Well, I didn't really go into it there since I was just responding to the specific claims from the poster I responded to. For what you mentioned, I will first point out that an extensive power grid significantly mitigates Dunkelflaute. However, when it is nationwide, I should also point out that, in my post, I explicitly ignored other power sources and storage methods like geothermal and hydro/hydro storage. If we don't ignore those, we get an additional buffer. What I think is that we should have a tiered storage system.

This would mean batteries for the standard short term. Meaning enough to cover the average deep winter night with average usages that the poster I replied to mentioned and then a little bit extra. That would provide coverage nearly all the time. 99%+. To supplement that, a secondary tier based on locally available resources, such as geological ones. That means hydro storage of various kinds (reservoirs, polders, underground, etc.) where practical, compressed or liquefied gas in underground reservoirs where practical, thermal storage in, for example, molten salt, etc. Basically, whatever is cheapest and makes use of available local resources. Where tier 2 is less practical than tier3, skip straight to tier3. Tier3 is longer term stable storage. This means things like synthetic methane (or even hydrogen if you can store it effectively), or synthetic liquid fuels. Also other substances, for example metal powders such as aluminum powder that you can burn in a thermal power plant, or use in some sort of flow battery, etc. then collect the oxides and use an electrolytic process to turn them back to metal powder again after use. There are all kinds of other options. Dehydrating zeolites, reservoirs of salt water and and fresh water where you generate power across a membrane between the two tanks then reverse the process with reverse osmosis to recharge, or basically any chemical process you can use to store energy that can be reversed with a reasonable energy loss, is relatively cheap at large scale, and that you can store in volume.

Basically, you would size your renewable power generation so that it would produce just enough on average in the dead of winter to power everything during the day and overnight on battery, which would mean plenty of surplus during other parts of the year. Whatever surplus there is in winter could charge the tier2 storage and, if it doesn't get enough for that, tier3 could be tapped to top up tier2. With all the surplus in the rest of the year, tier3 could be filled up and for tier3 storage types, that could last very long term and for many of them, increasing how much you can store could be quite cheap and simple. Of course, the tier3 storage would generally have much lower turnaround efficiency than batteries, but that would not be a problem because the surplus would be wasted otherwise.

To clarify, when I say it won't leak that badly, I'm not using a colloquialism. I'm literally saying that it won't leak as badly as would be sufficient and necessary for the amount to leaked to produce enough greenhouse warming to exceed the greenhouse warming that the replaced fossil fuels would cause. It would have to leak enormously to do that and we have enough experience to know it would not leak that much. So I'm really only thinking about an upper limit to the leaking.

I do completely agree with you that, with the right materials and techniques, the leakage could be very small. It still does present a worry in airports with lots of planes fueling at once. I'm sure acceptably safe protocols and fueling hardware could be established, but I can also see why it might reasonably make a lot of people nervous. In any case, there are a number of other hurdles to getting hydrogen planes to work, I just felt the need to point out that the complaint about greenhouse potential was misplaced. In terms of potentially viable technologies, for now, my money is on either getting conventional rechargeable batteries good enough, or on metal-air batteries, even if they're swappable primary cells (that can be "recharged" by reprocessing the metal oxides at a plant at the airport) as opposed to directly rechargeable versions. For medium distance flights, anyway. For long haul, we may have no choice but to use liquid fuels for now, but they don't need to be of fossil origin. The Navy is testing units to produce jet fuel from seawater currently. We'll see if that technology translates easily to civilian use and if it's sufficiently economical.

Interesting thing to note though is that you can actually see nearly 60% of the moon from Earth, just not all at the same time. Since the orbit of the Moon is slightly elliptical, it appears to rock slightly from the point of view of Earth, letting you see a bit more on one side or the other. Also, you can see a tiny bit over the lunar poles from high and low latitudes on Earth.

Why would you need to bring it down to Earth background levels? Humans can survive considerably higher than that.

Maybe you might be taken a bit more seriously if you A. didn't act like you had some special, secret knowledge when everyone here already knows that there's radiation in space. B. Actually presented some numbers about actual expected radiation dose in the situations you mentioned and compared them to known human radiation tolerances and standards (such as for radiation workers in power plants, etc.) and C. actually considered the radiation mitigation strategies that are already employed and proposed for future space travel.

I've heard more like 12x. Even at 37x though, it seems like H2 from non-fossil sources would be far better than CO2 producing fossil fuels. Even at 37x, it comes down to whether the use of hydrogen as a fuel would displace 37x as much or more CO2 from being introduced into the atmosphere. Basic logic says it probably would. Consider, with fossil fuels, essentially the entire mass of the fuel plus about 3x its mass becomes CO2 in the atmosphere. Essentially, every last drop of fuel ends up as atmospheric CO2 with a 4X multiplier. So, that would mean that something like 10% of the hydrogen fuel would need to end up in the atmosphere to be as bad as a greenhouse gas. Now, hydrogen is hard to contain completely, but it still tends not to leak that badly.

