We are nowhere near eliminating NOx, SOx and particulates from the actual ICE fleet, including new ICE vehicles, given how vehicles are actually used. Everything form cold starts to aggressive acceleration to variability from lab conditions. Much better than a decade ago is still really, really bad. Fundamentally, an air-breathing flame engine has an inherent mechanism that forms NOx that can be somewhat mitigated but not eliminated.

You're also being blithe about the efficiency point. The costs of producing, say, enough fuel for a 787 to go from JFK to LHR with these machines would be absolutely astronomical.

I understand that CO2 is the strategic threat. But tailpipe pollution is a massive tactical threat, and synthetic fuels do not tackle this at all. NOx, SOx, and particulate matter are really awful.

You mean some kind of "baseload"-battery-to-"peaker"-battery charging overnight? I don't really follow. Recharging simply requires an excess of power available, ie whenever supply outstrips demand. In the UK, for sure that's overnight because that's when wind is strongest and demand lowest, but in duck-curve countries, which is most of the world, it's during the day when insolation levels are so high that batteries can be recharged alongside supplying daytime activity.

You've misunderstood how the typical African setup works. There's typically no attempt to back-feed into house wiring, much less a domestic grid. Instead, the solar panels feed a battery, the battery plugs into a microinverter to convert DC to AC, and the appliances plug into a socket directly on the inverter.

I am very aware that microgrids are not domestic consumers taking panels home and plugging them in. You can tell I'm very aware from my previous post, which used the phrase "BUT there are ALSO community microgrids". The words I have now capitalised for you were the big clue that I was already aware. The entire point I was making to the person to whom I was replying was that the scale of solar deployments was not merely domestic and also not nationally significant solar farms, but a local intermediate scale.

Finally, everything really depends on what you are terming a "full" BESS. A community microgrid has storage, so it's technically a VESS. But it doesn't trade on wholesale markets, and doesn't provide frequency response / capacity / arbitrage, because it's not designed as a grid asset. It's optimised for local consumption and prioritises resilience. It doesn't plugs into low-voltage local distribution networks, not a high-voltage national system.

You're thinking of plugging into the grid in the context of the developed world. But in the developing world, especially in Africa where so many communities are rural, plugging into the grid means high fees and capex on local connection reinforcement -- poles, transformers, transmission lines, etc, often 10 or 20k USD per km -- and even after that, you're still left paying for cover for frequent blackouts, voltage instability, and load shedding. The comparison is never the economics of microgrid vs national grid alone, it's microgrid vs national grid + diesel + candles, which is a very different economic benchmark.

Why would you need batteries to replace *baseload*, though? You need batteries to replace peakers, not baseload. You’re looking to get through lulls, you’re looking for dispatchability, these are not what baseload is.

Batteries already beat peakers at substantially higher prices than the $20 figure you mention. I did some maths on this the other day. In the UK:
A 100MW gas peaker would have capex of about £40m, while a BESS is closer to £60m. But that £20m is dwarfed by opex, because fuel costs for the peaker are about £5.5m a year for 500 hours at today’s prices, ie £110m over 20 years.

Obvously this is all very very rough calcs, a proper model would be much more sophisticated and take account of inflation, amortisation, sensitivity analyses for gas prices, etc.

But the basic truths are that there is a thermodynamic floor to the opex costs for a gas peaker that doesn’t exist for a BESS, and that gas peaker capex is going up over time because it’s construction driven while BESS capex continues to fall because it’s technology-driven. The economics goes only one way, both today and into the future.

Thanks for that. An interesting read, especially given who he was and his role

That’s an exciting assumption but feels quite brave, tbh

If only there were a third option that doesn’t cause climate change and doesn’t render hundreds of square miles of land uninhabitable if it goes wrong

Aside from feeling grumpy that Slashdot editors rejected my submission on this exact topic some weeks ago as spam, here are a few other important aspects of all this.

The dramatic decline in the price of solar panels is driving a massive reshaping of developing world economies. In Pakistan, they've imported solar equivalent to 30% of the country's entire generating capacity in six months. In Namibia, rooftop solar is now 11% of total capacity; in Eswatini, it's 15% and in South Africa it's 9%. Solar offers cheaper running costs, no local air pollution, and security of supply, which is hugely valuable in parts of the world where grid operators frequently resort to load shedding. And large amounts of this growth is happening behind-the-meter, too. This will change the economies of the developing world permanently, as well as improving health and life expectancy, as diesel generators get used less and less in years to come.

It's the second order impacts that are the most exciting. Shopping bills go down because food can be refrigerated, so there's less waste. Education standards rise because kids can read at night. Respiratory infections drop because kerosene isn't being used in lamps. Sexual assaults fall because women and girls can use a cargo e-bike to fetch water instead of having to walk. This is happening right across the middle lattitudes, but above all Africa, because more than 85% of the African continent's landscape receives global horizontal irradiation of at least 2,000 kWh/(m year), making it the most sun-rich continent in the world.

They're taking home batteries and a micro-inverter. But there are also community microgrids being set up that are larger and more sophisticated. 9000+ in Africa thus far.

Most of Kenya may be connected to the grid, but the grid is much less reliable than the grid in developed country. S Africa is the most notorious example of this, but it's true all across Africa (not just sub-Saharan, either). And in facdt, somewhere between a quarter and a third of all Kenyans lack a reliable grid connection. On top of that, solar and batteries may be cheaper than using grid power, as well as being more reliable.

This article is about solar and batteries, though.

Here in the UK, we had the fucking Tories in charge, who were the most incompetent buffoons we’ve ever had the misfortune to have in charge. They fucked the NHS up, and that fucked the nation up, among their many other idiocies.

Robert, it’s time for beddy-bies. You need your beauty sleep so you can be a clever boy tomorrow, too! Now I know you don’t believe in germs because you can’t see them, so don’t you worry about cleaning your teeth, you just get straight into bed and dream of being cleverer than all the doctors, just like you do every night.

You understand absolutely nothing. Covid vaccines had Phase 3 trials that were *twenty times larger* than standard Phase 3 trials. 40,000 participants as opposed to the normal 2,000.

Moderna is doing truly fantastic work with its vaccines. For example, this:
https://www.clinicaltrialsaren...

A near halving of melanoma recurrence and death.