I mean either way, Fusion is such a long way off that it doesn’t really have much of an impact on climate seeing as we need to reach net zero decades before any significant number of plants could come online. While worthwhile from a scientific and long term perspective looking 50 to a 100 years into the future, but we built the first fission reactor in a spare room under some sports arena in Chicago and it’s still to complex and expensive to be cost effective compared to battery backed solar and wind, so a process that’s so much more expensive and difficult that we haven’t even done it yet probably isn’t going to change anything in the next few decades.

Honestly, the place where I can see nuclear fission making the strongest case is when it comes to large ocean crossing cargo ships. The extra crew and tech make it more expensive than fuel oil, but not massively so, and as such it could work out as being cheaper for very large ships than any other method of decarbonization.

Of course that only matters if we’re actually serious about forcing decarbonization in all sectors and not just the current method of just where it is cheaper than massively subsidized oil, so maybe we’ll see more pressure to do so in a decade or so. For now, when we’re limited principally from the amount of money we are willing to invest in building clean energy, the long wait times and low return on investment make it seem increasingly like a way to slow solar and wind’s growth, and thusly buy oil and gas a few more years of market share, which is probably why said oil and gas companies went from fighting nuclear with every add campaign they could muster in the 90s and 2000s to their current support for it.

The hard part is that there are places where hydrogen really is the best path forward for decarbonization, especially when it comes to making fertilizers or various other industrial processes, and even maybe for marine applications, but the conversation keeps getting pushed towards cars, buses, trains, and other small vehicles where it just isn’t practical.

Given how involved oil companies have been in marketing it in those segments, and the willingness of certain car, bus, and train companies to be perpetually ‘trialing’ hydrogen instead of just using batteries or centenary, it is rightly often seen as just a way to greenwash and delay from electrification, but there are still things where hydrogen really is the better option for decarbonization and we should be pushing for more green hydrogen production and infrastructure there while calling out the organizations acting in bad faith.

I’m admittedly uncertain that investing in new battery technology is really likely to help though. We just don’t have the decade or two required for said tech to be discovered, refined, put into production, and then scaled up.

Between LFP for mass vehicles, Li-ion for space and mass critical applications, and Sodium ion for bulk storage, centenary and marine nuclear for bulk transport, along with solar, wind, and hydro for generation and long term energy storage, I think we already have all the tech necessary to scale up and decarbonize both the grid and overland transport. At this point the focus and funding should instead be put towards applying said technology as quickly and at as large a scale as possible as fast as possible.

We know what we need to do, we know how to do it, now we just need to actually do it.

Personally, I prefer ‘Tradition is the rotting corpse of wisdom’, but that works too.

I just installed a sol ark system, and can confirm that they work just as well with a pi and Solar Assistant. Not open source, but integrates well with homeassistant and no need for network connecting the actual electrical equipment, just usb.

Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.

With current battery and hydro storage prices, their cheaper than natural gas with with the cost of the buffer, and absurdly cheap for any industrial application that doesn’t.

Also there are bulk industrial processes to make steel, concrete, fertilizer, and glass with little to no carbon emissions, they just require more electricity and so aren’t cost effective if your electricity comes from fossil fuels, hence why most such plants only started construction once the cost for electricity in general dropped below the cost for fossil electricity.

Moreover while mining and shipping are only starting decarbonization, the required fossil fuel extraction is already far, far smaller than what’s continually required to run the generation they are replacing, and that’s only going to continue to drop as more and more primary energy is electrified with renewables.

For the most part to my knowledge it’s the same as maintaining any large, complex piece of infrastructure. As it gets older spare parts get harder to find and have to be replaced with different similar parts requiring new engineering analysis, more and more big components like pipes and tanks get to the point where they need to be wholly replaced, etc…

Design lifespan is the point the designers expected a lot of annoying to replace things to wear out on paper for the cost of maintenance to rise, but now in the present we can inspect things to see how they actually did in practice.

This means that operations gets more expensive and you need to shut down for major work every now and then, but compared to the ever increasing cost of building an entire new plant just replacing the parts that have worn out in order to squeeze an extra fifteen or twenty years is probably going to be more cost effective to a point.

We just need them to hold in long enough for us to get enough renewables and storage capacity on the grid to replace all the fossil sources, at which point we can keep building renewables and replace the most most expensive to maintain nuclear and most fish limiting dams and the like.

