I don't think you realize that 76.9 million is just his stock options. He also gets dividends, just like all other stock holders.

Also, I'd take that wager once we agree that plumbing company in question must be at least within hundred times as large as Oracle. How much are you willing to bet?

He's good, but not worth the pay he's receiving.

Just because plumber does a good job, doesn't mean he's worth tens of millions a year. Just because CEO does a good job, doesn't mean that he's worth 76.9 million USD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende

Fact: It's possible to put up wind turbine at sea where wind is fairly constant.
Fact: It still won't work as base power, because materials do not allow us to build a gearbox that would survive high wind conditions long enough to be workable. I.e. modern turbines can only work with certain wind speeds, and are massively crippled by the RPM range of their gearboxes.

Fact: it's not terribly expensive to BUILD a wind turbine.
Fact: it's prohibitively expensive to MAINTAIN a wind turbine.

Do you know why? Because we do not have the materials that can withstand the massive wear and tear. As a result, wind turbine maintenance is extremely costly, and even with it turbines have a useful lifespan of approximately 12 years in optimal conditions. Same thing with gearboxes - we do not have materials that could handle complex gearboxes needed to allow for the windmill to function at wide variety of wind speeds. As a result, wind mills in Baltic see spend a lot of time spinning freely with gearbox in neutral. Because trying to generate power would destroy the gearbox in extremely short time.

Until we get to materials that will allow us to handle different speeds and forces, that will not require extremely costly maintenance regime and will survive usage for several decades, wind will remain a curiosity that is jury rigged for power production for political reasons. As we have already picked all the low hanging fruit, and improvement are incremental and small, we're unlikely to get functional wind power generation without massive breakthrough in material technologies.

Engineers are among the most unbiased people you will find. Because they are the ones who have to look past the political bullshit and actually build stuff that works.

My family members don't build coal plants. One of them actually directly works and was for a while responsible for making one of the dirtiest burnable fuels in existence clean enough to fit EU standards. He was responsible for pilot phase of the completely revolutionary ash removal system. We're talking ~200MW plant here.

My other relative worked in one of the world's biggest wind turbine transmission builder companies.

You on the other hand strike me as someone who has read far too much people who have no education in mechanical engineering related to power generation and just shoot off beautiful political slogans. Most of which aren't rooted in reality, but are based on wishful thinking, which is why there's a massive coal build up going on in "we're transitioning to wind!" Germany. Because people cannot face reality, and instead base large plans on wishful thinking. Which ends up doing the exact opposite of what it's supposed to achieve.

My opinion? Stop the bullshit, quickly push research into fission, build thorium reactors and update the current older generation nuclear plants to modern standards to avoid Fukushima-style failures. At the same time massively overfund the material research facility in Japan that is working on solving the fusion's material problems to expedite functional deuterium-tritium fusion reactor's arrival.

But it's not going to happen. Not because it's a bad approach, but because green movement has taken "nuclear bad" and made it into a religion, to the point where even upgrading the existing plants to be safer and more efficient is bad. At the same time these idiots are pushing for wind as base power, which is causing coal buildup so big, that Germany's CO2 emissions have actually increased last year, after being on decline for quite a while, and on their way to meet reduction targets.

Look, I'm not the amateur here. You may disagree with me, but surely, being a visitor to a techie site you would agree with the fact that engineers who do this kind of work for a living know more about it then ideological dreamers with liberal arts education?

What we need is not materials to withstand fusion itself, but materials that could retain their physical properties near it with proper cooling. This is the same as with any other power generation process based on heat exchangers.

As for your first claim, kindly cite sources. So far even Germans, who invested untold billions and massive amount of political capital are buckling. Surely if you were correct, they would have massive problems they currently have?

We have about equally good materials for fusion. I.e. they are good enough for exotic uses, but not good enough for sustainable production.

That is one of the main reasons why wind power requires subsidies to work even decades after massive research drive. We can better the shapes of blades and efficiencies of turbines, but we cannot improve on material technology because we simply haven't invented materials necessary yet.

If they get a chance, like internal collapse in China of some sort? Absolutely.

Just like China would if something of that sort happened to ROC.

Are you really so divorced from reality to not understand that people in power who threaten each other with war on constant basis and who are technically still at war are perfectly willing to go to war? They only dropped the "we must conquer all of China by military means" from government agenda in 1992, and they're still just one election away from yet another president who'd be willing to put it back on.

Sometimes I really get the feeling that we're entering another one of those periods in human history when humans who've lived in peace for their entire lives forget what's it like to hate the other country so much, you'd be willing to go to a full out war with them.

No, it is the condition where severe harm is done to the environment through addition of these substances.

Well, you certainly sound like brits and french before WW2. "So they're arming to take us on, they talk about it all the time, their leader is aggressively talking about their right to more land, but show me the exact (and obviously not available to the dumb public) orders!"

I have a better one. Pollutant is a substance that causes pollution.

Solar needs new materials for the grid, as well as new materials for the panels that are significantly more efficient and durable than current ones.
Wind needs materials that are significantly stronger than current ones while withstanding wear and tear significantly better than current ones.
Fusion needs materials that are significantly stronger than current ones, while withstanding extreme temperatures significantly better than current ones.

He doesn't. That's why coal buildup is so massive worldwide right now.

Issue is that many may actually end up with subsidized power that will cost too much to maintain, such as wind, which has fairly cheap buildup, but massive maintenance costs or natural gas, which has serious pricing fluctuation and supply reliability issues in many developing countries. It wouldn't be very different from the old hooking of developing countries on "development loans".

Vast majority of new coal is due to the fact that they are replacing nuclear with wind, and wind is unusable as base power.

That means that as they build up wind power, they need to build equivalent amount of base power.

That would be the massive coal build up happening now.

CO2 is not a pollutant. It's a greenhouse gas. Mixing these two shows extreme amount of ignorance on the topic.