No, you just aren't bright enough to understand it.

More dispatchable than coal or especially nuclear? Sure.

Every power source has an envelope. A limit to what it can provide at a given time. When a nuclear plant undergoes refueling that limit is literally zero. In the night, a solar plant also has a limit of zero. During the day a nuclear plant can change it's output level perhaps 4 times by about 50% assuming that we have recently refueled it. If it's got old fuel, if it's already changed too often today, if we need it to change quickly it can't do it.

Within it's power envelope, a set of solar panels can change output from 100% to 0% and then back to 100% in mere seconds. It can just stop and sit there for a week whilst your nuclear plant has declared an emergency in which it needs to keep generating power to maintain cooling. It can then restart immediately your nuclear engineers decicde the have to SCRAM and completely stop providing power to the grid.

Similar facts apply to wind, except the production limit depends locally on the wind, which means you need overcapacity and distribution. Once you have those in place, Wind turbines, typically running at around 80% of available power, are an excellent source of synthetic inertia and grid stability.

Not yet, sure. We are getting close to that. We have undersea cables in the North Sea. China has already achieved HVCD that goes from the far North to the South of China. The European grid extends from Portugal to Ukraine. A [connection to Iceland is already in plan](https://www.offshore-energy.biz/atlantic-superconnection-laying-the-fid-groundwork-for-subsea-interconnector-to-ply-uk-with-geothermal-and-hydroelectric-electricity-while-doling-out-wind-power-to-iceland/) and [Greenland to Norway may come soon](https://www.ft.dk/samling/20151/almdel/GRU/bilag/32/1593352.pdf). Canada already has a full scale grid and connections to Greenland have been discussed.

In the end, in a real grid with so many power sources it's impossible to say what starts where and ends up where, however it can easily soon end up with solar power generated in the Californian morning on the same overall grid as people are heating their homes in the evening in Ukraine.

I can understand that situation for paid surrogacy, especially abroad. I do not understand it for voluntary altruistic surrogacy, even if I can see problems around the handover after birth.

I have experienced both systems and other systems, both private and non. The problems of the NHS are underfunding and typical attitude of a state service which doesn't see it's duty to it's users but rather to the state, leaving it impersonal and difficult to communicate with. The problems of the US are liability lead and profit seeking. They are nothing alike.

Could you give me some specific link to what you mean. This statement is not useful to me.

The biggest cost of nuclear is the capital expenditure in building the plant. The fuel cost is in fact a small part of the cost even of refueling. Furthermore, the hope of nuclear becoming cheaper looks unrealistic to me. Russia's willingness to attack nuclear plants in Ukraine and the failure of the IAEA to achieve anything in trying to stop them tells me that nuclear plants need to be built safer, possibly even resistant to nuclear attack, in future.

I wonder if dispatchable / load following nuclear power makes any sense at all and isn't just a fad. Perhaps it's better to run nuclear plants at full power whenever they can run and just fill up batteries and do things like producing green hydrocarbons or green hydrogen? Making a plant dispatchable increases costs, likely limits service life because temperature and output changes cause strain and definitely increases complexity and risk Doesn't storing the energy seems like a better use of resources?

True but it has limits. To avoid accusations of bias or misinformation let me quote the actual nuclear propaganda.

An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)

Let's put that differently. It takes half an hour to reduce from full to one third power and that then needs to be maintained. Likely less than half of your plants will even be this effective at any one time. Batteries are a very useful complement to that.

I'm not mixing them and I agree they are not identical, but they are in fact not nearly as clear cut as you imply. The power grid is a large, complex and inherently chaotic (in the mathematical/physics sense) system. There are large scale variations on all time scales. Famously, in the UK, there used to be a man who's job was to watch TV and press a button when the adverts came on in the evening because the entire nation all went together and started the kettle. The largest such event in the UK has been over 3GW of additional power and over 2GW in small number of seconds happens regularly.

An equivalent event would be a complex lightning strike on the output side of a nuclear plant leading to a reactor SCRAM which could potentially be a 5GW change in seconds or even a large earthquake and/or Tsunami in Japan which could take up 7GW offline simultaneously.

Nuclear generation isn't ready to deal with that. However, nuclear generation + large batteries could be fine. In the UK we have long used pumped storage for this. The batteries give the nuclear plants time to adjust to demand and mean that if they overshoot a little, that will be easily absorbed into recharging.