Nuclear power was absolutely the answer, 50, 30, or even 20 years ago, but given the long construction times and cost relative to wind and solar backed by battery and hydro, the time for new construction has probably passed outside of niche regions. It’s still much more cost effective to keep existing plants online, but when the primary bottleneck is funding focusing on the more cost effective technologies just makes sense.

Of course, I imagine that’s the same reason why the oil and gas companies that have been fearmongering about nuclear power for the last half century have suddenly come around on it.

I also wasn’t talking about individual solar. Utility solar is nearly always divided between manufacturing, installation, and the operator. The operator is the only one benefited by solar’s long term return on investment. Everyone else makes their money in construction, which is very much price competitive.

In my experience none of these groups however have even a fraction of the cash of a company like BP or Exxon Mobile, and what piles of cash they do have tends to be investment in rather than profit from. As it’s a lot harder to spend investors cash on buying regulators than it is to spend incoming profit on it this limits the amount that they can spend on such an endeavor.

There are also a lot more places banning utility scale solar and wind than are oil and gas, so delaying renewables rollout seems like an evidently effective strategy for limiting their lobbying power.

No, i’m thinking of solar.

Over decades a solar system will pay back itself many times over, but that’s irrelevant to the question of how big of a money pile can business throw at politicians in the here and now.

That’s determined by the profit margin for companies manufacturing and installing them, which tend to be rather thin given the highly competitive nature of the market. No solar installer anywhere near the profit that oil companies are raking in, and the people owning the panels are usually paying off the loan to install them, using the profits to build more capacity, or saving, not buying off politicians.

Without subsidies there would be far less profit for oil companies, which is exactly why it is so important for them to ‘reinvest’ some of their recent massive profits into continuing and expanding said subsidies and slowing down the adoption of alternatives. Buying off the government with its own money is a benefit since it leaves more for them.

Counterpoint, Alberta exists and low costs benefit the consumer, not the company. I am fully confident that the profit made by oil and gas is significantly more than the tight profit margins in renewables, which means far less money to throw at politicians. Oil and gas can therefore throw much more money at Trump and still be in the black on their ‘investment’, even if you ignore that Trump has deep ideological and political opposition to renewables.

2066, the require the run Natural Gas to every building in the state and don’t plan to stop polluting at any point measure, is however still on track to pass through.

Come on King county uncounted votes, we’re all relying on you now.

I’ve considered it, but as they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Given you have to pay interest on short positions and can only make as much as the stock falls by, if they can keep the grift going for another year or two the market could crash and you would still turn a loss.

It was created in its current form by the formal adoption of senate rule 22 in 1917, which would explicitly take a two thirds majority to edit or remove and if not removed would leave the filibuster on the books. It’s also worth noting that filibusters were incredibly rare in the 1800s, especially pre civil war, with its use to stall civil rights legislation mainly being a 1940s and later thing.

The procedure to go around rule 22 by rasing a point of order in contradiction to established precedent is commonly called the ‘nuclear option’ by everyone from the media to reformists discussing it, and is recognized as the only likely way short of the two thirds majority needed to amend rule 22 to get around the senate filibuster. I think the name is more than a little grandiose, but it is the commonly accepted name for the procedure.

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A simple majority vote via the nuclear option could be undone just as quickly once things shifted, and from my understanding would never be an option in future if done once. To actually officially change the rules and eliminate the filibuster in a way that isn’t just procedural a two thirds majority is required.

Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

Multiple opportunities, in the last few decades? To my knowledge the only point they had the votes to was that one three month period where they got the ACA though, before that was in the 70s when party line votes were pretty rare.

The US could do similar, but the Democrats couldn’t on account of all legislation in the last decade needing Republican approval to not get filibustered, and Republicans hating the idea of any subsidy that interferes with the “free market” outside of oil subsidies.

While the US government could absolutely be doing more in theory, in practice I think the climate legislation the Democrats have managed to get past Republican obstruction has been very impressive.

So what your saying is that given fuel makes up 3-5% of a commercial kitchen’s operating costs as per the Department of Energy, it would at worse add ten percent to the prices of kitchens that currently use natural gas instead of propane or electric? And that’s worse case, ignoring that Berkeley sure isn’t paying average kitchen labor costs given minimum wage there is nearly two and a half times the national average.

So all in all nowhere near a large enough price hike to kill all demand for large restaurants in the city even by the worst case figures of a company lobbying against it.