Then there's the fact that displacing methane usage with hydrogen would lead to significantly less methane in the atmosphere in the first place, so there would be less methane for it to extend the lifespan of. There are other effects hydrogen may have that would also contribute to global warming, however, so it would not drop to zero even if methane were eliminated entirely.

We also need to consider that this is for air travel. Hydrogen in other uses such as cars, etc. is unlikely. For most purposes, battery technology would be preferable. This would just be a potential solution for modes like air travel, where battery weight might make it prohibitive. So that means that the actual overall usage for it would be far less than for fossil fuels in general.

So, looking at it, that seems to suggest that, even if it has more warming potential, the net effect would still be a reduction in warming. Of course, that's not the only consideration for hydrogen. The extreme flammability is a concern, along with hydrogen embrittlement of containment vessels, the turbines themselves, etc. So, there are some questions about viability.

Overall, your argument seems overblown. Any industry currently using fossil fuels would still be doing better from a greenhouse gas perspective if it moved to green hydrogen (obviously not to hydrogen from fossil fuel sources).

That's a weird understanding. Are you on a lot of heavy drugs? While burning biomass is one form of renewable energy, it's hardly exclusively what is meant when people say "renewable energy". You also missed the part where you don't clear cut forests. Whatever you're growing, you grow it in a sustainable way. If it's trees, you use sustainable forestry techniques like they're supposed to use in the lumber industry (certainly you should not be cutting down old growth forests). Of course, if you're growing just to burn biomass, large trees are not the way to go. Willow, poplar, eucalyptus are some trees that have good yields for burning but bamboo or giant king grass might be better in many locations. Also, when you say that burning trees is far more polluting, you have to define what you mean. In terms of CO2, it's certainly not because it's a closed cycle. The CO2 that goes into the atmosphere came from the atmosphere in the first place and in the recent past, so you maintain equilibrium. As for other pollutants, it's not actually very polluting at all if you do it properly. You're probably thinking of an open fireplace. Consider, however, a three stage catalytic wood burner. First stage is typical burning like in a fireplace. However, the heat from that heats up a sinusoidal pipe that's bringing in more air, heating it up and that air is mingled with the hot smoke, burning the unburned material in the smoke. Then, what's left goes through a catalytic burner that's pretty much the same thing as a catalytic converter in a car. That does a final burn of just about everything remaining including polluting nitrogen compounds. The final result is that basically everything that can be burned is burned and the exhaust is very clean. Do basically that on an industrial scale and add a scrubber and you've got a relatively non-polluting system. Of course, it's not absolutely perfect That though, is why you're better off with solar panels, wind turbines, etc. You know, the renewables you ignored in order to have a nice strawman to attack.

But none of them normally need 100% battery coverage. It's all about figuring out the risk of a period of downtime over a wide geographical area and what amount of risk is acceptable. Just like with other power sources.

Ah. Of course. Missed that one. Doesn't help that I inverted the direction since I didn't think it mattered. Thanks for pointing that out. Of course that means that the distance was not carefully chosen to be right in between typical ranges for BEVs and ICE vehicles, it was just a coincidence. Not sure what to think about that. I assumed that the poster was being manipulative with the choice, but at least clever. Now it looks like I have to drop the clever bit, but give them more credit for not being manipulative... I think it ends up being mostly a wash.

OK, you're leaving out one major thing, but also a bunch of other things. I'll deal with the other things first, then get to the major thing at the end.

Assuming your numbers are right, and I think you need to provide your sources, that would be about $3,342.87 per person in the US. Of course, those would last a good 15 years or so. That means $222.86 per person per year, or $18.57 per person per month on their power bill. So, not too bad if your numbers are accurate.
There is the question, of course, of if your numbers are accurate. So, you have $1,170,000,000,000 worth of battery storage and let's assume a cost of something like $300K per MWh of storage. That means 3,900,000 MWh, or 3.9 TWh. That seems in line with average residential electricity usage for the US of about 4.2 TWh per day. Of course, that's the whole day. If we look for the place in the US with the longest night on the shortest day... well, we get places in Alaska that have 24 hour nights because they're in the Arctic circle. If we ignore the state that has about 740K people, the longest night is in NorthWest Angle, Minnesota and the daytime is still 8 hours and 14 minutes. On the same day, the place with the shortest night is Key West, Florida, which gets 10 hours and 36 minutes of daylight. Sure, it's not the best daylight for solar power in either of those places, but you're still being misleading about how much power needs to be stored.

