I know that on-site solar has benefits -- I'm a big proponent. It's just not a silver bullet. Thinking of energy systems in terms of a silver bullet is fundamentally misconceived in my view, anyway -- there are so many benefits from having a heterogenous approach, above all resilience. We massively benefit from diverse supply, storage, the ability to flex demand, etc.

We need a less centralised grid than today, but we still need plenty of large solar and wind projects.

Wind, because it’s roughly counter-cyclical with solar so it improves supply stability and cuts storage requirements (which remain more expensive).

Solar, because there’s plenty of uses that can’t be served by on-site solar (skyscrapers, for one). And large solar farms are substantially better bang for buck than on-site.

There’s room for it all, and we need all of it.

1. Early Leafs were notorious for shitty battery management. Literally no other car had the same issues. I bought a Renault Zoe in 2015, just two years later than that guy. It was a tiny 5 door hatchback with a puny 80 mile range, so it needed charging all the time. It did, however, have a robust battery management system. I sold it in 2018, and it had the same battery life as the day I bought it.

2. The reason prices don't appear to have dropped more is that OEMs have used cheaper prices and greater energy density to stuff bigger batteries with longer ranges into cars at roughly the same price. So my third gen Zoe, bought five years after the first, had the same dimensions, but a 52kWh battery instead of 20kWh and a range of 245 miles instead of 80, all for the same price.

3. That Leaf guy got, as we say in the UK, done over like a kipper. The one thing that a Leaf has going for it is the modular battery design, which means that only the fraction of a battery that's truly irretrievable needs to be replaced. If you do need to replace an entire battery, it costs $15k to get a new one, just like you said (well, £12k). But... that's for a 62kWh battery, ie nearly triple the original capacity. (And you can a 40kWh battery for £8k). So prices have come down substantially

You absolutely do not need to build storage capacity to supply 20GW for several days. That would assume calm conditions, including offshore, with no sun, for several days across all California. When was the last time that happened? I don't mean this as a rhetorical question, it's a direct question to you: when did the whole of California last experience multiple consecutive days of no sun and no win including offshore (and many nights of no wind too)?

Sure, but there's a limit to how much nuance I can fit in while ensuring the sentence is vaguely coherent. Plus, there's upside as well as downside variance, especially when you consider new chemistries are arriving fast.

In the last 10 years, battery price per kWh dropped by more than 80% from $780 to $139. https://www.statista.com/stati...

In the next 15 years, battery price per kWh is going to drop again, and significantly, because all the previous drops happened without the economies of scale or learning that are available now that EVs are selling in the order of millions per year. This isn't just theory -- the next few years' worth of enhancements are already in roadmaps, and they're all for lithium ion chemistries, not solid state or sodium or anything more speculative. Here's a quick overview: https://apple.news/AlTkZ0RI9RW...

So trying to figure out the specific costs of a replacement pack for 15 years down the line is difficult, but it will definitely be much lower than the costs today. My guess is that you're looking at something that costs $10k today costing $4k in today's dollars then. For a PHEV, it's probably more like $6k today, $2k then.

It's also how frothers got so frothy... they guzzle down the frothing from their favourite sources and then bilge it back up like a never-ending burp

They took the production offline five years ago because it was losing money. Two years after that, they looked at this defunct plant that was costing them money and realised they could re-use the site and make money instead.

I’d ask for them to up the dose, if I were you. It probably won’t help, but in your position, anything’s worth a shot

Cleaner buildings, roads and lungs where it really matters - where people live and work — is a more immediately obvious benefit of EVs cf CO2.

1. Your 42% number is still too high. It doesn't account for the reduction in electricity required to refine all the gasoline for all those vehicles. Plus 3mpkWh is a very low figure, eg:
- Model Y - 3.3 to 3.8
- Model 3 - 4 to 5
- Kona - 4.8
- Niro - 4.4
I know there's Hummers and Cybertrucks etc, but an average of 3 seems too conservative

2. This capacity was taken offline back in 2019. We need to retire carbon intensive capacity fast, and we need to expand less carbon intensive capacity even faster. New capacity that's less carbon intensive is definitely coming online faster than old capacity that's carbon intensive, but the rate of both needs to increase

The plant was shut off back in 2019, five years ago, for being uneconomic. It was already shut off well before Calpine decided to build the battery bank.

So this wasn't a choice between a ive CCGT plant and batteries; it was a choice between a dead CCGT plant and batteries.

The CCGT jobs were long gone.

That’s not true even for EVs, which is a very demanding application, much more than this. EV battery warranties are for replacement if state of health at 8 years is below 80%. That implies manufacturers expect batteries to last considerably longer, which is unsurprising, given they can do 1000 charge-discharge cycles before hitting 80%. And it’s not like they’re useless at 80%. They’re at 80%.

There are about 2 million crop workers who pick fruit and vegetables on American farms. It's not all done by massive machines!

I don't know enough of the history to know whether the laws were worded that way through malice or incompetence (or both). It seems entirely plausible that lobbyists got the laws worded like this to create the loophole for auto manufacturers, given that's a dance we've seen before in the US many times.