Who is building and operating a plant (these need to be more or less 1:1 per MW to back your intermittent power sources) that sits idle 95% of the time? That would be a pretty interesting pitch deck.
That’s a pretty damn low utilization rate. The cost per Mwh would make the Texas polar vortex incident look downright cheap. Or you’ll be having the government build and operate idled natural gas (or coal!) plants via taxpayer money since investors are generally not quite that poor at math. An idle plant still needs the same number of staffing and engineering as one operating at 90% capacity factors, before you even begin to look at capex.
Perhaps that will happen. Running your baseload generation balls to the wall at 100% seems to be a far better use of capital to me, and have your cheap intermittent power sources fill in for those peak loads that don’t require reliability.
I can come up with all sorts of great ideas on how to utilize spare solar capacity. None are financially practical in the scale of a human lifetime at a societal level, even with a magic wand to instantly enable the political will to do so.
Humans continue to amaze me with their inability to account for tail risk. The same political magic wand makes nuclear viable within a decade or two, accounting for said tail risk within it.
That said, the current unserious political climate gives me zero hope any solution will be found, so I’m simply preparing for semi regular power outages becoming a thing within my lifetime.
> Who is building and operating a plant (these need to be more or less 1:1 per MW to back your intermittent power sources) that sits idle 95% of the time?
It does feel like an inefficient use of capital. My best explanations for intermittents are
1) they are fuel savers, making natural gas cleaner by having them run less;
2) they siphon money into the generator’s pockets (from taxes via the Inflation Reduction Act and other subsidies, from other electricity generators via renewable energy mandates, from the utilities via rooftop solar which reduces the consumption when energy is easier/less costly to produce).
Is your position that, since people said the same thing about kids reading books, then there is nothing we can give kids that will have a negative outcome on their development? A book can only be read, which requires cognitive effort. iPads can be watched and listened to, which requires no cognitive effort. It's obvious which one kids will choose to do.
Problem is not children having access to it. It is more parents outsourcing parenting to YouTube/TikTok or Meta. If parents still take responsibility on how much and where the child spends their time, it is no different than any other tech gadget. People are concerned about new tech since the time of Guttenberg.
Aswath Damodaran did an analysis on Meta valuation. He found out that even if all the 10s of billions being invested give 0 in terms of revenue it doesn't have much impact on its stock value and in turn companies value. So, I think it would be stupid for Zuckerberg to not invest in Metaverse unless he is missing some better opportunity.
I mostly agree with your rant, but I counter your example of sticking $100 bills up in your front yard as "art".
There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion.
I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.
The key difference is that holiday decorations aren't as fungible as $100 bills. People can (and do) steal stuff out of peoples yards (and packages on their porches) and then resell that stuff for cash. The reality is that people with poor morality/integrity will always see self enrichment at the expense of others.
As I mentioned to another commenter, FOSS licenses take away (steal) a right that creators have to arbitrate giving away their work. You can write software, keep it licensed, and give 'no cost' licenses to people who just want to use it for their fun stuff, but when someone wants to use it in a product, and it is code they would have had to hire someone to write otherwise, I think it is more reasonable for them to pay the creator the equivalent cost (at least). So if something would take a week to write, what is 40 hrs of wages you would accept to write that code? Let's say its $100/hr that is $4,000. So for a one time payment of $4,000 you can license your code for them to use in their commercial product which will make them, presumably, much much more than $4,000 over its lifetime. But with FOSS licenses, you can't do that. You can sue them (it's expensive) and after suing them the only compensation you can expect is that they publish their source code? Now the FOSS license has stolen not only your creative work, but your time you could have used to write more software, and the monetary expense of hiring lawyers. As a result FOSS authors don't have a lot to gain by suing scofflaws, the scofflaws know that and so they steal the value safe in the knowledge that it will be unlikely to cost them anything.
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