A "jobsworth" does not refer to a useless job, but to a worker who does the absolute minimum, hiding behind regulations, and fobbing off any demand to do some actual work with "That's more than my job's worth". Hence the name.

Given that the comparison is with a Small Modular Reactor, this isn't really relevant. If we end up with GW data centers then the comparison result may change, since it will be comparing a full-sized reactor against much larger renewable plants. I doubt the results will be much different, but they might be.

Citation needed.

It takes time to upgrade aging coal plants too. Can you cite an actual lead-time comparison study, or is this just your opinion?

But I thought you were worried about shortages - and you're insisting no new coal plants are being built. If only existing plants are being upgraded, how is that going to address these potential energy shortages?

Meanwhile, build times for new solar plants are measured in months, wind only a little more. New coal plants take years, and nuclear up to a decade (or more, in many recent cases). Yet you say you still prefer nuclear - I guess time is not a factor after all?

Pipes also leak - a lot more than you seem to think.

And yet it's wildly popular in places like California and Australia, so the public certainly feels it's well worth it to avoid much-higher retail power costs. My solar system paid itself back in about 4 years, and I'll get another 25 of free juice.

That's solar thermal, not photovoltaic - what was that about straw man arguments?

Meanwhile, large PV plants like Copper Mountain, Gemini, Edwards & Sanborn, Desert Sunlight, and Topaz are producing just fine. Deserts are near-ideal for solar plants (good luck building nuclear without a large nearby water source though).

Lol, they would certainly be remaining closed if Trump wasn't throwing $350 million at them! The very fact he has to prop them up proves they're not a lower cost option.

And as for lobbying - Trump literally asked fossil fuel execs for $1 billion in exchange for favourable policies - cheap at the price from their perspective (but more than a little corrupt).

Bullshit, I myself have cited numerous such comparisons directly to you, right here on Slashdot. Here's another one - nuclear costs from 2x to 10x the cost of firmed solar, backed by storage, and would take far longer to build. Nuclear power has a place in this world, but even in the most enthusiastic countries like China it's a very small place (4 GW of new nuclear added there this year, compared to 277 GW of new solar).

Yet you consistently refuse to accept or acknowledge the dozens of independent cited studies, never citing relevant evidence of your own - and instead talk about "political leanings" and "lies by omission". The irony is astounding.

Sure, but to put that in perspective, they added 54 GW of coal in 2024 - and 80 GW of wind, and 277 GW of solar. Nuclear was just 4 GW.

You should actually read the conclusions of that article. It does not bolster your case.

That's why grids are widely distributed, far wider than any storm system. In Australia's case, the NEM includes connected generation sites many thousands of kilometres apart. Mainland US is even more widely connected. No storm covers more than a fraction of that, and the rest of the grid is producing normally.

Good thing they never need to cover the entire grid then (thanks to ishmaelflood for the link!). Historically, production would have never dropped more than 30% over any two week period, and even this can be mostly addressed by overbuilding supply (same idea as peaker plant generation).

South Australia has been running on ~100% renewables for some years now (over 130% at times, exporting the difference) with just a couple hundred MWh of storage. How? Local generation (rooftop solar), overbuilding of generation (cheaper than storage), and links to neighbouring state grids to share the peaks and valleys.

Lol, I guessed you missed the part where the Coalition took their nuclear plan to the election - and suffered a massive wipeout, losing a quarter of all their seats - in large part thanks to their insistence on slow & expensive nuclear.

And of course you cherry-picked a Sky News article rather than any actual studies. Trust me, they're considered a fringe outlet in Australia - hardly representative of the majority view, as the election conclusively proved.

Source? Those are wildly overblown costs - did you get them from a study, or Sky News? Even the pro-nuclear Coalition's favoured modelling showed a fraction of that.

More realistically, CSIRO puts it at $500 billion. AEMO themselves say $122 billion. And even these costs will be easily repaid in the long run, with cheaper energy and slashed pollution - not to mention reducing the GDP hit from climate change, which could be trillions.

Your weather link states that the risk of renewable "droughts" is overstated, that the historical record shows no more than a 30% production drop in any two-week period, that simply overbuilding supply can minimise even that, and concludes:

System inertia is indeed important for a resilient grid - but that no longer requires "spinning mass". For example, see grid-forming inverters.

And they can add it back again - they're storage systems, not sinks. Turns out, on-demand load is just as valuable for a balanced grid as on-demand supply - even more so when the grid includes non-load-following power plants like coal or nuclear.

