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Patents expire

Patents are difficult to enforce internationally

Where would coke be if the recipe was patented instead of trade secret ?


While your point is completely true, the specific example of coke is ironic because Coke's dominance is more related to marketing than their formula!

Hydro electric as a resource is probably mostly exploited - are there a lot of big hydro projects left to build? If there are they must be difficult or expensive or they would have already been built.

In the Cascades they’re deconstructing dams as the benefits were oversold while the maintenance costs and environmental impacts were underestimated.

Do you have a source for this? I constantly point out that several cloudy days in a row often happens but am rebutted with graphs of the declining costs of solar modules and batteries

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Figure 3

When used as the sole source of electricity solar clocks at 565 EUR/MWh. Nuclear, for comparison, is at 141 EUR/MWh.


Nobody is suggesting to use solar as the sole source of electricity. That would obviously be insane and then leads to silly numbers like the ones you gave.

A MWh of solar is about 30 Euro/MWh if you levelize the capital costs.


The article discusses why LCOE is not a good estimate of the costs. Yes, combining different sources lowers the total cost (by damping intermittency). For Denmark it's offshore wind and solar in a 7 to 1 ratio (plus natural gas or biomethane power plants).

> Nobody is suggesting to use solar as the sole source of electricity.

You weren't clear on what you propose.


https://has-electricity-decoupled-yet.strommarktberatung.de

Germany has a lot of solar. It's suppressing prices below the electricity price you would get with pure gas power generation.


The electricity price is not decoupled from the gas price because there's not enough energy storage, wind turbines, interconnections (that is the energy grid can't function without natural gas). The cost of building (and operating) all this goes into SLCOE.

Well, I found the proposal clear and your response confusing.

There are reasons it might not work, not least of all political. But a link to a paper picking a bone with LCoE is talking past GP.


I wanted to remind that "just add solar" comes with the costs that are rarely mentioned.

I was very clear, even before the edit. I wrote "reduce the gas bills". Not "cut the gas line".

Konschubert, it's widely reported that German energy prices are some of the highest in the world.

Exempli gratia: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-household-powe...

And the proposal to fix this is more accounting games to transfer costs to different constituents.


Batteries are good to cover evening peaks or maybe a while night. Not multiple days of low solar, that’s not economical.

Seems crazy to build an expensive factory and then cheap out on the power source so it can only run when it is sunny out

They certainly turned away from socialism and towards capitalism though, I think as part of embracing capitalism. What parts of the economy are not capitalist? State owned companies? In Canada and the US there are many protected or subsidized companies as well. Genuinely curious on the differences on owning a company in China vs canada

Thanks


Ask Jack Ma.

10 year warranty on appliances instead of 1 would show the manufacturer was serious about quality !


Only if everyone expects the business itself to continue to exist for 10 years.

Back when I was a kid, my dad claimed house construction firms (in the UK) regularly closed down after building homes to get around having to fix things under warranty.

Regardless of if this was actually true or not, the perception will kill trust.


Or that it was so cheap to manufacture they still expect it not to be a problem.


Night time? But batteries! Several cloudy days in a row? More batteries! Cost? -> a mix of sources becomes attractive


Batteries? You mean like digging a hole/making a wall and pumping water?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...

Or we could just spin some rocks around.

https://www.torus.co/torus-flywheel

Rather have solar/wind and this than shipping depleting goop from foreign nations.


https://imgur.com/a/dV8gk3R

can you find curves like this for any other power source?

also batteries are getting exponentially cheap too


These are typically representative of cost performance per watt of one part of a more complex deployed energy system. Things like the aluminum / steal for the container / framing, copper / aluminum for the transmission and wiring, land and labor for installation decline at much less aggressive rates or increase over time.

In almost all pareto optimal least cost energy system models that I've seen, high penetration of solar, wind, batteries plus some minority amount of (clean) baseload power is the most capital efficient energy system.


Power generation is largely automated !


A partly cloudy or partly sunny day produces some insane changes in output without a battery system to smooth them out

There is a limit to the size of the instantaneous increases and decreases in generation that the other generators on the grid can compensate for


It is a tax efficient way to return profits to share holders


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