Citation needed.

It takes time to upgrade aging coal plants too. Can you cite an actual lead-time comparison study, or is this just your opinion?

But I thought you were worried about shortages - and you're insisting no new coal plants are being built. If only existing plants are being upgraded, how is that going to address these potential energy shortages?

Meanwhile, build times for new solar plants are measured in months, wind only a little more. New coal plants take years, and nuclear up to a decade (or more, in many recent cases). Yet you say you still prefer nuclear - I guess time is not a factor after all?

Pipes also leak - a lot more than you seem to think.

And yet it's wildly popular in places like California and Australia, so the public certainly feels it's well worth it to avoid much-higher retail power costs. My solar system paid itself back in about 4 years, and I'll get another 25 of free juice.

That's solar thermal, not photovoltaic - what was that about straw man arguments?

Meanwhile, large PV plants like Copper Mountain, Gemini, Edwards & Sanborn, Desert Sunlight, and Topaz are producing just fine. Deserts are near-ideal for solar plants (good luck building nuclear without a large nearby water source though).

Lol, they would certainly be remaining closed if Trump wasn't throwing $350 million at them! The very fact he has to prop them up proves they're not a lower cost option.

And as for lobbying - Trump literally asked fossil fuel execs for $1 billion in exchange for favourable policies - cheap at the price from their perspective (but more than a little corrupt).

Bullshit, I myself have cited numerous such comparisons directly to you, right here on Slashdot. Here's another one - nuclear costs from 2x to 10x the cost of firmed solar, backed by storage, and would take far longer to build. Nuclear power has a place in this world, but even in the most enthusiastic countries like China it's a very small place (4 GW of new nuclear added there this year, compared to 277 GW of new solar).

Yet you consistently refuse to accept or acknowledge the dozens of independent cited studies, never citing relevant evidence of your own - and instead talk about "political leanings" and "lies by omission". The irony is astounding.

Sure, but to put that in perspective, they added 54 GW of coal in 2024 - and 80 GW of wind, and 277 GW of solar. Nuclear was just 4 GW.

You should actually read the conclusions of that article. It does not bolster your case.

That's why grids are widely distributed, far wider than any storm system. In Australia's case, the NEM includes connected generation sites many thousands of kilometres apart. Mainland US is even more widely connected. No storm covers more than a fraction of that, and the rest of the grid is producing normally.

Good thing they never need to cover the entire grid then (thanks to ishmaelflood for the link!). Historically, production would have never dropped more than 30% over any two week period, and even this can be mostly addressed by overbuilding supply (same idea as peaker plant generation).

South Australia has been running on ~100% renewables for some years now (over 130% at times, exporting the difference) with just a couple hundred MWh of storage. How? Local generation (rooftop solar), overbuilding of generation (cheaper than storage), and links to neighbouring state grids to share the peaks and valleys.

Lol, I guessed you missed the part where the Coalition took their nuclear plan to the election - and suffered a massive wipeout, losing a quarter of all their seats - in large part thanks to their insistence on slow & expensive nuclear.

And of course you cherry-picked a Sky News article rather than any actual studies. Trust me, they're considered a fringe outlet in Australia - hardly representative of the majority view, as the election conclusively proved.

Source? Those are wildly overblown costs - did you get them from a study, or Sky News? Even the pro-nuclear Coalition's favoured modelling showed a fraction of that.

More realistically, CSIRO puts it at $500 billion. AEMO themselves say $122 billion. And even these costs will be easily repaid in the long run, with cheaper energy and slashed pollution - not to mention reducing the GDP hit from climate change, which could be trillions.

Your weather link states that the risk of renewable "droughts" is overstated, that the historical record shows no more than a 30% production drop in any two-week period, that simply overbuilding supply can minimise even that, and concludes:

System inertia is indeed important for a resilient grid - but that no longer requires "spinning mass". For example, see grid-forming inverters.

And they can add it back again - they're storage systems, not sinks. Turns out, on-demand load is just as valuable for a balanced grid as on-demand supply - even more so when the grid includes non-load-following power plants like coal or nuclear.

"Bragging rights" has nothing to do with it, they were maximising renewables because they're so damned inexpensive - just like most other countries are doing.

This was just regular old cheaping-out on grid services they didn't feel were necessary, until they were. Capitalism at work, buy the cheapest you can and don't waste money on "non-essentials" until after they turn out to be essential after all - unless forced to by regulations.

That is not remotely true, inertia has been a well-understood factor in grid resilience for a century at least. That's why synchronous condensers were introduced way back in the 1930s. The Spanish grid operators most certainly knew that extra inertia is required as turbines are retired - and chose to skimp on it anyway.

Source please? Some operators may keep a few gas turbines around as a short-term solution (don't even need to fuel them - did you know free-spinning turbines can be operated as syncons?) - but grids like South Australia have already proved they can reliably operate a GW-scale grid with nothing but renewables, a few syncons, and a single 40MW gas turbine. And even that last turbine is on the chopping block, as grid-forming batteries are steadily added.

No, it's "restarting and upgrading" existing coal plants. Some of those were already closed due to age, some are scheduled to close soon. In practically all cases they're closed or closing due to not being economically viable anymore, maintenance and running costs exceeded revenue - they simply couldn't compete.