"Bragging rights" has nothing to do with it, they were maximising renewables because they're so damned inexpensive - just like most other countries are doing.

This was just regular old cheaping-out on grid services they didn't feel were necessary, until they were. Capitalism at work, buy the cheapest you can and don't waste money on "non-essentials" until after they turn out to be essential after all - unless forced to by regulations.

That is not remotely true, inertia has been a well-understood factor in grid resilience for a century at least. That's why synchronous condensers were introduced way back in the 1930s. The Spanish grid operators most certainly knew that extra inertia is required as turbines are retired - and chose to skimp on it anyway.

Source please? Some operators may keep a few gas turbines around as a short-term solution (don't even need to fuel them - did you know free-spinning turbines can be operated as syncons?) - but grids like South Australia have already proved they can reliably operate a GW-scale grid with nothing but renewables, a few syncons, and a single 40MW gas turbine. And even that last turbine is on the chopping block, as grid-forming batteries are steadily added.

No, it's "restarting and upgrading" existing coal plants. Some of those were already closed due to age, some are scheduled to close soon. In practically all cases they're closed or closing due to not being economically viable anymore, maintenance and running costs exceeded revenue - they simply couldn't compete.

Instead they're being propped up with a short-term cash handout, but when that's burned through they'll just close again. That $350 million could've been spent on new renewables & storage instead (staged build-out of those can be very fast, months not years), but instead we're stuck with expensive and polluting coal for another few years.

Certainly true! Which is another reason why we shouldn't be propping up uncompetitive generation. Building new solar is so much cheaper than existing coal that the savings from early replacement of coal plants pays for significant amounts of battery storage as well - and that's before including $350m of coal upgrade costs.

Not necessarily, it can be significantly higher. Methane leakage from processing, storage, and transport can have a vastly higher impact than CO2 (and it all ends up lingering as CO2 anyway).

Like how you've been opposing solar all these years?

It means keeping coal boilers hot by burning gas - co-firing is a common strategy for supplementing or transitioning coal plants with gas.

Of course it is expanding the use of coal. Your own post's quote says it's "restarting" plants that were closed - and it's certainly propping up plants that have been closing across the USA for years now. It's expanding coal use today, and expanding it compared to what it would be tomorrow.

Straw man. You'll find people are much more worried about their power bills than blackouts. We need cheaper energy, and this is not delivering that.

Something I've been suggesting to you for a long time now. In the real world, coal is just plain uncompetitive, even without considering external costs like pollution and climate impact, and gas is not much better. Firmed renewables are much cheaper across most of the US, and have the additional bonuses of not killing 91,000 people a year or disrupting ocean food webs with acidification.

So far it's working no better or worse than before the pandemic. In many respects the quantitative easing was a success and interest rates remain low. The economy is most at risk presently from the ever-changing whims of the president.

As far as ignoring debt I'd agree with you, except that governments (and voters apparently) are concerned about the debt and are using it as an excuse to cut public spending and many things that actually are a net benefit to the society and economy. If they just pretended debt didn't matter or exist, and spend whatever they want/need, then things might actually work okay; they did before anyway. Except for the minor problem that most of this debt is actually owed to citizens who are using government bonds as a savings vehicle, and they will need that money when they retire, so more money is borrowed from the next generation to pay the previous one.

Stop reading my chat history! You're worse than Zuck!

Currently the "they" is the central bank. They already do all this, create as needed and loan it out. Governments borrow it. MMT simply eliminates the debt part of it, which is a bit silly to have anyway. Governments still spend money as they see fit. This just removes the drag on the economy that comes from the debt part of it. MMT does do away with much of the separation between government and central bank, but most countries in the world have no real separation. The US is somewhat unique in having an independent fed.

Anyway, economists who are a lot smarter than me and you have been exploring and debating MMT for quite a while now. If you are interested in the specifics you can read up what various research groups have said about it.

This is a bad strategy all around. If you try to manage the money supply with spending, it means that must inflate anytime your wish to boost the economy with fiscal policy.

That already is the case. Just look at stimulus spending.

When the economy is growing the money supply already must be expanding. Feds already create money as needed. The difference here is it's not lended to get it in the economy.

I don't understand what you mean about rainy days at all.

Haha. Probably not triggered. Just annoyed.

You jest, but EU countries all have the same problem. Just being together in the EU won't solve it.