how you could have read the headline and made that statement.
Because neither you nor other /. where talking about the 500% but repeatedly claim over and over again that solar/wind can not work at all unless (the non existing) storage problem is solved.

It is my contention that the focus on large production number for solar is hiding the real issue with integrating solar into the grid which is storage. Is solar useless? No. Does high solar production need storage to shift supply to demand? Yes.
Define large. 50% of peak? No, no storage _needed_. 75% of peak? Again: now storage might be usefull if you want to invest into it, needed: No.
The point finally is: do you want to shift surplus supply to other demanding times, if you say "yes, you want that", then you need storage. But again: that has nothing to do with the fundamentals of the grid and how it works. For a grid to work you don't need significant more storage than any 'grid in good shape' already has.

It is also for shifting supply to demand. When supply is higher than demand the excess electricity is stored by pumping water. When demand is higher than supply the water is run through the turbines to meet the demand.

Exactly that is, what is called 'grid balancing', or do you think you balance only in one direction?
As soon as wind/solar ramps up, you 'balance' with pumped storage the fine grain 'surplus' and ramp down conventionals for the big impact.

The last part of your post makes no sense to me. Obviously germany only had at very special days so far a close to 80% renewable production. Do you finally agree that you only have use for significant amount of storage when un dispatchable production reaches (or exceeds) the 80% to 100% range, or not?

The original law was stupid, IMHO, as the rest of the world shows. No where where I'm aware about a similar laws exist(ed).

Politicians don't care about anything but the money they can make by gaming the system.

The whole 'climate change controvercy' (an artificial controvercy about a topic where never was any controversy aboit in the first place) is a prime example for that.

Or the idiotic idea that car companies may not have their own shops and laws banning Tessla selling their cars directly.

It is just a few days away that Apple has to close its
AppleStores ...

On 64bit hardware 64bit a code base runs faster/smoother and/or consumes less power, as the 32 bit code is usually 'emulated' (well, that is not strictly correct) and needs to be 'translated' into 64bit equivalents (not strictly correct either :) but close enough for a layman)

A prime example for mandatory voting is Swizerland. But they have a 'direct democracy' (mostly) which means many laws are directly voted for by the population, not in the parliament.

America has a much bigger problem than lack of voters. First of all it is the more than archaic voting system from the late 1700s.

Secondly it is the abuse allowed in it: we have a district that voted mostly republicans and it is surrounded by mainly democrates? But last 4 year many 'democrates' moved into that district?
Lets just reshape the districts, so we are certain that we still have a republican majourity in said district.
In america before every election the 'ruling party' reshapes the voting destricts based on population data in the hope to 'manipulate' the outcome in their desire.

In every other nation that is considered 'voting fraud' or 'voting manipulation'. In the US it is business as usually.

Then comes the need to register for votes ... poor and underdogs, minorities etc. don't like to register.

Then you have the two party system (I really wonder why you laugh about China etc. with a one party system ...)

Then the 'electors' system ... it got changed at some point, but it is still retarded.

Then you had the Bush voting frauds ... come on, in every nation of the world, that is not a dictatorship, that election had been invalidated and Bush would be in jail and had haved no chance to even stay up for the 'Ersatzelection' ... but now 15 years later, who cares *shrugg*

Americans are really really strange regarding that ...

And from thst everything that is evil follows in the USA.
Who gets voted into office? Judges? Sheriffs? State Attorneys?
None of them is doing his job, they all only work to get reelected!!

Police cought one who has no aliby?
Sheriff: lets drop the hunt for the true culprit, lets focus on catching more idiots!
State atorney: How can we get him convicted? Hm, should be easy, he can not defend himself!
Judge: the harder I punish him, the more points I get for the next election!

How retarded is that? In germany the prime responsibility of a state atorney is to convict the right culprit, not a random 'victim'!

There are plenty of cases (in germany) where the state prosecutor in the end himself in the final speech plead 'non guilty' because it was obvious the guy charged was non guilty. Something like that can not even happen in the USA ... your law system is not much better than sharia, except cheating on your spouse is not punished (yet!)

Lets not even start with the idea that a jury in our days is the right thing to 'judge' a culprit.