I think you are really having a bit of a "violent agreement" here. Economics mean that nobody would sell electricity for a negative price if they could avoid it without losing other sales. EDF chooses to do that, though, because (using economics) they see an opportunity to more than make up for their loss by selling extra energy later when prices are back to positive. Their negative prices encourage battery "generators" to empty their batteries in advance, even at a bad price, so that they can absorb the excess energy EDF needs to generate in order to be ready for the forthcoming surge in demand.

The timing when it's worthwhile to generate energy at a negative price in order to generate more at a higher price later is entirely determined by physics. In the meantime, if the prices are negative, then some wind turbines in Germany just switched off and some batteries elsewhere profited handsomely from their ability to compensate for the limitations of the EDF nuclear plants.

Nice bit of sleight of hand there. Sure it happens in "renewables-rich" but only in so far as it is caused by their non-renewable energy sources. The only relation to renewables being when there's a specific purchase deal which gives a longer term stable supply price to small generators, typically in a transition phase when fossil fuel power plants have still not been removed from a grid.

The simple fact is that a renewable generator never accepts a negative price. All renewable generation systems are able to simply stop generating and wait until the price they get goes above zero. Any financial and grid engineering that controls the price of electricity as delivered is not their choice or responsibility.

Solar works on the other side of the planet at night. More importantly, whilst wind runs 24/7, Solar fills in the important times during the day when power demand is high. There is never no wind, it just moves elsewhere. The prevailing winds coming into the UK move up and down but, now that we have wind power coverage from Norway, through Scotland, Ireland, England, Spain, Portugal and Marocco, all connected to one single grid, the wind is always blowing somewhere. What is especially impressive is that now weather modeling means that it's possible to truly predict wind output over multiple days in the future to allow any compensation for low or high periods to be done easily.

What happens when wind turbine fails? There will be tens or hundreds of them in a farm, so onbody cares. What happens when a coal power station fails? They have to be built so big for efficiency that one single one going down causes massive disruption. Nuclear is even worse. That's not a useful form of "dipatchable" power, if your grid has to be built for gigawatts of power to go offline all at once because your nuclear plant has to SCRAM to avoid damage in a small earthquake.

So, overall, with correct supply diversity, especially when you add in hydro which can change from zero to full output in less than a minute, renewables are far more more practically dispatchable.

I know that the fossil fuel addicted power industry doesn't like to admit this, but I think you can see both wind and solar as more dispatchable than most fossil fuels.

Exactly. The problem with the way you are putting this is that it sounds like a problem. If this was a fossil fuel plant and you had to keep it running above demand then you would be burning fuel that was wasted. However, there's nothing wrong with "burning" wind that won't be needed. Spin up your turbine blades to a nice cruising speed and then take energy out of their rotation as needed (this is fully equivalent to spinning reserve in a thermal plant driving a turbine, just free).

Absolutely, this means you have to overbuild. There should be more wind power available than the maximum consumer and normal industrial peak demand combined. That does increase CAPEX for renewables, but still never nearly to the level of nuclear plants. Unlike fossil plants, however, the marginal cost of running your turbines is minimal, so you can get benefit from running the excess capacity to drive processes like desalination, green hydrogen generation, iron smelting and so on which can take power during low demand hours.

Natural gas, sure; or for that matter in a potential future, stored generated gasses of various kinds. That's a very clear benefit. However we should not automatically think of fossil fuels in the "dispatchable" category. A coal plant needs a long period of time to heat up in order to burn more coal. The power industry even deliberately moved away from the term "peaker" plant for natural gas because the more efficient plants are less dispatchable. The direct gas burning plants which change power levels very quickly can be vastly less efficient (tens of percent worse) than the more indirect ones with steam turbines and similar.

Those plants do have a good thing in that they have a large chunk of spinning metal in their turbines which are often grid synchronized. This provides "inertia" in the grid which directly maintains both frequency and general stability, but if the grid ends up taking more power out of the turbines than the plants are able to put in, then those "minutes" to adjust power output can be too long.