The reality is that, if built so that the mean power generation is exactly the mean power requirement, then the mean power generation in winter is roughly 40% of the overall mean. So, you don't have to actually store 100% of the needed power, reducing your number. Plus the fact that you don't actually have to build to provide exactly the mean power needed, you can overbuild so that you have more surplus power year round, and a higher percentage of daily required power in the Winter (you're sure to point out that it needs to be stored, but more on that later) Then there are other factors, like typically reduced power needs after daylight hours. Then there are households that have their own battery storage which can reduce the need for grid storage (and remember, with EVs everywhere and systems that let houses draw from their cars at night, and a smart grid, grid storage requirements could be even lower). Then there are the types of storage that most households have even without battery storage. For example, about 16% of residential electrical usage is for heating hot water, which is then stored in a tank that can keep it hot for days. So if you have a smart system that heats the water only when non-stored power is available, a percentage of that surplus capacity from overbuilding can be stored without needing battery storage on the grid. Not to mention that, for home heating, you can heat hot water during the day (with a heat pump system) and release it into the house at night to heat the house as well, reducing the need for electricity at night for heating.

Aside from that, remember that the US is four time zones wide. So with a reasonable power grid, and some overbuilt storage for solar power in the different time zones and in the regions further South with longer days, you can get a lot of extra power so that the overnight storage requirement is even less.

OK. Now I will address the major thing you left out that I mentioned at the start. That is that powering the entire US with just solar and batteries, while possibly a fun mental exercise, is contrived if being used to calculate the battery needs for the grid. Even ignoring other sources and storage systems like hydro and hydro storage, geothermal, etc. there's the obvious other power source: wind power. Wind is strongest in the US in Spring, but second strongest in Winter. Whatever the mean capacity factor for wind power, it will be above that capacity factor in Winter, reducing the needed storage for overnight by a lot.

Ultimately, when you consider all of the factors, you clearly would not need 100% of the days energy stored for Winter. Realistically, with a well designed system, you would need a third or less. So that portion of the average utility bill would be around $6 per month per person or less. So, not actually bad at all, really.

Now, it is worth noting that we are only talking about Residential usage. Other uses like industrial and commercial are about twice residential usage. Still, most of the same factors apply. Plus, for most commercial usage, the drop in usage at night is a pretty big drop. Industrial varies. There are a lot of industrial customers who also stop at night, but there are plenty of big power draws that can run all night. Overall though, given most of the same arguments that apply to residential, commercial and industrial would also only need about a third of a days power usage or less stored for overnight usage.

There is also the drop in price that goes along with scale. I cited $300k per MWh, but it's already down to around $180K in some places. With battery prices dropping and other battery chemistries and perfection of the methods for building out this kind of storage, it should get even cheaper. So, the quoted price drops by potentially another 40% or more.

In the end, it seems like you think you're presenting a showstopping giant number, but it seems like you're actually presenting a great deal. The current US administration just asked for $1.5 trillion for the military. Not for decades like the grid storage, mind you. For a year. Also, while all sorts of arguments can be made about defense of the country, etc. the basic reality is that the money is for oil related wars. Big numbers don't really look so big when you look at the other big numbers we're already spending.

Warsaw to Berlin is about a 5.5 hour drive. It also seems to be cherry picked as a distance that is just slightly beyond the range of an average EV, but just in range of an average ICE. The average EV can make the trip with one charging stop from 20% to 80%. The average time for that charge is about half an hour (though some EVs can do it about a quarter of an hour). So, that makes the 5.5 hour drive a 6 hour one. That's about a 9% increase in travel time or less. Not showstopping for most people.
Basically it looks like new battery architectures that are on the horizon that will hold more charge and also be able to charge faster are going to force you to move the goalposts when you ask that question.

You haven't established that it would. If you just consider the basics, using cars as an example, gasoline has 33.6 kWh per gallon. Average fuel economy is 26 MPG. That means about 1.3 kWh per mile. Meanwhile average miles per kWh for EVs is 3 to 4.2. We'll just use 3. So, an EV getting 3 miles to the kWh is using about 25.64% of the energy of an EV. Going back to TFA, gasoline prices have gone up by about $1.05 per gallon, and could go up more and for diesel it's 1.69. People in the US buy about 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline per week and about 1 billion gallons of diesel. So that's about $4.2 billion per week just in price increases due to this disruption. In terms of overall weekly cost, it's $15.3 billion. Meanwhile, the war itself, which is yet another oil-driven war, is costing (if you include known figures for support to Israel and other gulf states for the war) is about $10 to $13 billion per week. I would say that we don't have wars for oil every week, but if you look at the last few decades, it would be entirely fair to say every other week.

