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   simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 09-Sep-2024 21:53:28 JST simsa03
   David Ulevitch, "Untethered: Decentralizing Energy to Transform War" https://a16z.com/decentralizing-energy-to-transform-war/
   
   A big driver in the development of small nuclear reactors may less be the civilian demand but state-side demand to supply military bases and forward tactical units with energy and electricity. That may become an immense factor in innovation. Remember how it was the Vietnam War that led to the standardisation of cargo containers by the U.S. military that subsequently made globalized trade possible. It's thus probably the military, again, that is the driver of profound technological changes.
   
   #nuclear #energy #infrastructure
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Sep-2024 00:57:57 JST simsa03

     • Walkaway Friendly Localist 🌿
     Partly so, in my opinion. I concur with the assessment that dezentralised energy storage capacities will – over a long strech of time – mostly benefit the military and its increasingly electricty-intensive equipment (drones, flight control, interception, AI managed swarms, etc.).
     
     But that does not pertain to volatile #renewables like wind and sun whose effectiveness and suitability far more depend on grid structures, base loads of consumption and conventinal production, electricity markets, network costs, etc. That's one of the reasons, BTW, why I speak of #peakrenewables: They can positively contribute up to 30% in the overall electricity production, marketing, transfer, and consumption – beyond that it mainly increases costs and creates negative price offsets. And storage even for such minor for such capacities is not on the horizon. Hydrogen production on site of renewables is laughable (10% effectivness) and hydrogen powered plants are, well, not in sight.
     
     Thus I think the current Tesla "Megapack" battery units (3.9 Mw/h storage per unit) is currently the best solution not for private, municipal, or commercial solutions but for military.
     
     [Sidenote: And given the demand for batteries, I find it plausible that the vast lithium reserves in the Donbas region provided one of the main reasons for Putin to invade Ukraine.]
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Sep-2024 03:43:28 JST simsa03

     • Walkaway Friendly Localist 🌿
     Well, yes and no. You mentioned storage, then flipped to production. Renewables have no capacities for storage. And their electrcity generation is imbedded in a context of other factors like grid stability, prices at spot markets, etc. The commingling of topics was in your notice, not in mine
     
     Turning "production processes to electric" is a pipe dream. The transformation of the chemical industry in DE alone would require us to put 500 TWh/a annually on top of the current annual consumption of 600 TWh of electricity, and that's only the chemical industry. And no, you cannot create that electricity to prices that keeps chemical production and products competitive. And a further no, as we didn't even mention how ore mining and refinement of minerals to produce the renewable stuff relies on fossil fuels in the mining industry and thus ads to fossil fuel consumption as to climate emissions.
     
     Accorting to a McKinsey report (need to look up the link), the transformation towards electricity across all sectors till 2045 would require DE alone to pay about € 10 trillion total, that is € 500 billion annually. Nobody has that money.
     
     I could open a different thread on why I see #peakrenewables but I leave that for another day. One example may suffice: We'll be lucky if in DE alone we can keep the power output of wind on-shore at current levels given the decommissioning of about half of the fleet from 2026 onwards due to end of life requirements. We're talking about 14,000 units that need to be replace *before* we can add more electricity generated from wind on-shore.
     
     And yes, stuff like Tesla's Megapack seems feasible in decentralized, movable logistics environments as that of the military in war zones. Another field may be development aid and disaster mitigation. But here the consumption is relatively small and by no means on a scale that could serve as a base for industry-size production.