And China has the ability to make an individual's/family's decision whether or not to buy an EV factor significantly into their social credit score, giving the country an ability to strongly pressure its citizens to buy EVs, artificially inflating the "demand" for them.

Their website still has their store up, and there is an article from May 2025 about their ocean cleanup efforts funded by the sale of e-citizenship and 'titles', as well as other products.

The first question to ask, however, is whether that "758 MW of solar" is the rated capacity of the solar facility (the maximum power it can deliver under ideal conditions) or the average production (the production averaged over a 30-day period to eliminate weather variation). Odds are -- based on hundreds if not thousands of similar declarations made by other wind and solar projects -- that it's the rated capacity, with typical solar production averaging about a third of rated capacity, or a little more than 250MW over time. The battery capacity, though, is a more properly grounded statement -- the battery farm stores 1200MWh, with a delivery rating of 300MW, meaning it can deliver 300MW for four hours before draining completely, or running out halfway through the night.

Not necessarily renewable power; just deny AI datacenters grid connections for power; all their power requirements must be supplied from sources organic to the datacenter, whether that's solar, wind, nuclear, or thermal.

And you're getting paid only for the power they suck out of your home battery system. You're not getting paid for the wear this puts on your battery system, burning through its charging cycles and pushing it faster to end-of-life.

It's not how fast you can push power from the charger into your car, it's how fast the charging stop can push the power it receives into all of the cars that are plugged in. If you have a 250kWh battery, and you're alone at a charging facility that's getting 500kW delivered to it by the grid, you can charge your car empty to full in a half hour if your car and the charger support delivering the power that fast; if the chargers can only deliver 250kW, then it's an hour for that charge. If there's another car there, your charging time doubles to an hour (but remains an hour if the chargers can only deliver 250kW). Four cars, and it's now two hours. If the charging facility is getting a megawatt off the grid, you can cut those times in half -- but the company that builds the charging facility isn't going to settle for four charging stations if they've got a megawatt tap on the grid; they're going to put in eight, or sixteen, sharing out the delivered power among all the vehicles sucking down charge -- and as the greens' pie-in-the-sky wholesale transition to EVs makes for more of them on the road, you're going to be sharing a charging stop with many more cars -- and getting a smaller share of the pipe the developer installed.

Sigh. As I used to point out regularly to the doctors at the hospital where I used to work -- and who were required to undergo annual refresher training to make sure they understood its ramifications, and should know better, but continued to make the same mistake in writing and email, the acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act has one 'P' and two 'A's, not the other way around. HIPAA, not HIPPA.

Amazon cloud services... where government data lives on hardware owned and controlled by Amazon... who therefore owns the data, because they're capable of destroying it, copying it, altering it, or basically doing whatever they want with it. Because you trust Amazon to adhere strictly to the security policies that prevent them from accessing the data stored there, right?

...and send it all to Microsoft to be used to "personalize your experience"... after they sell it all to anyone who wants to be even more invasive.

The people who keep puffing the "wind and solar are cheaper than fossil-fuel generation" are quick to throw out the LCOE costs using the installed capacity of wind and solar facilities, and ignore the fact that these facilities, over time, produce less than half their rated capacity, and require extensive infrastructure construction to get the power from where it's most efficient to site the production to where it can be used. Then there are the equally-ignored considerations of the production curve not matching the demand curve, either requiring that wind and solar production be turned off due to excess production or falling short of demand, requiring backup power sources to cover the shortfall, with the most common 'solution' -- battery storage -- being both expensive and of limited capacity... and not included in the costs accounted when claiming the cost advantage of wind and solar.

Does the LCOE for solar account for the cost of the backup power that is required for periods when the solar facility is not producing power (i.e., night), or otherwise producing power well below the facility's rated output (i.e., overcast or when the sun is low in the sky)? Does the LCOE also account for the cost of maintaining generators with sufficient inertia to cope with sudden shifts in the amount of solar power being delivered to the grid to avoid situations such as the recent power outage affecting the entirety of Spain because one solar facility had a sudden drop in power output, with a lack of inertia in generation to hold the grid stable causing other production facilities to trip offline? Companies that install solar and wind facilities are quick to tout their rated capacity, as if the facilities produce at that capacity 24/7, but the actual production is typically less than half of the rated capacity, and the production curve does not match the demand curve, so that while a solar facility can produce significantly more power than the demand in the middle of the day, that production often dips well below demand in the early evening (the 'duck curve') -- excess power generated in the middle of the day is wasted unless large and expensive storage systems are used to capture that power and return it when production falls, with these storage systems insufficient to store enough power for an extended shortfall in production. Waving the flag for the LCOE of solar generation when the builder/operator of the solar facility assumes no responsibility for delivering reliable power misrepresents the actual cost of solar generation.

And either way, they're going to get back only a fraction of the energy they put in to compress the CO2 in the first place. And I have to wonder what the capacity of this compressed-gas storage is going to be; the blurb talks about 8-24 hours of power supply, but if it can only cover 10% of the grid requirement, but a loss of wind drops out 20% of the supply and stays becalmed for three days, it's not going to help much.

Well, except for one significant technological advance, which was banned by the Union Cycliste Internationale in 1934, because it made the current champions look like chumps. Charles Mochet had invented the Velocar, a pedal-powered 4-wheeled vehicle that got used as a pace vehicle in bicycle races. It was difficult to maintain speed in turns, so Mochet experimented with variations on the design, eventually splitting it in half to create the first recumbent bicycle. To get exposure for his invention, he convinced a second-rank cyclist, Francis Faure, who endured the jeers of the other racers at the first event he was to ride the recumbent in. After he left them far behind, unable to even get close enough to draft him, the jeers stopped. After walking away with victories in many races, Mochet and Faure set their sights on the record for "The Hour", essentially a competition to cover the most distance in an hour of cycling. On July 7, 1933, Faure smashed the 20-year-old record by almost a kilometer, covering 45.055 km in the hour. At the 58th Congress of the UCI in 1934, there was enough outrage at Faure -- a middling cyclist who had previously only shown his ability in short races and sprints -- to have crushed the top athletes in cycling competition (as well as strong lobbying from the manufacturers and professional riders) for the UCI to issue new regulations defining what a "bicycle" was for purposes of being allowed in competition; one of these, requiring that the front of the saddle could be no more than 12 cm behind the bottom bracket (where the crank and pedals are mounted) instantly rendered all recumbent bicycles ineligible for competition in UCI-sanctioned events.

The US Cycling Federation has continued the de facto ban on recumbents in competition (despite commissioners' claims that they're not truly banned), with attempts to enter recumbents being disqualified for a variety of reasons, including exposed gearing, overall length, etc., all in the name of "safety", but which has the effect of banning recumbents from competition in USCF-sanctioned events.

According to the Australian Institute of Marine Science's report on the state of the Great Barrier Reef for 2023/2024, it's in quite good health, with coverage increasing in all three of the northern, central, and southern areas. This appears to be just another solution in search of a problem, a program created to justify sucking down more funding so that they can be seen to be fighting "climate change", whether or not the programs they're pursuing have any effect.

And the same thing I used to say to the doctors (who should know better, given the annual refresher requirement) where I used to work when they made (sometimes repeatedly) the same mistake, it's the "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act" -- 'HIPAA', with one 'P' and two 'A's.