1. Absolutely none of what you've said invalidates either my point that adding pumped hydro alone cuts costs by hundreds of billions for an energy system, nor my broader point that it's stupid to talk about the costs of energy systems by looking at the costs of running one of solar and Li alone
2. None of what you've said is a reason not to do pumped hydro. Pumped hydro can store GWh easily, plants last 50 to 100+ years, and cost per kWh is very low despite refurb costs etc. Should it be done thoughtfully? Obviously. Can it be done everywhere? Obviously not. But once again, adding pumped hydro alongside Li BESS drops energy system costs by hundreds of billions, showing that any analysis of an energy system that says "look how much it costs if we run an energy system using solar and Li BESS alone!" is idiocy.

All renewables require *storage*. Storage is more than just batteries. How are you unable to comprehend the point I was making?
Let me try to explain this simply: wind blows a lot at night when sun doesn’t shine. So we need fewer batteries if we have wind and solar than if we just have solar. Do you understand now? Continuing to focus on adding just one extra power source, wind, leads to a reduction in storage requirements of about 40 to 60%. You also dramatically cut the duration of energy deficits and the frequency of deep shortages.

Adding just one other form of energy storage, eg pumped hydro, cuts total system storage costs by hundreds of billions more, because it’s about one third to one tenth the cost of lithium battery storage.

It’s just a nonsense to talk about lithium and solar only.

Literally no-one is proposing doing this. As a reminder, renewables includes wind and hydro and tidal and geothermal etc, and storage includes flow and sodium and pumped hydro etc. Seriously, what is the point of pretending that anyone is pushing for a single power source and a single storage technology, when they're not?

My new Trump abbreviation is TRE. Trump ruins everything. In this case, among other things, he’s ruined oil and gas for the oil and gas guys.

The US has fallen behind the rest of the developed world in so many aspects of life due to ossification of structures driven by regulatory capture and fragmentation. Dealerships have been nothing but pernicious for consumers for decades, keeping ICE sales higher than they'd otherwise be, keeping prices higher than they'd otherwise be, etc etc. The rest of the world looks on with incredulity that you find it so difficult to unfuck yourselves.

Think logically, you say, and then proceed to lay out a series of non sequiturs.
1. The implication of renewables having lower LCOE than fossil fuels is not that fossil fuel generation gets shut down, because it's not a perfectly commoditised market with instantly effective price signals. Assets last decades, purchasers optimise for more than just cost, policy makers intervene as Trump has repeatedly done, etc etc.
2. It does not follow that if there were zero fossil fuel usage for power generation, I'd be far less happy about (other people) attacking Tesla. This is a completely bizarre false chain of logic. I can't even tell what point you think you're making.

Why do you guys always make such crap arguments? Can't you just have a private discussion with ChatGPT for an hour and get yourself something robust to counter with, rather than this drivel?

Abrogate doesn't mean what you think it does. One abrogates a treaty, not a subsidy.

Also, is now *really* the apposite moment to be talking about subsidizing the costs of renewables, while untold billions are being spent to try to manage the coming supply shock from the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz?

The LCOE calculations are readily done, and it's absolutely blindingly obvious that not having to pay the costs of supplying fuel means renewables are substantially cheaper than fossil fuels.

1. The balsa trees were largely from plantations, not wild balsa trees
2. There are about 390 billion trees in the Amazon
3. The plantations covered about 10k hectares out of the 700m hectares of the Amazon basin
4. About 4.5m hectares of Amazon basin are lost annually, mainly due to deforestation and fires, and climate change is a force multiplier for both of those

Here you are talking about forests, and you can't see the wood for the trees

It's true that Texas has fantastically cheap onshore wind due to its geography. But that isn't true in the north east of the US, where the geography is much less favourable (and also insolation). The costs of a distribution network to take meaningful amounts of net new power from Texas to New York would be enough to swamp the LCOE benefits of Texan wind. So offshore wind is actually more financially compelling than onshore for these places

There is absolutely no way this is actually money-neutral for the US government. That would require a degree of executional competence that is patently well beyond them.

You're *still paying* a French company to build power infrastructure, you gibbering fuckwit, it says so right in the story. You're paying them a refund and then paying them to build an LNG plant and then you'll pay other countries for the fuel. You will pay and pay and pay to other countries for this and similar decisions.

We are starting to see a partial disintermediation of the global financial system, as millions of homes and small businesses put up panels and batteries. That’s because to do that, they don’t need sovereign borrowing, dollar reserves and frequently they don’t even need formal finance. To the extent that there remains dependence following the shift to renewables, it’s front-loaded and decays over time, because assets last decades, and raw materials are widespread.

There's some weirdnesses in the reporting, but I think the point is that going from essentially zero to 10% in a single year is quite fast. It's not that fast, though - I think Pakistan went faster, for example

Ember are pretty sharp, so I think it's likely to be just crappy reporting of what they've actually found

Paywalled, so I can't read it. But journos are notoriously shit at understanding energy markets, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's shoddy analysis.

Just think this through: you're an Asian country faced with a shortage of oil and LNG. That means that you don't have petrol and diesel for transportation, and you don't have gas for heating. How does coal help with any of that?

I think he may have had TIAs, but he’s clearly not had a significant stroke. He’s not significantly aphasic, for example.

As for coal, I think the evidence is not supportive of your thesis: coal and oil are only weakly fungible. Oil has only been backup/peaking for power generation for a long time, coal can’t be used for transport, oil can’t be used for reducing iron ore, coal can’t be used for petrochemicals, neither are really used much for commercial / domestic heating, etc etc. So the oil shock doesn’t spike demand for coal for power generation or transport, because oil was not used for power generation and coal wasn’t used for transport in the first place. For heating, we get to a crunch with LNG being constrained by the Iran conflict, but coal can’t really help.

The most important thing to remember is that about half of all oil is used for ground transportation, so the single most efficient policy responses to an oil shock all involve more efficient ground transportation, whether that’s public transport, electrification, or both. And almost all LNG is used for power generation or heating, and for that renewables and storage are the biggest levers policy makers have.