Actually, by putting down solar panels as covers over aqueducts used for the water supply, they can effectively make electricity and make more water (by reducing evaporation) at the same time.

This. Want to know why EV sales have died in California over the last year? Just look at the cost per kWh and compare it with gas prices. PG&E average yearly rates have doubled since 2022. Meanwhile, the cost of gasoline has gone down. It is now fiscally irresponsible to drive an EV unless either you have solar power or someone else is paying for your electricity (employer, unlimited supercharging, etc.). Hybrids are not only cheaper up front, but also likely cheaper to operate at this point.

California should have allower PG&E to go bankrupt a few years ago, bought it for pennies on the dollar, and begun operating it as a government-owned corporation. There's no excuse for the power rates that we're seeing when most other states are paying literally a quarter of what we do.

PG&E is bad for our pocketbooks and bad for the environment.

Pedantically, the fact that the 737 has under-wing engines makes it kind of a 737 issue. As far as I know, we didn't see MD-80s hoovering up rabbits.

But yes.

Hence why it is less common. Rabbits: Ground only. Birds: mostly below 500 feet (*).

* Some birds can fly at up to 37,000 feet during their migration. Technically, I suppose, so can a rabbit, so long as it is onboard an aircraft.

First, someone had to place the rabbit onto the giant trebuchet...

But seriously, the engines are pretty close to the ground, so anything on the runway tends to get sucked into the engines. Apparently, this isn't even all that rare, happening four times last year alone. It's just way less common than bird ingestion.

No, it's more likely to be bird ingestion. Maintenance is second most likely. Design flaws from GE are third.

True, you can always have leaks, but hydrogen leaks seem to be way, way more common than leaks of other fuels as a percentage of launch attempts. The shuttle was scrubbed on average almost once per launch, and a large percentage of the scrubs were caused by hydrogen leaks (source).

And that's on top of the whole embrittlement problem, which can lead to catastrophic hardware failures if you're reusing parts over a long period of time, which is another reason why folks trying to do reusable rockets (e.g. SpaceX) tend to avoid it. And if you think embrittlement is a risk in something that gets used once, imagine the effect on fuel lines in cars that are pressurized for decades at a time.

It is a really, really nasty fuel, IMO. Mind you, hydrazine is worse in some ways, but that doesn't mean hydrogen isn't nasty. :-)

One possible exception: Rental cars at airports. But only to a point.

You're grossly overestimating the required range for most of those things. School buses travel an average of just 63 miles per day. Mail trucks? 25 miles per day. Or were you planning to charge them only on weekends? :-)

Mind you, that's not the whole story for school buses, because they also have to be able to take the sports teams and bands to out-of-town games and competitions within a 200-mile radius or thereabouts, so for those long runs, you would need at least a 400-mile range to do a round trip, or else the driver would need to be able to take it to a Megacharger or similar close to the destination with a 200-mile range. But you could also keep a small number of diesel or gasoline buses for that purpose if you want, at least for the foreseeable future.

To be clear, I'm not saying it isn't the right choice for them. I'm just bothered by claims that they don't have a choice, as though this were forced, rather than a strategic decision to prioritize profits and simplicity of their billing architecture over inclusiveness.

Sure. That's common when technology is in its infancy. Those problems could be solved, given enough time and money. In theory, so could the leaks, though given that NASA tried to fix them for three decades and still had leak problems on Artemis, that remains a theory. :-D

Hydrogen has much bigger problems than filling time, freezes, or the occasional explosion from dispensing a gas at high pressure incorrectly. If those were the biggest problems, I'd be totally in favor of doing more with hydrogen and fuel cells, because those are manageable and/or fixable technical problems.

A much bigger problem is fact that almost all hydrogen comes from natural gas, which makes it anything but green. The dirty little secret is that your losses from leaks would make distributing it over oil pipeline infrastructure completely infeasible, so you'll end up distributing natural gas instead, and cracking it to make hydrogen. And now, you have all the CO2 emissions from burning natural gas, plus all the efficiency loss from cracking the natural gas ahead of time, and you're about as green as a forest fire.

And of course, if you get it through electrolysis instead, you're likely wasting considerably more than half the energy you put in, versus more like 1% loss when charging a battery, making it a huge drain on our power grid.

And the elephant in the room is the cost per mile. In California, current prices for hydrogen fueling are hovering around $36 per kg, or about 50 cents per mile in a typical hydrogen-powered car. This makes it almost an order of magnitude more expensive than BEVs, and there's no real reason to believe that this will improve at this point, given how long it has failed to improve. At best, the whole thing feels more like a glorified government subsidy capture scheme, rather than a serious means of powering cars.

Hydrogen is a terrible idea on multiple levels. The fact that ostensibly it could have been a short-term workaround to provide multiple means of getting energy into rural areas (gas pipelines and power grid) is nice in theory, but in practice, the losses are just way too high, and batteries just work way too well, so the benefits just don't hold up in practice.

*shrugs*

Hydrogen leaks were one of the most hated aspects of the Shuttle design, too. It's routine until it doesn't work. Then it's a huge pain in the backside. The shuttle, Artemis... both of the two big NASA designs that used hydrogen had big headaches from hydrogen leaks. At some point, you start to see a pattern. (Whether that pattern is hydrogen or defense contractors, I couldn't say. :-D )

*shrugs*

There are literally almost one thousand companies that do this. There's no way that none of them would be willing to process your payments for a high enough fee.

There are quite literally payment processors that specialize in high-risk merchant accounts (e.g. PayCompass).

Yeah, there have been problems over the years caused by payment processors being a**holes. And other companies have come in to fill the holes they left behind. That's the thing about capitalism: When one company won't do business with you, there's almost always somebody else who will, if there's enough money in it. And there's *definitely* enough money in it.

These companies just don't want to fool with it. And I get that. But I really get tired of them acting like they have no choice. They have a choice. They made the choice to pay lower fees on everything in exchange for not selling that. They could also have chosen to use a processor that specializes in high-risk transactions and raised commissions across the board to make up for it. They could also have split their purchases into adult and non-adult purchases and used a high-risk merchant account for the first and a normal merchant account for the second, and raised commissions only on adult content that the first processor considered high-risk, adjusting the line over time, as needed.

There are always options. Those who say they have no choice are almost always just making excuses for poorly thought out decisions.

The main problem is probably that Steam supports PayPal, which is one of the most restrictive payment processors out there, and PayPal probably gets mad if you can't pay for certain things with PayPal because of PayPal's AUP. Heck, Steam might even use PayPal under the hood for all of their transactions, for all I know. But the thing is, Steam chose to tie themselves to that payment processor, and nothing stops them from walking away.

And by "more difficult", you mean that there is a massively larger amount of efficiency loss. If you're lucky, you recapture 60% of the energy in the fuel, and multiply that times the 75% efficiency for electrolysis, if you're lucky, and you're throwing away more than half the energy that goes in. So if folks are freaking out about the power grid not being able to handle EVs, imagine what would happen if you doubled the power requirements.

It's not really that bad. You can put probably ~500 miles of range into a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle in 7 minutes versus 200 miles in 15 minutes on a modern EV. It's actually pretty comparable to a gasoline-powered vehicle. But you do still have to stop, unlike with an EV, where 90% of your charging can be done plugged in at home while you sleep. So in that sense, it's slow.

I've said similar things about NASA's Artemis mission for the same reason. Doesn't everybody want to use a fuel that is almost impossible to keep from leaking, and then spend the better part of a year with the rocket stuck on the pad trying to fix the leaks so they can launch it? :-D