you can have solar without batteries... it is not as good, but you can do it, all depends of what you need, what you have available and where/when you use more energy!

you can have solar to heat water, for hot water or sand heating...hot water is actually cheap and can save lot of money. sand heating, you can later pump that heat back to the house. It is not long term storage but aren't that expensive too...

Getting solar electricity is more expensive, but you can still install without batteries, it will depend a lot of your usage... if you use lot of energy during the day, you can consume it directly from solar and grid, saving money when is sun. You can also use electricity to store heat in the above methods, it is lot less inefficient for heat storage, but it is flexible as you can still use electricity during the day. You can also pump water up if high terrain or simply charge a EV car during the day. Those small details can work for one and not for others. That is why without batteries it depends of your requirements and what you have. Even if just as backup, lead batteries can work and are cheap.. but for daily charge and discharge, they end being more expensive as this cycle will kill them quickly in one or 2 years

But most setup batteries can be expanded at any time, so you can start with a small one and expand it later on, when the price drop

the 700million was the total reported by the article, just one person donated 40 million

Go read the report, the power didn't failed because of the renewable energy. While it could have help more if they had some better protection in place, the main issue was a cascade of problems and lack of features to isolate the problem. It didn't cascaded to the rest of Europe due to low interconnect between Spain and France, that help contain the problem. Portugal have high interconnect with Spain, they could do very little to stop the event. Again, many networks assume that everything is fine and lack proper ways to cut-off if something is failing, leading to more failures.

Power was having issues prior to the shutdown, actions were not enough, monitoring was not enough and proper safeguards where missing. Again, everything is build assuming that all works, but when fails you really see why monitoring and safeguards are important. This problem can happen in most places in the world, are usually related to the network grow and and not planing for failure

now people are using guided echo chambers to justify their stupid ideas?! WTF?!

first, you guided the AI for the response you wanted, everyone can do the exact same question, guiding it in a different way and get the totally opposite from what it told you! why? because both are true!! the how important are each detail for you guide what you are looking for, but do not make the opposite false

- Mineral demands for EVs, grids, and charging
yes, EV needs all that, but also there is multiple parallel research for replacing Lithium and build different batteries... just like the initial cars used huge amount of fuel and return little power and then they evolved, also EV are doing this. The way we build batteries today do not scale for sure, but you can see already Chinese cars not using standard lithium batteries... and they are cheaper. So while this is a problem, with demand, more investment in new tech is made and this will improve. Recycle is also a big point that needs to improve and can help a LOT to reduce new resources
Also notice that they are talking about phasing out OIL, but you have other alternatives other than EV... Hydrogen (specially green and yellow) is also a option
Charging, again, this will improve and with more local distributed renewable sources instead of a huge central production makes actually easier to build a grid for those charges. Anyway, any new tech require a initial upscale... for sure you don't think that we should kept using horses for everything just because roads were bad and little oil was produced

- Nuclear scale
Nuclear is too expensive for those numbers! you can keep some nuclear for backup/peak usage but you do not need that many!
Again, renewable energy is the future, it is already cheaper than everything else! what is missing more is storage and by storage i'm not only talking about batteries, but water storage, height, hydrogen, flywheels, thermal storage, etc! you can even produce renewable gas by capturing CO2 and water if energy is cheap

- plastic
Only a very small fraction of the oil is turned in to plastic. Cars, both normal and EV need it. you can also make renewable plastic without oil, again, if energy is cheap. you can even replace many plastics with wood/paper and grown fungus! all techs that exist, but still young and hardly can compete with normal plastic right now because it is so cheap (chicken and egg problem, not enough production to lower the price, low demand, low production, high cost, high price, low demand)
20 years ago solar prices had the same problem, now solar is MUCH cheaper because it finally broke that issue. External promotion of new techs demand will lower their prices

- The diesel-mining irony
True that most current setup use diesel, but also that is changing!
it is actually easier to transport solar panels and have electric machines to remote places than transport fuel every few days!
Caterpillar is the best example, they build their own solar only setup for their own usage to test and results were awesome. They are now pushing those solutions and report a payout of 4 to 5 years. So in the end, replacing OIL with Solar will make mining cheaper and at least in the power level with less pollution
https://www.cat.com/en_GB/by-i...

