The problem is going to be the following. Sometime roughly 2030 there will be 90GW of wind and 45GW of solar. Demand will be roughly 60GW peak winter and 50GW summer. The lows will be about 25GW summer and about 40GW winter.

Are you starting to see a problem? No, not yet? Lets continue.

Its January 2030. Its a cold, calm, clear early evening. There is no solar because its dark, and wind is delivering 5GW owing to the usual winter blocking high pressure zone. It has been below 10GW for a week, and will be below 20GW for another week. Nuclear is supplying around 10GW - if they haven't closed down the legacy nuclear by then, Gas has fallen to less than 10GW because the plant has hit end of life.

Where are you going to get 30-40GW from to meet peak demand?

But if you think this is a problem, now lets turn to early July. Solar is now putting out its max, around 30GW at midday. Nuclear is still delivering 10GW. Wind, well that is going a bomb because this is a time of pleasant summer breezes. Its midday. Demand is dropping to 25GW at midday.

Now the problem with solar is that most of it is not under the control of the grid operator, so they cannot turn it off. They turn off all the wind and pay constraint payments to the operators. They can't turn of the nuclear. They are looking at supply of roughly 40GW and demand of 25GW.

At this point, summer or winter, for different reasons, the flight data recorder has a pause in the dialogue between the crew, broken by someone saying 'Oh dear'. Or something a bit stronger. And then all the lights go out.

Two weeks later they are still trying to find enough spinning capacity to get the thing restarted. If its winter, people are quietly dying of cold. Their heating needs power to operate the gas boilers and cookers. If its summer they are taking cold showers, eating cold baked beans.

Meanwhile the government of the day considers the situation and comes to the conclusion that the problem is that they do not have enough solar power installed, so they adopt a plan to install a further 45GW of it. That should fix the problem. Now, how to communicate this plan to the country? That is a slight problem, Prime Minister. A lot of our communications facilities seem to be, well, out of action... because of the, well, the...the temporary interruption to grid services...

Do the math how you want. If you move a country to a generating system where peak demand is bound to coincide with low supply, and peak generation with low demand, the result will be blackouts.

We are facing the same problem that Gutenberg created in the 15th century: a proliferation in the ability of everyone to create and communicate whatever they want and whatever people want to read. Due mainly to a dramatic fall in the cost of production of books. But its far more extreme than Gutenberg because the drop in costs is so much greater. In an era in which everyone has Internet access, a smart phone and/or laptop, writing in publishable format has become much easier and publishing itself has basically become free.

And the problem arises in the same areas it arose back in the day: pornography, religious heresy, political subversion. The same thing happened in 17c France, where people took their manuscripts to Holland for printing which their local booksellers in Paris were afraid to touch. Holland was also a center of piracy, where you could get a run of some best seller quickly and smuggle it back to Paris or London to sell at a discount. A sort of early predecessor of the Pirate Bay.

There is really no solution to this. You can see the same sorts of measures being taken up - the creation of a sort of index, the banning of some materials by righteous jurisdictions, For instance, as late as the 20c the works of \Joyce being banned in Ireland, Lady Chatterly in England, lots of books in the US. In the end this, and the Papal Index, were dropped because they were widely ridiculed and were not working. When the main result of your policy is to drive your best regarded novelists abroad and their works to be published in France, something is not working. And its not achieving its goal, if anything its increasing the interest in the banned material.

Governments however do not feel they can simply stop trying - and one understands this. Along with kinds of freedom of speech most here would find important and valuable, there is also the darker side of human nature that flourishes at the edges. What do you do about it? Do you decide to just give up? One understands why they feel they cannot. And one also understands that regulation and censorship of the truly vile is only possible by measures which have a dramatic negative effect on privacy.

Its a bit like speeding. You can pretty much stop speeding dead if you have enough cameras and you have number plate recognition. The side effect is that all trips and all car use then become trackable. You lower accidents. But the temptation to increase the use of the data is enormous. Similarly with facial recognition - you probably could use it in conjunction with other draconian measures to stop phone snatching and shop lifting. And there seems to be no other affordable way to do that. But the cost in privacy of such a total package is not small.

I see the problem and its historical parallels clearly enough, but don't know the answer.

You ask: "And how does *also* allowing non fossil-fuel energy, like wind and solar, hurt any of that?"

Answer: intermittency. Adding wind and solar to the generating system just adds cost for no benefit.

If you want detailed case histories of this look at the UK, the usual canary. You will find that the useless intermittent supply from wind and solar comes in, on the bids, far higher than conventional. Regulation is needed to force utilities to buy it. And that is for an intermittent supply. There is no way to deliver dispatchable power from wind and solar at a cost which is competitive with conventional, ie gas or coal.

You doubt it? Go through the UK wind bids and add up the total cost of the UK electricity Net Zero push. Adding wind and solar to a conventional generation system just pushes up costs. Among the costs it adds are constraint payments. There are wind farms in the UK which are making a majority of their income from being paid not to generate, because the wind is supplying when there is no demand.