By contrast, solar panels are designed to sit passively not generating any power without any level of damage. They can go from 0% to 100% (of current available power) instantly and a wind system can do almost the same, using the inertia of the blades to generate power in the time before they reach the right angle for maximum power generation meaning that it's easy for power supply directly in front of those renewable systems to provide grid stability services such as "synthetic intertia" and even directly and immediately commanded adjustable power output.

I was looking this up. Altruistic surrogacy only allowed within families. I can understand (though am not sure I support) a ban on commercial surrogacy, but that seems to be going too far. Do I understand right that this basically comes down to religious interference in people's lives?

For future, some kids can be negotiated with and if you agree about handling this in advance they will let you console them. Don't rule it out, but make sure you try a night or two when "mommy" is actually available before you do it with them away. Insist on mommy being available to answer the phone if needed, which might not always help, but will take quite a bit off you. Of course all kids are different and you might just have had one(s?) that weren't possible to negotiate with. There's a reason I'm not keen on kids between 6 months and three years.

I'd love to see your list.

In this case I agree with you. The NHS and the UK health system are not (small c) conservative because they are fascist. It's partly due to limited money, but in fact their research is pretty good. It's mostly due to the fact that they actually believe in the "do not harm" part and only start doing things once they believe that there is a decent chance of actually helping people. That can be unfortunate if your best chance is to be experimented on, but on average it saves many many people from quackery. If you want a weird new treatment you need to get it past NICE and they really do see their job as protecting people from the mad doctors.

Don't do that. It's been said often before, but worth saying again. Having a child is a huge challenge and even if you are well bonded before, it may not be enough if things become difficult. Try to at least start from a place of strength and trust and definitely it's better to have at least two people who care.

Because tolerance of intolerance is the death of tolerance. People have a duty to judge each other, but it must only go so far and leave plenty of space for variation. Pedophiles out. Loving, stable, homosexual couples who provide a good upbringing in. Anyone who tries to forgive and hide the former out. Anyone who tries to destroy the latter without evidence of wrongdoing also out. People who try to hide evidence of wrongdoing and pretend that there aren't bad couples? Double out. The Judge Judgers who Judge in the benefit of the Judge rejectors who reject the judge with the aim of doing wrong are the worst.

So, when the nuclear people are all telling us how wind is more expensive because of the need for batteries, I'm always reminding them that actually it's Nuclear which can't cope with the variation in power needs and benefits very much from power storage. I'll avoid being a hypocrite and point out here also that batteries aren't just for renewables.

However, this is totally great news. Once power creation goes below a certain cost level it will be impossible to pay for transporting fossil fuels like oil and coal and make a profit from generating it. It will be impossible to pay for building huge, dangerous underground mines or shafts and digging out the fuels. Economies which have committed heavily to doing that and haven't found free alternatives which come to them instead, like the sun and the wind, possibly water and geothermal, will become stop being competitive for many things such as AI and creating steel.

Trump has given Europe a chance to come level with America which we can only hope Europe begins to underatand and take, but Trump is also giving China it's best chance to get ahead strategically and that's a really dangerous game as long as they remain hard aligned with Russia and authoritarianism. I really hope the US wakes up and realizes that AI is not the only game being played right now and you need to get ahead on distributed, fuel free (and free fuel) energy sources. The batteries will definitely help because they will always take from the cheapest sources available to them at any given time.

Lots of stuff I kind of agree with. Software development is generally awful and people just don't care about doing it right even when it costs them hugely.

However, there's one thing. We desperately need third party forks. Zen browser, for example, is a really important concept because its an open fork which scratches someone's itch. I hope eventually that Firefox really comes to understand that importance. It's what made webkit so important.

Unfortunately, firefox is under a bad license which doesn't fully support collboration. The reason that there are so many webkit derived browsers which come together under the one HTML renderer is because the KDE project chose the LGPL instead of a weaker license like the Mozilla license. The reason that there are so few fully open browsers is because they chose the LGPL rather than a stronger one such as the GPL v2+. It remains to be seen if Firefox can create a sustainable software community around it.

I'm kind of with you on that, but building features as optional is a bunch of extra work. For me, although I would like what you ask for, it's good enough that I can turn it on or off. If you disagree and see this a major priority then I'm sure there are many like myself that would applaud your contribution of the code for it.

I guess it will start built in, a new framework will be built and in the long run we'll all be able to choose whatever AI components we prefer.