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Comment Fix the grid (Score 0) 51

Solar causes a lot of fluctuation on the grid.
Add to that that those grids were set up to delivery power from one point to many user, not to have those users alternate between user and supplier.
"Here's some free power, please use it" does sound a lot better than "You need to use this electricity to prevent blackouts or other issues".
It's kind of like Iceland asking people to crank te heat with the windows open to help get rid of their excess thermal heating energy.

Let's hope home batteries are going to become cheaper quick, they will prevent the grid from failing and supply back-up power when it does.
The obvious fix is for (local) governments to install batteries in neighborhoods, but I wouldn't count on that happening too much. Them being a little slow on the uptake is a big part in the cause of this issue.

Comment Re:Essential vs Nice to have (Score 1) 85

If sounds like they don't have their duck in a row.
Adding more complexity is going to make things worse.

The bigger problem is that, like many businesses, they don't take the software seriously. Most of it is invisible and too abstract to grasp so it just gets ignored.
Years of mediocre (at best) MS software has turned people complacent. "I'm not good at computers", No the manufacturer could not be bothered to make the computer good at you. It's crappy product.

Tesla is essentially and IT company that deliveries their software with a car around it.
I recently testdrove a number of new compact electric cars and none of them felt fun to drive, but at least one didn't frustrate the hell out of me with how incredibly poorly designed their software is.
Worst offender: VW. Complete garbage, had to end that drive after less than 15 minutes because I could not get the heater to defog the windows. It's not just bad UX/UI, it's a safety hazard.

Comment Re:Funny Yesterday this (Score 2) 58

That point may come. I'm no expert but I'm going with: at least not in the first 50 years.
Production of hydrogen is the problem.
By far most hydrogen produced today is made from fossil fuels and is equally polluting.
A much smaller part of it is made by electrolysis, which is very wasteful and results in hydrogen that is 3 times as expensive as that made from methane.
So with current tech we would need massive amounts of excess green electricity to make hydrogen a better option than ICEs and BEVs.
This is besides the issues of storing and transporting it.
Any company promoting a hydrogen powered product is purely doing so for PR, not because it's a good idea.

Comment Re:A sad day (Score 1) 181

Hydrogen is the fuel of the future. And it always will be.

Currently most hydrogen is produced by splitting up fossil fuels into hydrogen and CO.
The result is that it's just as expensive and just as polluting as those fossil fuels. If not slightly more due to the extra steps involved.

The alternative is splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, electrolysis.
This process is clean if you don't account for how that electricity is generated.
Also, it's very inefficient. An EV with a battery would do three times as many miles as a hydrogen powered EV on the same amount of electricity if this is how that hydrogen was produced.
So the only way this makes sense is if we had an abundance of electricity.

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