By the time you factor in the increase in gas consumption consequent on having to rely on open cycle rapid start gas to cover calms and nights its doubtful you even save any emissions either.

Its a great mystery why people who are persuaded of a climate crisis from CO2 emissions have this blind faith in wind and solar generation. Whether or not there is a climate crisis, wind and solar are not a viable generating technology and are not any kind of solution to it.

Paul Homewood has covered the UK wind constracting process in detail if you want that. Most advocates of wind do not. But here he is, as a for example, on constraint payments:
              https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

and here he is on the recent AR7 auction
              https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

Lots more on costs, subsidies and constraint if you explore the site. The political consensus in the UK seems to be turning against the so called energy transition. The situation in the Gulf is clarifying minds. The absurdity of the idea that moving to intermittent wind and solar is either possible or is going to increase energy security or reduce energy prices is becoming obvious.

Never really understood these suits. They ask for damages, but does this mean they envisage Exxon (just as a for instance) carrying on extracting and selling fossil fuels? Because that is where the money would have to come from to pay the damages if they won.

Or do they want Exxon to close down and stop extracting and selling? At which point the company would be worthless, so it would have little prospect of paying any damages to (for instance) the residents of Colorado (just as a for instance) or anyone else.

And then you have the problems of scale and attribution. Take the problem of scale first. If you look at the percentage of total global emissions that are due to Exxon, they are rather small. Chinese emissions from coal, for instance, will dwarf them. So there is a real problem proving that Exxon has caused significant amounts of the current warming. But it gets worse, the current warming is not itself very large, Globally its around 1C. Very hard to prove that this much warming has caused significant damage, and even harder to prove that anything Exxon has done has caused significant amounts of it.

This would be the first defense. But the second defense would be attribution. Colorado, for instance, is suing because of the damage done to its residents. How do you prove it was Exxon's emissions, as opposed to the Chinese emissions from burning coal? And if the remedy requested is to close down Exxon, how much effect will that have on global emissions, global temps and local weather?

They seem to be suing people for unproven damage which may have been caused (though you'd have to prove this) by a global phenomenon to which Exxon has been a minor contributor. And requesting remedies which will be either ineffective or impossible to obtain.

Its completely different from a case where a company pollutes a bay with mercury, it enters the local food chain and poisons the locals who eat the local fish. And then sue for being poisoned. Or asbestos, where the companies can be sued by people who worked with the stuff and got asbestosis. Or tobacco, where the product has harmed those who used it, and they can sue. Or a state government can sue based on damage to its citizens. The harm done by the habit to the damaged is provable.

Here we have Colorado trying to sue for damage which may or may not have been caused by global emissions, which have only been contributed to minorly by Exxon, and where there is no provable connexion between the damage and the Exxon emissions and where an award of remedy will either be impossible to pay or will have no effect on the problem..

Simply do not understand either how they are goiing to prove what they need, or what remedy they can obtain.

Sue China, maybe. China is mining and burning more coal than the rest of the world put together, and is accounting for more than one third of global emissions. China stops emitting, global emissions really do fall by an amount which will have an effect. Exxon,,,?

ChromeOS is absolutely fantastic for normal, everyday users who only rarely need an installed app. For those people, I'd be very hard-pressed to give up the ease of remote management and the restrained user interface updates. Supporting Chromebooks is a breeze, truly.

But if users need more than just the rare installed app, "low-end" Macs are absolutely the logical move. The Mac Neo moves this an absolute no-brainer decision. Apple makes the best computer hardware in the industry, hands down. The OS is not as easy to use as ChromeOS, mainly because the UI is not as restrained. (Apple seems to change its settings apps on every release, just like Android and Windows. That is criminal. It's all just Linux under the hood, guys, for heaven's sake stop "innovating" on how to control settings!)

for you, not the AI

Anyone who is genuinely confused about whether they are ONE person or MANY shouldn't be in charge of anything, much less AI robotics intended for use by the military. What nonsense. Good riddance.

"It abandons its core mandate to protect human health and the environment to boost polluting industries and attempts to rewrite the law in order to do so."

This is complete nonsense. There is no threat to American health from American CO2 emissions. No-one has ever shown that.

Reducing US emissions will have no or minimal effect on the level of global emissions. So even if you think the level of global emissions will produce heat which is a danger to health globally (which is again pretty hard or impossible to prove) you still have no case for the Endangerment Finding.

The EPA is not concerned with the global, but with the American, not with global temps, global emissions, the welfare of the rest of the world. If you could show that US emissions were driving warming and that warming was a threat to health, maybe you'd have a point.

But US emissions are not driving global emissions, so you cannot show that. Its at the level of eat your dinner because of the starving children in Africa. How, asks the kid, will that help them? Don't argue with your mother, is the reply.

