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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Such an incredibly misleading article.

    1 GW of nuclear capacity generates several times more electricity than 1 GW of PV capacity.

    Nuclear power plants run at almost full capacity pretty much 24/7/365. With the occasional shutdown every few years for maintenance and to replace the fuel rods.

    PVs only generate electricity during the day, and only hit their maximum capacity under ideal conditions. The average output of PVs is 15-25% of their capacity.

    Globally we generate more electricity from nuclear than we do from all PVs together.

    At the typical sizes we’re building them you need dozens of PV farms to match the energy output of a single nuclear reactor.


  • Yea basically. Creative accounting abuses of RECs are rampant. There’s no tangible product or service delivered when you buy a REC so there’s nothing stopping a bad actor from selling the same “REC” to more than one buyer.

    But more importantly, RECs don’t work to reduce GHG emissions even if they’re purchased and sold in good faith. RECs don’t change anything, that’s the problem. They don’t reduce electricity usage, or change the grid mix. All RECs do is give a company the ability to claim that it was magically someone else’s electricity that resulted in fossil fuels being burned and not their’s. Companies that buy RECs are paying to shift the blame onto companies that didn’t.

    Back when solar and wind was more expensive than fossil fuels it may have made sense to offer companies the option of paying extra to get “green” power that otherwise wouldn’t have made financial sense. But now that wind and solar are cheaper than coal and nat gas, utility providers will buy all available green power regardless of RECs.

    The bottleneck to building more renewable power isn’t money. Companies paying for RECs aren’t making that happen any faster, they’re just Greenwashing their ESG reporting.



  • I read in a firefighter’s thread that the trick is to use a low pressure spray directly on the battery compartment. (It was a thread about Tesla cars not semis though so that might not apply)

    The reason was you can’t actually put the fire out, it’s self oxidizing (it can literally burn underwater) so you basically need to wait till it burns itself out. Fortunately batteries only hold something like 1/10th the energy of gasoline and can’t release that energy as quickly so a fine light spray is enough to keep it from getting hot enough to catch anything else on fire including batteries in the surrounding battery modules.

    Takes a long time, like hours to get it to a point they can move the vehicle and literally a couple weeks before the reaction completely fizzles out. They have special lots they tow them to where the car can fizzle itself out without damaging anything surrounding it.






  • “Green Hydrogen” is made by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. There’re no carbon emissions in that process, but to be truly “green” the electricity must come from a carbon free source like wind, solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric.

    The process of electricity to hydrogen to compressed hydrogen to fuel cell to electricity is about half as energy efficient as electricity to li ion battery to electricity. As a form of electricity storage green hydrogen is significantly less efficient than batteries.

    Green hydrogen only makes sense as a fuel in situations where batteries are not feasible.

    And right now making green hydrogen at all does not make sense because if you build a new low carbon source of electricity it will make a larger impact if you use it to displace fossil fuel based electricity generation rather than using it to create green hydrogen.


  • Hold a gun to someone’s head and they’ll do pretty much anything you say because they believe their life depends on it.

    Morman’s preach that your eternal life depends on being part of their group. So for a transgender person who’s been brainwashed by the church, it’s like having a gun to your head. They don’t want to be in a group that hates them, but they’re afraid “god” will kill them of they leave the group.

    They live in terror of being excommunicated (kicked out of the church) because they’ve been convinced that is equivalent to death. The amount of power that gives church leaders over the lives of the followers is staggering, and of course ridiculously abused.







  • There will definitely be someone trying to take his place.

    But I’m old enough to remember the last 7 republican presidents and presidential nominees. None of them were like Trump.

    They weren’t convicted felons, or impeached twice, or telling bold provably false lies daily. They didn’t double down on their lies when called out on it.

    Some of them couldn’t find a coherent sentence without two hands and a flashlight but went on to be elected for two terms, while still managing not to recommend injecting bleach as a treatment for any medical condition.

    Trump has something no Republican candidate in my lifetime (and probably ever) has, blind loyalty in the face of utterly ridiculous behaviour.