One thing that would really help batteries is permitting reform. The BAAJA reform bill would really help not just the batteries themselves but the transmission lines which are far more difficult to construct thank to an insane system and lots of lawsuits.

In my jurisdiction a battery development is just about the only kind of development that can tell the evil rule and restriction people masquerading as do-gooders to GFY (though of course it still gets kicked in the dick at the state level since we've got a lot of rules others don't).

Grid capacity both locally and at the transmission level is still the biggest factor when it comes to site viability though. You can't back feed a municipal water system by connecting a fire hose to a random house's hose spigot.

Regardless, battery sites are becoming a big thing in long term RE investing because being able to have this site plan developed under favorable rules while all the other rules only ever get worse makes these sites potentially hugely valuable when the batteries are gone in decades.

It’s easy to pass failing students when you don’t test them. That’s the whole reason it looks good

And yet even including Chernobyl nuclear is far safer than oil and gas per kw

Sure. In the same way that flying is far safer than driving. There are massive amounts of safeguards in place to keep it as safe as possible. The problem is that when something goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong. This is why some people fear flying and nuclear power.

Way more people will die from climate change because we were forced to rely on oil instead of building out nuclear.

Even ignoring climate change, coal kills _literally a thousand times as many people as nuclear per kWh_ (largely due to air pollution; living vaguely near a coal plant measurably shortens your life). But people aren’t necessarily great at intuitively understanding risk; nuclear _feels_ much scarier.

>But people aren’t necessarily great at intuitively understanding risk; nuclear _feels_ much scarier.

Nuclear is much scarier. Your argument fails to account for the extreme effort spent in order to keep it safe!

In the US, high explosives kill fewer people per year than painkillers. Despite this extraordinary statistic, we're not about to let anyone buy high explosives over the counter. Because we know that high explosives are in fact, much more dangerous than painkillers.

Same goes for nuclear. We have kept it safe(ish) so far, but we know what can happen if we don't.

But we can't make coal safe. We just accept the deaths.

You don’t even have to look that far ahead, people area already dying every year due to the direct toxicity (Including radionuclide release!) of fossil fuel emissions. One relevant study for those not aware: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11301007/

The executives (and more broadly, meaning this as analysis, the right of politics) are banking on that being someone else.

Its not when something goes wrong, its if. And it still is much safer and a lot better for the environment than oil

I mean every single major nuclear plant accident is from reactors built in the 1960s. I think we are simply better at building them and it is no longer a question of “when”

Assuming no outside forces suddenly intentionally do something to it. Attacks against infrastructure aren't uncommon. Having infrastructure that is well known to take quite some time to spin down with the consequences being ten thousand years of salted earth is quite a big bullseye.

Which I would still argue is far from making a "when" realistic. This entire comment chain started on the matter of cost. If someone has a reactor, the enemies won't try to explode. They will go Temüjin on it and seize it.

It just becomes part of the sale price

We could easily build apartments on the coast in CA and then non multi millionaires might be able to live there. We have decided that only multimillionaires deserve to own a coastal house by restricting zoning in the coast so heavily

It's funny because it happens at all levels.

The uber wealthy have their gated communities in the hills.

The very wealthy have their lock on places like Carmel.

The upper-middle class in Santa Cruz or Half Moon Bay try to prevent new condos (or student housing) from being built, because it "destroys the community character."

Everyone wants to pull the ladder up behind them.

Yea, the point of property taxes is to stop that from happening.

Austin has been begrudgingly growing up, not without a raft of complaints from locals, because the property taxes are high enough to make selling to a developer tempting. In return, Austin has remained relatively affordable in comparison to other tech hubs.

This then means there is no real fix to anything since basic human greed always prevails. May explain why things move slowly if at all.

For example, the Netherlands are currently pouring cement down their oil derricks to try and prevent a future government from re opening them, over absurdly minor earthquakes, despite the energy crisis.

The issue is continuous heatwaves, when you either buy ac or start to die. No passive cooling can help you when the nights stay hot

The US could carpet bomb their enemies like they did in WW2, instead they pursue one of the lowest civilian casualty methods of in the history of the world, and nobody even cares because somehow that’s not good enough

What makes you think these targeted strikes are any better? Did the school girls say, "o, but at least our entire city wasn't carpet bombed like an obvious war crime, instead we were drone striked in such a morally ambiguous way. O well"

No.

And why did America have so many enemies???

Maybe because we keep finding excuses to invent them, and then does hundreds of "morally grey" bombings. But at least it wasn't another Vietnam, right?

What a low bar.

Bombing civilian infrastructure is a war crime because the end state is the same as bombing civilians. Killing power shuts down hospitals and emergency responders (generators run out eventually) and desalination plants. The military is largely unphased, they’re the first ones to get gas for generators.

Also, this is carpet bombing. Carpet bombing is the targeting of civilian infrastructure with effectively willful ignorance of the collateral damage.

We started a war knowing the only way to win was either boots on the ground or war-criming our adversary into submission. We don’t get to pretend our hands are tied and we have to send out the bombers. We don’t have to do this because Iraq forces us to, we have to do this because we elected a man who can barely read Post It notes and ignored half a century of military intelligence. We are at fault for every dollar of damage caused to infrastructure and every life lost.

The point is the DoD is telling its suppliers not to use it because the supplier of your supplier is your supplier. That’s what this does

There must be precedent if this is so normal.

The DOD keeps extreme control over their supply chain. For many things it requires specific approval to be in the supply chain in the first place

How many suppliers have they designated a supply chain risk?

Congress cannot do anything the Supreme Court says they cannot do