I think the idea was the same as the idea of runnng MacOS on generic Intel. People wanted to do that because they liked the OS but did not want to pay over the odds for generic hardware. The Mac people always claimed that the Apple hardware was premium quality, but it never has been, its always just been commodity stuff at an inflated price.

So finally Apple comes up with what seems to be genuinely better hardware - faster, lower power consumption in packages that are at least as good as premium Intel machines. They aren't cheap, but they do seem very nice as hardware.

But, people are now saying, yes to the hardware but no to that awful locked down OS. So they naturally enough try to get Linux working on the hardware.

The difficulty they are running into is the same in both cases. Apple is determined, whenever it gets a market lead in either OS or hardware, to use that to force sell the other. So back in the day we had an OS people really wanted, but which would only run, and later was only permitted to be packaged with, hardware which was either garbage stuff like the Motorola chips or later the PowerPC ones which were too expensive and also real heaters. But the idea was, force them to buy the hardware to get the OS.

Now its force them to use the OS they don't want to be able to use the hardware they want.

The solution is not to deal with these people. Wait a while and the industry will catch up on hardware. Meanwhile just buy the best hardware you can afford and run the OS you want on it. As long as you deal with Apple you will always be in a similar situation, the only thing on their mind is how to lock you in. The specifics will vary, but the song remains the same. Some people are fine with that, some even positively like it, it makes them feel safe and special.

A lot of us don't like it and won't have anything to do with Apple. And then there are the real open source heroes, like the Asahi team, who are ready to throw themselves into a real struggle, Applaud them, support them, and they seem to be winning bit by bit. But its a struggle, its a few guys against one of the largest tech companies in the world. Wish them luck, support them, but its a bit like Wine, its an uphill struggle and probably not ready for production yet, if it ever will be.

I have no desire to add any renewable power generation devices to my home. It was never designed with that in mind, starting with the siting. It will never be optimal. However, I am more than ready to be a consumer of renewable energy, the economics are very compelling. Installing bi-directional batteries, however, will have a negligible impact on my home -- maybe take up some space on my garage wall, that's about it. But having backup power right at hand is a great incentive. And, distributing power storage makes for a far more robust system.

This is a very interesting idea. I'm for it.

The Microsoft bluetooth keyboard is just about silent, as quiet as you can get, and excellent build quality. Do not, however, spill coffee on it!

"that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions"

As usual no quantification, just the usual hysterical alarmism. Current global emissions are about 37 billion tons a year. How much will these US installations add to that? And how much additional warming will this additional amount lead to?

Can you even say by how much its going to increase US emissions? When doing this, might be an idea to start by saying what these are right now. Then we can see how important it is.

'Planet heating' is a giveaway, by the way. Straight out of the Guardian style guide.

It would help if you could be more specific about who you want destroyed. If you read the detail of the report and look at the tables (which the Guardian fails to give much information about) you will find that most of the emitting is being done by entities which are

(a) outside the West
(b) doing something other than oil extraction and sale.

So are you urging people to get out there and destroy Chinese cement plants and the HQs of the Chinese cement producers? What about the Chinese coal extraction companies, do you want to head up a delegation which goes over there and destroys them? Good luck with that! Or do you want to try persuasion? Join the club, the West has been trying to persuade China and India etc to stop or slow down for the last 20+ years, with absolutely no results.

The key entities are the nation states. That is the only place you will ever get action on curbing emissions. China, for instance, is emitting over one third of global emissions. China is using and extracting more coal than the rest of the world put together. They could stop tomorrow if they wanted to. Which entities are doing this within China is immaterial, they all have such close ties to government that they can be considered extensions of government.

Slashdot should really stop linking to the Guardian. As in this report its disconnected hysterical alarmist rants put together by literature grad. Nothing wrong with being a literature grad. But keep them away from science and engineering topics. All you will get is vague rants, like this one.

The usual recent obsession on Slashdot, on an unimportant detail of the story.

The real story is the relative size of the US and China economies, and its the same story whether its electricity or steel. China is bigger. A lot bigger. And getting bigger yet all the time.

This is the important thing about this story, not how much wind they are using, which is an unimportant detail. This is what is changing the balance of power in the Pacific, this will lead to the fall of Taiwan one of these years. This is the important thing about the story.

For goodness sake raise your eyes from this myopic progressive obsession with the climate and renewables story and focus on the geopolitical issue here which is going to change the world well within in most of our lifetimes.

"....in ten years time, renewables will give them electricity so much cheaper...."

No it won't, this is nonsense.

  First because intermittency, which means it does not provide reliable dispatchable power without being supplemented by other conventional sources.

Second because even without providing for intermittency, for what it does produce intermittently its far more expensive.

Want proof? Look at the recent UK auction.

People keep claiming wind and solar are far cheaper than gas or coal, but they never give any evidence, and they are not. Which is why they always need subsidy and compulsory purchase regulations.