Conscription is the Nordic way. Train before it is needed, so that everyone knows what to do when shit hits the fan. And when it does a large part of the population knows how to enact a specific role in the army, would it be needed. From crewing submarines to driving tanks or how to use the communications equipment.

I honestly thought it would be bigger. Having said that, we (as in the municipality i work for) currently have 40-60 MWh sand batteries in production. The first, small and hot, one is currently charging to go into production when it gets colder. The bigger and colder battery is slated to start charging the next season.

“And you can store it for long periods, not just two hours or four hours like lithium-ion batteries, but potentially for days and maybe even weeks.”

I’m guessing here, but “for days and maybe even weeks” must be because the battery is above ground? With good insulation seasonal storage is very much in the cards.

A day care in another Swedish municipality use about 1/5 of the “normal” energy for heating thanks to a sand battery. As in 15-18 kwh/m2/year as opposed to 70 kwh/m2/year as is the current upper limit for new buildings in Sweden.

It is basically an isolated heat trap for excess electricity/heat during the summer to be used during winter. It is rather like ground heat except for a few notable differences:

The cons are obvious:

• Higher investment,
• More complicated

The pros:

• Doesn’t need as much power (higher heat output during winter),
• The community has a goal of using 100% of produced electricity on site (as that is most economical), but this allow us to utilize the entire roof for solar energy, which will be more economical in autumn/spring.

Cost wise, for the tenants, it’s no difference, as the lower running costs of the battery is predicted to out weight the extra cost of capital, but in an emergency the house will be much easier to keep light and warm. The plan is to fit the house with batterier and V2G EV-chargers.

So far I’ve mostly changed how I do stuff, rather than what i do. Electric car instead of ICE, Bike and train for commuting, Solarpanels and 20kWh batteries for most of my summer time energy needs.

At work I have more possibility to make a difference, though. So far I’ve had batteries introduced (solar was already norm) as an accessory to “our” buildings, I’ve gotten 2 thermal batteries (sand) built and are currently investigating building mounted small scale wind power. Among other things.

That doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion at hand. The question is “is it better if something happens earlier” and if, as you say, the median reaction time is 273 ms, that means that median player a will consistently be 3 ms faster than median player b if they react to the same event all else being equal. 273 ms will beat a total of 276 ms every time in a race to react.

Oil dependence is use as a of controlling the world. Renewables changes that control. Therefore Renewables must be stopped.

Depends on your view point. From a European perspective liberalism is center right, although I’d say that the so called liberalism as discussed in the US is pretty well into the right. The whole spectrum has shifted, so I’d say that what used to be conservative talking points are now liberal talking points.

Depends on what the alternative is. I’d prefer a beer to the water water of Flint i.e.

As bad as things are, I’m still glad that the oil wars are driven by greed and not scarcity. Had the option been mad max things would have been so much more desperate, as things stand, a world with energy and hope is still an option.

This is not the application im worried about in regards to Jerome Paradox. There are other power guzzling techs that will eat any and all energy that can be produced while paying more per kwh than any of us can afford. Those technologies are my primary concern…

How on earth did you arrive at that conclusion? You are the one to bring the orange despot into the discussion to begin with.

Why are you so afraid to admit that the country you live in is not best at everything and may actually have something to learn by looking elsewhere? Having a gated pissing contest is not the way we will learn enough fast enough to have a future. Learning from example is the only way forward.

But I’m a bit astounded by this, do you really feel you have to buy a car simply because it is produced? Don’t you have any personal efficacy or desires?

Oh, the new “renewables are bad” talking point. Unlike the general feel of the article I think this is actually just in time. The first TW took 70 years to install, but the second took 2 years (2024). Given 20 years of operational life that means that the quantities starts to accelerate by the end of the 2030-thirties. Which is when the article states that there will be price parity between recycling and landfill…

However, at least here, the cost of landfills has increased and will continue to increase so it quill only be a matter of time…

So, westerners want to buy cheap ICE cars and somehow its the fault of the Chinese? As for the Chinese themselves they buy 50+% electric, well ahead of say Sweden.

But as for the topic at hand, surprisingly few people realize how much cheaper renewable are and that they stand to earn a buck adopting green tech while producing less dirty electricity. I have to deal with them at work, sometimes I get to see minds explode in disbelief:)

Here, maybe. For most outside green energy I expect it to be more newsworthy that 50% of chinas electricity is from renewable and that solar alone eeks out coal. An interesting point about the molten salts approach is that cooldown doesn’t happen immediately after sunset. The land use is problematic for most places, though.

I would think that the graph would be rather different had it been “last kilometer”? I’d expect to see electricity at the bottom there.

For panels mounted as depicted, I’m with you 100%. I do want to mention though that vertically mounted panels seems to increase harvests and from the farmer (singular) I’ve spoken to who is testing this with the help of academia I’ve understood that there is a debate about moisture retention. And as far as I’ve seen, there are more than university coming to the same conclusions. Having said that, we’ve still to see this tested large scale…

I agree, multiple land use is the way forward. Solar panels for their own sake is seldom good enough land use, even if may be cheaper to set up.

I agree wholeheartedly. Solving the issue of high wintertime electricity use is not about adding capacity, it is about driving down demand. High winter time electricity costs is unfortunate, but it will help making that change. High winter electricity costs will incentivise innovation in energy/heat storage to help reduce electricity needs. And that in turn will help keep electricity costs down for everybody. The municipality im in is currently building 2 heat storage facilities to try the technology. Fingers crossed it will pan out well! For a country like Sweden with approximately 2-2,5 million small houses, if each had a 10MWh heat battery on-prem that’d approximately equal the energy output of all nuclear sites in the country for the sunless 5 months…

Well… there should be a “right now” included in all discussions about birth rates. Case in point: Sweden. There is birth data from 1749 and examining that data show 2 distinct time periods, roughly before and after ww1. Before ww1, fairly even birthrates, after early 1800 increasing (to rather high level). Swedens last war ended 1812. After ww1 decline in birth rates, but an obvious 25 year long cycle instead. Last time there were black headlines about birth rates was 1999-2000. Sure enough 25 years ago and nothing to suggest that the long time trend has been broken. When the most recent slump in birth rates began all preschools and schools were full to the brim.

I’m not sure those conclusions can be drawn by that article. I mean, there was one solid regression in there which clearly showed a near perfect linearity between less gas-hours (that is more fossil free power) and lower electricity cost. And in that regression Sweden and norway was even omitted, had they not been the correlation would be even stronger.

As for the other regressions presented they were not apples to apples comparisons and no conclusions can be drawn because of bad methodology. Sure enough R-square was very low as well, but that would be expected.

The issues with the methodology are that A) the cost of electricity isnt decided by what is produced in a country, but by how much is in demand in neighboring electricity regions. For instance, the price of electricity in sweden is closely tied to demand in Germany. Thus will wind and solar in Sweden have very little explanative power on price. And B) the meassured price is t the true mean price as met by the consumers. If 5% of households has a solar installation it will skew the mean price by alot. Not only will their price of electricity inversely follow production as they will first use there own production, they will also see negative prices when the installation delivers more electricity than what is used by the household. Both mechanisms skew the price of the mean bought kwh electricity And neither is accounted for in this comparison.

But the main conclusion stands. Any reduction in gas-hours will lower the price of electricity.