Who's the actual target?

I once knew someone who was in military intelligence during the Cold War who had lots of good stories about where the intelligence to analyze came from. One good source was an undersea Soviet cable that the US had covertly tapped. Another was their predecessor to cell phones. They were analog and unencrypted, but they generally realized the risk and didn't use them anywhere near where there might be a listening post. However in issuing guidelines for their usage they apparently miscalculated on the fact that the signals also propagate up, believing that the low power transmissions would be too weak and distorted by the time they got to orbit to be demodulated. The US however had a satellite that could do precisely that.

The Soviets were also very good at covertly tapping US communications. They (and their Russian successors) also made good use of them in other ways. In the Chechen conflict, their leader Dzhokhar Dudaev stayed in communications with his contacts via short calls by satellite phone. The Russian solution to this was to create a system that would specifically recognize his phone, and mounted it to a HARM - the sort of missile normally used to take out radar transmitters, which homes in on a specific radio signal. It was the world's first - and only - "Anti-Dudaev Missile", and worked quite effectively.

embarrassed themselves by proposing obvious nonsense

Okay, I'll bite. here's a comparison of historic forecasts from skeptics and from mainstream scientists, versus actual measured temperatures. Who, exactly, is embarrassing themselves here?

It's long been known that the temperature of the thermosphere is highly dependent on what the sun is doing. It doesn't "store" energy, and there's essentially nothing above it to block it from radiating out into space. It also represents a mere 0.002% of the atmosphere.

It's not the thermosphere whose temperature people care about. It's the first few dozen meters of the troposphere that matters.

and it's about the coolant effect of CO2 in the middle and lower atmosphere, not the troposphere

You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.

(Hint: the troposphere *is* the lower atmosphere - and if you define "middle" by "half of the mass" rather than "half of the altitude", it's that too)

Why is it "bullshit"? Do you actually think there's really no health cost to dumping PM, SOx, NOx, CO, VOCs, etc into the atmosphere (just ignoring CO2)?

Quite true. People complaining about randomness on the grid and uneven supply usually don't stop and consider that the grid already faces huge randomness from the other side - demand - and deals with it just fine. Baseload is indeed a problem, not a solution, and peaking and storage are interchangeable.

I think people focusing on storage are letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough". I think storage is the ultimate future, but we're talking long term. Mid-term, peaking is the answer. Switch over the lion's share of generation to renewables, get them as type-diverse and geographically-diverse as possible, use peakers to fill in the gap like we already do, and you've taken out 90% of the problem (at least on the electricity side - still have to deal with transportation and other anthropogenic emissions).

That page is ridiculous. They credit 171k deaths to hydro from a single Chinese dam failure without bothering to mention that it failed because of a freaking cat-4 (nearly 5) typhoon. And dams have saved far more people than that through flood control. The 1931 floods in China alone killed as many as 4 million people.

And beyond that, pumped hydro != conventional hydro. Pumped hydro generally uses proportionally small reservoirs, and it's not usually situated in populated areas like river valleys. Where there's a big coastal rise it's popular to use the ocean as the lower reservoir.

As I described earlier, nuclear is a bloody awful choice if you're looking for a peaker (not going to go into why yet again)

Lastly, hydro, even pumped hydro, isn't my preferred solution (for ecological reasons). My preferred mid-range solution is a geographically diverse (stretching across multiple climate zones that don't experience the same weather at the same time) high power HVDC grid with diverse renewables generation in each location (so that their randomness doesn't correspond well with each other), with natural gas as peaking. You could probably get a 90% renewables / 10% gas solution in that manner. And a HVDC grid provides a ton of other benefits beyond just reducing net randomness - it syncs up disjoint AC grids allowing power sharing, it spreads out demand peaks over broader regions where they occur at different times due to different timezones, it makes underwater transmission lines much easier, it lets you use energy resources that are "the best, period" rather than having to settle for "the best that's close enough to the demand", it lets industry position itself more ideally, it helps you keep pollution away from populated areas, and on and on.

Holy Red Herrings, Batman! It's almost as if I wrote "If you have HVDC, and and solar power generation in a single geographic region suddenly become stable", rather than what I actually wrote:

Probably the best thing you can do is simply have a powerful HVDC grid so you can move power between different geographic regions and to use different types of renewables techs

Even in Germany, solar plus wind alone is much less random than purely solar or purely wind. But combined over a broad geographic region, the figures are surprisingly stable. HVDC lines also (their main purpose today) link you up with other regions so that you can use them as peaking when you need it and they don't (esp. regions with hydro, since hydro is much more total-energy-limited than power-limited, and nameplate power capacity can be uprated if necessary with little ecological impact and proportionally very small cost).

then your "high voltage DC net" myth will collapse.

Which is why Germany and Denmark are in a constant state of blackout?

Honest policy by a - say - PHD-in-physics politico would be to demand storage for at least 5 days for every Watt of "renewable" power installed.

That argument of yours makes no sense, since it doesn't account for capacity factor or generation profiles.

It would mean lifting up the entire lake constance by dozens of meters.

This claim is unevaluatable without knowing how much backup energy you're meaning to provide.

