• fullsquare@awful.systems
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    11 hours ago

    renewable generation, i’m with you, but i’m not sold on storage. i’m not even sure if there’s enough lithium for grid batteries to seriously matter, so it might need to use something else. the boring, working option (geographically limited) is of course pumped storage hydro, but other than that, i think that the right way to do things is to use energy when it’s made, not when it’s needed. in particular, water heaters have tiny duty cycle and hot water just sits there, which means you could, in principle, make it so that water heaters soak up all, or at least as much as practical, of excess power, wherever it is available

    some countries do fund nuclear power as a kind of strategic energy independence hedge* no matter costs, most prominently france and russia, and to some degree india and a couple of others

    *also for military use

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      5 hours ago

      i hear sodium batteries are emerging as an alternative to lithium, but note that I also don’t know shit about this domain