Instead they're being propped up with a short-term cash handout, but when that's burned through they'll just close again. That $350 million could've been spent on new renewables & storage instead (staged build-out of those can be very fast, months not years), but instead we're stuck with expensive and polluting coal for another few years.

Certainly true! Which is another reason why we shouldn't be propping up uncompetitive generation. Building new solar is so much cheaper than existing coal that the savings from early replacement of coal plants pays for significant amounts of battery storage as well - and that's before including $350m of coal upgrade costs.

Not necessarily, it can be significantly higher. Methane leakage from processing, storage, and transport can have a vastly higher impact than CO2 (and it all ends up lingering as CO2 anyway).

Like how you've been opposing solar all these years?

It means keeping coal boilers hot by burning gas - co-firing is a common strategy for supplementing or transitioning coal plants with gas.

Of course it is expanding the use of coal. Your own post's quote says it's "restarting" plants that were closed - and it's certainly propping up plants that have been closing across the USA for years now. It's expanding coal use today, and expanding it compared to what it would be tomorrow.

Straw man. You'll find people are much more worried about their power bills than blackouts. We need cheaper energy, and this is not delivering that.

Something I've been suggesting to you for a long time now. In the real world, coal is just plain uncompetitive, even without considering external costs like pollution and climate impact, and gas is not much better. Firmed renewables are much cheaper across most of the US, and have the additional bonuses of not killing 91,000 people a year or disrupting ocean food webs with acidification.

Cherry-picking a single packaging announcement from a single vendor does not disprove anything. Obviously there's trade-offs between battery metrics, and obviously commercial products lag behind lab results, but that says nothing about the industry's continual improvements over time - and neither do your quotes. Perhaps you should be reading them more closely yourself.

While new chemistries and packaging arrangements can certainly help, there have also been steady improvements in existing cell chemistries, and in particular the anode and cathode materials & structures. Some more citations for you to read:

RMI, 2024:

Ars Technica, Batteries keep improving

Trends in the Gravimetric and Volumetric Energy Densities of Lithium-ion Batteries Over the Past Decade, 2023

Commercial cells available with 400-500 Wh/kg densities, up from around 80 Wh/kg 30 years ago.

LTO batteries have great charge times and long cycle life, but poor energy density (worse than NiMh) and high cost. Supercapacitors are cheaper and even faster to charge, but have even lower energy density. EVs generally use NMC (3x the energy density of LTO) or LFP (150% density with much lower cost, albeit slower charging than NMC).

In actual fact, energy density of lithium-ion cells (not packs) has grown from 80 Wh/kg to 300 Wh/kg in the last 30 years, with cells reaching 700 Wh/kg in the lab.

May I suggest backing your opinions with citations in the future, as loud but unsupported assertions are generally ignored.

More than a decade I think - certainly if you're talking launch systems. The engine in your link has a thrust described in the single-digit Newtons, whereas we need megaNewtons to lift any significant payload to LEO. Fine for deep-space long-duration missions where efficiency is key (assuming we can find the Helium 3 to fuel it), but not suitable for launch.

The Saturn V was a huge achievement, especially for its time, and a credit to the engineers who flew it so successfully despite its many issues. It could lift an impressive 140 tons to LEO. But it was also ~$1.5 billion per launch in today's dollars, and that all got tossed in the sea every time.

Starship is much more capable, around twice as powerful, yet is a fraction the cost at ~$100M to build and launch. It can lift around 230 tons to LEO when fully expended, so it is more than capable right now of lofting the entire Apollo mission stack, lunar injection stage and all, along with a Lunar Gateway for good measure. Its Raptor engines are the only full-flow staged-combustion designs to ever fly, and have a power-to-weight ratio nearly 50% better than the Saturn V's F-1 engines, despite being 1/30 the cost to build.

But Starship's real value is in reuse - and this is why they keep doing test flights. It's designed to land back on its own launch tower, then get refueled and relaunched on the same day. When you can use your expensive ship more than once, then your marginal flight cost is not much more than the cheap propellant - and now your flights are $10M or less - for over 100 tons to LEO. Two orders of magnitude cost reduction changes the game completely, for so many things.

Then add in orbital refuelling, and now anything you can get to LEO, you can send anywhere in the whole system. Apollo put 15 tons on the Moon, while Starship could deliver 100 tons, a dozen times, and still be cheaper than a single Apollo mission.

Half-Life 1, yes. Half-Life 2 required Steam to activate it though, even physical copies included a Steam CD-Key.

Unless you liberated a copy while sailing the seven seas as a privateer of course. Which was somewhat more common before Steam hit its stride.

The Soviets supported any potential source of discord and conflict in their opponents, as do the Russians (and CIA) today. In this case it probably backfired on them, as increased environmental awareness (and concomitant environmental regulations) have overwhelmingly benefited the US. A 2015 OMB analysis of costs & benefits of Federal regulations showed a 250% to 1400% net benefit:

And more specifically, the Clean Air Act of 1990 cost around $65 billion over the next 30 years - but saved $2 trillion (not to mention preventing 220,000 premature deaths) - i.e. a benefit to cost ratio of 30 to 1 .

I fully expect they'll simply dismiss it all as "bogus" anyway. Some people just don't want to look too closely at their own beliefs.