For every 50 kids that~~'s~~ are responsible enough to have unrestricted device access there’s 50 one more who just aren’t isn’t mature enough yet.

FTFY.

The French revolution - and most of that history - contradict your hypotheses.

Science demands rigorous testing of all three of those hypotheses before making a conclusion.

Dude probably gets a standing ovation every time he enters a room.

There’s a common dream among gun nuts, where you squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the trigger, but the gun never fires.

It has to do with how we are often taught to shoot. If you anticipate the recoil, you tend to push the gun forward, the muzzle drops, and you miss your target. To counter that, you’re taught to slowly squeeze the trigger while you aim, and let the shot surprise you. By the time you recognize the gun has fired, the bullet has already passed through your target.

In the dream, you’re squeezing harder and harder and harder, waiting for a bang that is never going to come.

“Abdicate”

Bread was preceded by porridge (crushed grains in water or milk), which was preceded by gruel (raw, whole grains softened in water). Gruel also gave us beer.

So, they left a bucket of water to stagnate next to a bus stop?

https://youtu.be/bBkqI7EQp0A

Worked in two factories since Covid. The first stockpiled components we produced in house, and relied in JIT logistics for external components. Which was basically the stupidest arrangement they could have cone up with. They had 10+ years worth of parts they could make in house, clogging up their warehouse. And couldn’t ship anything because they were waiting on suppliers.

The other built two new warehouses to stockpile external supplies, and never let up on production.

Let’s say you have an aluminiun factory, which obviously needs lots of energy 24/7.

Very often, they just run overnight, not 24/7. Grid operators incentivize their off-peak consumption to increase the base load on their baseload generators, making them more efficient.

The solar-friendly solution is to just shift their operations to daytime instead of nighttime. This reduces total overnight demand, and reduces the need for storage.

Nuclear cannot be used as a “backup”. France is using nuclear for baseload generation, just like every other grid with nuclear generators.

And that is the underlying problem. Like all grid providers, they are incentivizing overnight consumption to improve the efficiency of their baseload generators.

Those perverse incentives are the primary cause of the problems you are describing.

Remove those perverse incentives.

Those industries currently taking advantage of the incentives switch to cheap daytime power instead of cheap night time power. They increase daytime demand, reducing the overcapacity problem.

Now the overnight baseload has dropped. We can now reduce nuclear baseload generation overnight, which also reduces it during the day. Now the daytime overcapacity problem is also reduced.

Desalination, fischer-tropsch synfuel production, hydrogen electrolysis. Even if we can’t find anything productive to do with the power, there are plenty of useless, nonproductive ways to monetize excess power: AI and Crypto, for example.

Overcapacity is not an actual problem.

Try bitcoin.

The ROI on bitcoin is substantially greater than that of a high power laser aimed into space.

Of course, it depends on the conditions.

Seasonal variation.

If you are doing solar right, you will have surplus power from it 9 months out of the year. The solution to making it profitable is not storage. It’s finding customers who can use that excess power, but won’t increase winter demand.

The solution to reliability is to overbuild wind and solar, so that even suboptimal weather allows us to fully meet our essential needs.

Which is still cheaper than nuclear.

While an individual wind farm might occasionally see periods of windlessness, that lull doesn’t happen to all farms on a nation-sized grid simultaneously.

Storage is a red herring. Storage is attempting to make solar operate the same way as existing generation models: “supply shaping”. Attempting to match supply to demand.

Supply shaping doesn’t even work for our existing baseload generators. We use demand shaping to move our biggest loads to a time of day when we can most easily meet them with legacy generators. Which happens to be overnight. Which is the worst time of day to generate power with solar.

When we get rid of the current counterproductive demand-shaping models, we drop the overwhelming majority of our storage needs as well.

Nuclear pushes major industrial users (steel mills, aluminum smelters, etc) to overnight. Nuclear can’t be ramped up or down fast enough to match the normal demand curve, so they use “off peak” incentives to raise the trough and lower the peak. This allows nuclear to meet a much larger percentage of total demand. Without such incentives, nuclear has even more problems than solar. It would only be able to produce about 20% of our power, with 80% coming from “peaker” plants. With those incentives, nuclear can meet about 80% of out need, with peaker plants filling in.

By driving consumption overnight, those same incentives prevent solar from being able to meet the overnight demand.

Removing those “off peak” incentives, and providing new “on peak” incentives pushes those customers to daytime consumption that can be easily met by solar.

Stop thinking of nuclear as a “backup”. Its not a backup. It is baseload generation. “Backup” is not provided by baseload generators. “Backup” is provided by generation that doesn’t suffer from the limitations of baseload generators. “Backup” is from generators that can ramp up and down to match a fluctuating demand curve. “Backup” is provided by “peaker” plants.

Look at the date on the article you linked. It was published on July 7th.

When solar panels are seeing 15 hours of high-angle summer daylight and clear skies, generation should be considerably overcapacity.

Come back to me when you can write that same overcapacity article in November, when your panels are struggling with 9-hours of low-angle overcast.

When you have sufficient solar capacity to meet winter demand, you’ll have 200% - 400% of demand in summer. That is simply the nature of solar production outside of the tropics.