But if you are just a fucking liar with a physics PHD, you skip the storage.

Storage and peaking generation are 100% interchangeable. You can use any combination of either. And as stated, the need for either storage or peaking generation depends on the randomness of the supply, and 1) the more types of sources you use, and 2) the broader the geographic area you collect from, the less net randomness in the generation.

It should be noted that the power grid today is already highly random - not in terms of supply fluctuations, but demand fluctuations. Nighttime demand averages about a third of daytime generation, and there are sudden spikes and dropoffs at certain times of day. The current approach to the grid - peaking - deals with high levels of randomness just fine.

(it should also be noted that HVDC across time zones also helps you level out time-of-day demand spikes)

Not necessarily, it depends on your usage profile. If you're talking about power suddenly dropping out for half an hour then coming back, you're absolutely right. But if you're talking about it suddenly dropping out when a certain weather pattern moves in and staying out until it moves on, then of course it'd be useful.

And IIIIII will love you again! I will love you! Like I uuuuuuussssed tooooooo!

Again, if a person is willing to pay the costs, they should be allowed to. Secondly, there's a difference between the car having to drive 10 minutes to a parking garage and circling endlessly for hours. Third, when you're talking fully automated roadways, you get greatly increased throughput. Fourth, your "there's only so much road space in downtown areas" claim makes no sense, we're talking about how automated vehicles can free up space downtown by preventing the need for "convenient parking", allowing parking to be clustered into dense and/or less convenient locations, depending on the situation.

Moving parts != motor oil. Electric motors most commonly have a small amount of grease that's designed to never need replacement. There's also some that use hydraulic or air bearings.

Motor oil that's designed to wear out with time is part of the consequences of having to work in the harsh environment of internal combustion engines. It's not a fundamental requirement of moving parts.

People would spend their time engaged in their preferred hobbies. Tinkerers would tinker. Musicians would make music. Writers would write. Programmers would program. Gardeners would garden. And on and on. I see nothing wrong with such a world.

Now, whether people's needs (let alone wants) could be met when you're having such a big global GDP cut, I think THAT's a more serious concern...

In reality, nukes are terrible as backup power. Just assuming you have a plant that can ramp up and down quickly (most can't), nuclear plants are almost all capital cost. Hence they need to run at a high capacity factor to pay back the investment; it doesn't pay to idle them. But if you're wanting to use them as gap filling in low wind/solar times, then that's exactly what you're suggesting be done - sit idle until more power is needed. It's a terrible use of a nuclear plant.

Pumped hydro isn't that expensive. It's currently the cheapest option out there by a good margin (except for uprating already-existing conventional hydro). But other techs are trying to beat it. Probably the best thing you can do is simply have a powerful HVDC grid so you can move power between different geographic regions and to use different types of renewables techs. The randomness goes way down when you do this. NG is commonly used as a peaking fuel, and I see no problem continuing to do this (instead of doing energy storage) if you can keep it down to an average of under 10% or so of the total generation mix. It's low carbon to begin with and modern NG peakers can hit upwards of 60% efficiency once warmed up. So 90% renewables, 10% efficiently-used NG, you're talking near total elimination of electricity-related CO2 emissions.

It's not the engineers' fault; It's rare that I've seen as big of a misrepresentation of an article outside of say Russian state propaganda that I've seen with this Register article. Starting with the title.

The original article absolutely, positively does not say in any way, shape or form, "Renewable energy 'simply WON'T WORK'" or "Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible."

The actual article says something very, very different. The engineers went into the project hoping that if we make the incremental improvements to make renewables as cheap as coal, then there will be a mass-switchover to renewables and CO2 levels will be held down. Except that that doesn't work. Why? Because of lead times. People who have existing coal power plants for example aren't just going to take them down because new renewables projects are cheaper than new coal plants. You need to get the price down well below that of coal to where it justifies them throwing their already-invested capital costs out the window. Without doing that, your switchover rate is limited by how fast power plants go offline, which is a very long time. So in their "as cheap as coal" scenario, they only get to a 55% emissions cut by 2050. They were hoping that'd keep the world under 350 ppm. But not only does the world still hit 350 ppm in that scenario, but it continues to rise. Hence, the hypothesis that getting renewables as cheap as coal is sufficient to prevent major climate change is suggested to be wrong.

What that DOESN'T say in any way, shape or form:

1) Renewables "WON'T WORK"
2) Renewables "don't help prevent climate change"
3) There's no scenario in which renewables can prevent climate change

What they call for are several changes.

1) They feel that focusing on preventing emissions with renewables isn't enough, that you need active CO2 scrubbing as well.

2) They call for renewables investment to adopt the "Google Model": 70% core business, 20% related new business, 10% risky disruptive new technology. This is versus conventional investment which is 90% core business (aka incremental improvements), 9,9% related, and 0,1% disruptive. They think this provides better odds for renewables or other technologies to stop climate change because incrementally improving down to the price of coal - while it'd have a big impact on CO2 emissions rates - still won't keep levels down below 350 ppm.

Does this even resemble the Register article? Nope. Not even a little bit.