"These solar households are now buying less and less electricity, but the utilities still have to manage the costs of connecting them to the grid."

The pro-solar folks think the utilities should pay this cost, instead of the people who actually incur that cost? Do tell.

If the power companies didn't have to worry about connecting all of that moderately-erratic power to the grid, they could easily "build down" over the next decade or two - and chop lots of unprofitable customers from their systems. They could dump pretty much all of the rural customers, and wouldn't have to worry about capacity expansion in the near future. They could even shut down a lot of older power plants that are low performers, profit-wise, instead of having to fight the government to build new plants while trying to keep the old ones running.

You mean "they predict they will hit the target in six years." They hit 31.5%, and might have hit the 33% - if you believe a government spokesman.

This is only "locally-generated" power, by the way: they don't count the power imported from other states, and fail to mention that overall power generation in South Australia is expected to decline due to cheaper power imported from places like Victoria.

They also won't add "one additional dollar to energy prices" by adding the many additional dollars to taxes levied by the federal government.

Yeah, I just bet it is.

This kid managed to make a rugged, reliable piece of hardware that recognizes many fingerprints, will withstand regular impacts from firing, and managed to make the failure rate only one in ten thousand.

Oh, wait - he made a plastic prototype, and hasn't actually tested it in a firing weapon?

Do tell.

No, I know where they are. They just bribed me.

The genes are obviously smart enough to hide from researchers.

...as long as they studied plants and insects on the Fukushima site itself, including right next to the reactor.

"Yeah, as long as we put the seeds right in this radioactive puddle, we got results."

"What about further away? Like outside of the plant property?"

"Are you nuts? I need funding for my next scary study here!"

...from other articles.

The biggest issue with molten salt reactors is corrosion, so they need to find just the right materials to build the thing.

Economies of scale have mostly kicked in already.

As of right now, the panels are no longer the biggest part of the cost of a full-scale installation - it's the "putting it on your roof correctly so it doesn't fall off or catch fire" part that costs.

Prices will drop - some - but for anything like the near future, they're going to stay in the $15,000-$20,000 range - without storage.

You can get lower quotes, but for some reason, those quotes always leave things out... the folks who brag about "I got it for half that" haven't dealt with contractors before, for the most part.

Thirty billion dollars?

You're off by a couple of orders of magnitude, at least.

The cost to put solar panels on the roofs of just the houses in California - with "full capacity" standard-issue PV systems (at about $20,000 a pop), on 15,000,000 homes - is about $300 billion. And that doesn't include storage - it's for grid-tied systems.

That minute was over 40 years ago, and they're still using them.

Most of the newer high-powered SAMs built in Russia are capable of missile intercept (of shorter-ranged ballistic missiles), and they've still got a huge ABM system around Moscow.

Minimum wage increases don't immediately result in mass firings. What happens is that companies stall for a few months, then slow down hiring - and start laying people off. It usually takes about six months. Expect to see an increase in layoffs starting about the time the kids go back to school.

It would also be interesting to see the stats for "number of hours worked." The trend in most places has been towards switching to part time, and cutting back on hours worked. We already know that the national trend for the last few years has been "more jobs with less actual work." Lots and lots of former full-time workers who get 29 hours a week or less, more and more kids who get four or five half-days instead of three full days.

"It was so big we had to sterilize our lab equipment with a hammer."

The MMO WildStar uses a randomized keypad for their two-factor authenticator input.

After a while, you get pretty good at it.

...except that no such effect appears on their maps.

Not to mention the other thing - where the wells they extract the water from originally are on the side of the fault where the earthquakes happened, and the wells where they inject the water are on the other side of the fault, away from the earthquakes. Not only is it counterintuitive, it's the opposite of what they claim in the study.

The small fault that seems to be generating most of the seismic activity in the study is not only quite a few miles away, it's not connected to any of the major faults in the area - and there's a long, major fault (Nemaha Fault) in between the injection wells and the earthquake zone. (Figure S9 shows this dramatically)

It gets better. According to the notes for Figure S3, water is extracted on the west side of the Nemaha Fault and re-injected on the east side. Which means that the earthquakes are increasing on the side nearest the extraction, and not increasing on the side where the water is re-injected.