The irony is that solar is making inroads even in the oil refinary
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

since when math matters?!
if gas price is cheaper than electricity, it doesn't matter that he is using 10x more gas than electricity!! :)

The problem is exactly that, people do not do the math, they follow their initial gut feeling and prefer anything that support their (probably outdated) decision.

Yes, solar energy works, is getting cheaper and in long run pays itself without any problem
Yes, heat pumps work (except in very cold environments, but for those, keep at least a gas backup and/or consider using a ground/buried heat pump ) and are usually cheaper than anything else
No, wind do not work for home setups, you need a big and high enough wind turbine... but in those conditions, yes, wind energy is great
Oil works, but is getting more expensive and more stupid to use it
Gas works, but is getting more expensive
Storage works and is getting cheaper

So if you have space (solar, storage, ground pipe heat pump), do the math
if you do not have, normal heat pump and still do the math
account that oil and gas prices will probably keep increasing in long run (even ignoring the war right now)
Yes, the math may still show gas as being cheaper in certain areas where the electricity may be too expensive, but in that case, unless too much in the north, solar may be a even greater option... and redoing the math with solar, things may get different

yes, tell us more about that mind virus that rots brains... in what true social network did you learn that...
Some people use their brains, learn science and understand how the world works and is connected... other like to see illusionists and story tellers, what is real, what is fake... who cares, as long as they support what some random point of view, everything else MUST be true!!

are you SURE?!?! they may be hiding!!! :D

critical failure in this comparation:

>I found my front door lock was not working.

you found it, great, it was not working!! Easy detection!

now lets put this in the same apples to apples:

the door is working fine, you lock and unlock the door without problems. you do not call the locksmith, everything seems fine!
Your next neighbor kid tried to use a screw drive ( or a finger nail if you want, it is not brute force) in to the lock and it unlocked without any issue. you learn about it and call the locksmith and replace the broken pins.
The hard part was finding the security problem. After knowing the issue, the fix is trivial... but if it was not your neighbor kid (ie: AI, but can be anyone that have the trouble of testing in unusual ways), you would be clueless about the issue and how easy it was to enter your house

well, that is a personal opinion based, i actually have the opposite opinion... i want my desktop to do what i want, not what someone in Apple HQ think is OK.
Yes, many external tools can help fix MacOSX, but it is always a fight to change EVERY SINGLE small detail

what a deal!!

i give you 700 million, i get 20 billion in return!!
where can i sign for a deal like that?!

key word here is innovation, not stock prices and profits

Most companies switched from innovation to (short term) profits and stock prices (fire all knowledge people to reduce cost, hire cheap labor or , like now, AI )

>The headline and the summary don't seem to quite agree here
why not!?

The main pain of security issues is finding them!!
After claude found the issues, humans could check and fix them, that for many issues isn't that hard. Again the hard part is pinpoint that some check fails to catch a corner case or a buffer may have the wrong size

whats stop you from going all in in linux?
remember that even if you switch to MacOSX, some apps will always be different and some games will not work (actually more games work now in linux than in mac)

Better send the Trump war machine after them... sadly they will need to attack all world and even domestic... i want to see the specially funny firework in (and from) Russia and China!!

perl directly is not a issue, as long you understand what it is doing. Just because is not a hyped language anymore, it still works very well
No tests and push to prod are a problem.

About the hack, i have 4 reservations, yet i only received notification about one of them, that is strange. I have both older and newer reservations of that affected. Maybe it was just the interconnect with other platforms (airbnb? other house renting service?)