The point is not to switch over to NoSQL, but to use it where it has its benefits.

90% of the data in our days does not need 'integrity constrains' or even transactions.

RDBS are abused for everything because developers are to stupid to realize when a simple file is sufficient. Or their managers ... or what ever.

Everytime I see someone 'logging' intoma database I like to carry him into the base,ent and chain him onto a wall.

You likely are joking :)

Because the term 'web scale' has no meaning at all ...

It actually stops long before that. The molten material will dilute with the stuff it melts with its heat and sooner or later, a few hundret or a thousand meters below the surface it will stop. I doubt it can reach the molten core of the earth in any circumstances.

  run my AC at night, solar doesn't power that. The wind blows, then it doesn't, then it does.

Neither of those are base load 24/7/365 power sources, basic common sense should tell you that.

Actually on a national scale the wind always blows.
And: as I mentioned now about 1000 times on /. : your definition of base load is wrong
All that has nothing to do with base load.
Base load is a flat line, like the basement of your house or the "base income" or what ever you can imagine with the name "base" in it.
In other words if you have 100 power plants, like 40% of them will be so called base load plants and run around 90% of their capacity around the clock with no change in output over the day and only a slight change of output over the course of the year.
They do that regardless of demand so even if the demand drops below their production you use the excess to refill your pumped storages: that is base load. And with wind and solar being cheaper than coal, you obviously power down and phase out old base load plants.

What is so hard to grasp that "base load" is a flat line cutting from left to right through your daily load curve? You have a load curve over the day, peeking at 7:00 AM and 7:00PM and a hilly plateau in between, perhaps another bigger peek somewhere, and the rest of the curve is like 40% / 50% of that peak. The lowest valley in that curve: that is base load. Because with that point you decide how many "base load plants" you want to have in your grid. It is super simple.

So, now germany produces X GW of power with wind on average, and the wind power production has never dropped below Y since 2 years. Hence we can phase out or cold store as many base load plants that equal Y in power production. So: wind is base load. As simple as that. In 20 years germany will have no traditional base load plant anymore, they all will be replaced by wind.

Same with solar. Base load plants react very slowly, they are designed to be like that. So depending on what plants you have in your fleet it is very likely that you power down base load plants to like 45% when solar energy surges. Powering down mid range plants would make you lose flexibility (you need to be able to power them down for sudden changes later)

Base Load and dispatch able/non dispatch able are orthogonal concepts. You keep mixing them up!

We are not talking about PRODUCTION.

You seem not to grasp what pumped storage is for. It is for balancing the grid.

So the production has absolutely nothing to do with the capacity in GW it 'could' produce nor the amount of energy in GWh it can store and "release".

(*facepalm*)

It is super easy to google for pumped storage in germany ... http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Scroll down to "Deutschland" but note the numbers are from 2005.

Therefore pumped storage contributed 1.4% to weekly production. 1.4% is almost insignificant.
EXACTLY! and hence your and others' claims that wind and solar does not work without extensive storage is: NONSENSE Germany is a perfect counterexample for that.

Obviously :D

However you don't know what all the workers do with the money they earned and what the previous house owner does with the money he got.

Economics are not "that" simple.

Did not think about that ...

Perhaps students simply should by used Macs anyway :D

I read the headline, sorry, how do you come to that conclusion?

I also read half the article, or two third ... sigh.

So you are arguing about stuff which is not even in the article ... or how should I understand your post?

The point is: they believe they only need the only already build over area to produce 5x the daytime use of California. As I said: the other topics in the article did not interest me as it had to many flaws/bad journalism. How you conclude that I did not read it is beyond me.

Sorry, this: Or if you have a painting and auction it off, a portion goes off to the artists and their families for several generations, (often to collection agencies since said artist is dead), regardless of how you bought the painting/artwork and the arrangement at time of purchase.
is nonsense.
The authority over 'the work' by the creator is 'exhausted' with the first sale. Any subsequent owner can more or less do what he want with the work, except defined otherwise in the 'copyright law(Urheberrecht)', e.g. he my not make copies.

In germany many drugs that you consider 'common of the shelf' are not considered 'common of the shelf' ... as far as I can tell, for a good reason.