So, using electricity, especially locally sourced, is massively cheaper so far, but then we do have to consider infrastructure. Of course, it doesn't look like that will be any more expensive than the infrastructure needed for ICE vehicles. You certainly haven't shown that it would be. As it stands, it is looking like we will mostly pay for it through our purchases of electricity. Going by the current national average per kWh of electricity for 17.45 cents, a gasoline gallon equivalent is about $5.86. However, if you adjust that for the mileage difference, it's $1.50. Of course, the cost of electricity has gone up 28% in just the last five years, which is 7.4% above nominal inflation and a good portion of that increase is the rise in cost of natural gas, tying back in again to the problems of unstable fossil fuel prices.

So the cost of infrastructure is just one of the involved costs. A pretty strong rule of thumb is that the infrastructure used to distribute a resource is less valuable/costly than the resource itself. Ultimately, the infrastructure requirements for oil distribution are less costly than the infrastructure requirements for electrical distribution. Now, there is the fact that liquid fuels are very energy dense. If you build a big pipeline, the Wattage in the fuel traveling through the pipeline can certainly exceed the Wattage in a similarly priced set of electrical lines. There is the approximate factor of four advantage the electricity has for applications like transportation or heat pumps, but even then a big pipeline wins. That changes though when you get to "last mile" distribution. There's simply so much more involved in the distribution of fossil fuels than in the distribution of electricity. Especially when more of the electricity is locally generated rather than needing to be shipped around the world. In the end, the infrastructure for electricity distribution is likely to be less expensive overall than what is required for the distribution of liquid and gaseous fossil fuels.

As for the costs for AI data centers, that's a bubble. It's frustrating that we all end up paying more for electricity to support them. Of course, when the bubble bursts, hopefully the extra capacity and infrastructure will be useful for increased electrification of sectors like transportation.

It seems to me like you're creating a false dichotomy. Not to mention buying into the false dichotomy that building new infrastructure means increased costs in general. That argument fails to recognize that infrastructure is really a consumable with a limited lifespan and ongoing maintenance costs. You don't necessarily increases costs by replacing one form of infrastructure with another as the old infrastructure becomes obsolete and ages out, especially when the new infrastructure allows you huge savings on resource usage.

Not sure what you are trying to say here. Kind of baffled, actually. What technology that's less efficient than fossil fuels is being forced in?

Not sure what problems you mean, or what problems you're talking about that are not already being worked on. As far as EVs being a loss of freedom, you realize that no-one is actually going to stop you from using ICE vehicles if you need to. Although, if a pure BEV doesn't meet your range needs, there's always a PHEV. Now, a lot of PHEVs on the market are kind of green-washed garbage where they can't even actually operate normally on just battery power, but there are legit ones. With a sufficiently large battery, the average driver can probably get something like a 90/10 ratio on electric vs. gasoline usage and still have no range issues and basically all the advantages of an EV.

It's a growing niche, with every indication of eventually turning what it is displacing into a niche. If we want to go by your last post about cars, 1 in 5 new cars sold last year worldwide was electric and it's a growing market. For the electric shipping question, you first talked about electric shipping like it couldn't be done. When I pointed it that it can, you acted like ships stopping at ports to fuel wasn't a thing and that, anyway, that would mean spending money on infrastructure and having to spend money on infrastructure somehow precludes a thing from happening, the entirety of our modern civilization somehow notwithstanding. From my perspective, it seems like you're on the losing side of a lost cause. You just seem to really, really want electrification to fail in the face of the fact that internal combustion engines appear to be at their peak, but EV systems are still developing and improving (I mean, the motors are at maximum efficiency, but the battery technology is definitely still improving). For the life of me, I can't really understand why you're so insistent on fossil fuel tech over more modern and sustainable technology.

Ah. I know this one. XKCD reference here. So that you don't have to follow the link if you don't want to, it shows one of the stock characters showing a bride a graph indicating that, since she had 0 husbands yesterday, and 1 today, she'll have over four dozen husbands by late next month. In other words, it's cute that you can only make linear extrapolations.

As for ships and trucks not having worked yet. They, in fact, have, but they're still a niche. Sensible extrapolation of the technology shows them becoming more and more mainstream.

So now we're talking about consumer BEVs? Quite aside from the fact that you're intentionally downplaying the capabilities of BEVs, you're also exaggerating the sales situation. Despite the dip in sales when the Trump administration eliminated the tax credit, 2025 was still the second best year for US EV sales on record. Then, of course, we come full circle to the actual point of the article after all your goalpost shifting. The large rise in gas prices due to Trump's war is renewing interest in EVs. While it is too soon to have sales numbers, other indicators like web searches, etc. indicate increased interest. Of course, if we want to reverse the goalpost shifting altogether, we can go back to your first post and point out, as throughout this discussion, that electric ships and trucks are indeed making their way into shipping from producers.