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, decreased immunity, liver problems and a range of other serious diseases.

They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and are highly mobile once in the environment, so they continuously move through the ground, water and air. PFAS have been detected in all corners of the globe, from penguin eggs in Antarctica to polar bears in the Arctic.

So, I think the Guardian did a fine job of explaining what matters.