It’s worth noting that he also fired many of the staff who know how to ensure that they’re actually safe, as well as the staff who would approve financing.
It’s worth noting that he also fired many of the staff who know how to ensure that they’re actually safe, as well as the staff who would approve financing.
This sounds like quite a rube goldberg machine to avoid simply supplying a predictable baseline with nuclear. If you try to out-surplus increasingly common climate catastrophes, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening.
Any surplus or pricing plan will be gamed by power hungry datacenters or other wasteful capitalist scam-de-jour. Like you said, demand is elastic so any spare watt will eventually be sucked up as the price curve is optimized. The combined fluctuations on supply+demand is not what you want for a stable grid.
I predict a scenario where storage has to shore up that instability; much more storage than people think. The potential for a zero-supply floor (independent of demand growth) with massive surplus peaks requires building out an equally massive buffer. What will that ecological damage will look like? Will our current projections and efficiencies hold true at that scale?
The cheap energy -> increased demand -> increased storage -> more surplus cycle will cement our reliance on cheap energy, which requires more stability which means more storage, etc…
Let me clarify here that renewables are important for planning a responsible energy future, but only chasing cheap energy isn’t the solution. It’s not possible for us to out-produce the over-consumption that got us here.