Alright, the rich text reply editor still isn't working for me, so I can't quote people without it fucking up the formatting, but Bofferbrauer's response I can get behind. It is true that future gens of nuclear fission hold a lot more promise than the current gens, and are way safer. Fission isn't a long term solution though, even with the better plants. That Ted Talk I linked in the messed up formatting reply features a chart that explains that at current consumption of energy, there just aren't enough reserves for fission to replace fossil fuels.

I'm not nearly as pessimistic as some of you are on solar. In fact I'm incredibly optimistic. The technology for battery backed 100% renewable grids exists TODAY and in a financially feasible form. All that prevents it is the political will. It requires a reworking of the entire power grid and the power plant business model, so as to make it less a bunch of power plants providing electricity at a cost per Watt to a network of connected homes across huge distances, and more a bunch of networked networks of microgrids generating power locally, and storing it at power plants, which also generate electricity, and instead of selling the electricity per kWh, they sell a monthly service to connect and regulate all the microgrids. So if a storm blocks the sun in a microgrid dependent on solar, that microgrid gets its energy from neighboring microgrids that are having a sunnier day, and battery backs everything up so that if there are a lot of rainy days everywhere for everyone, there's enough extra energy to hold everyone over. A renewable grid can be sustainable, reliable, and not fluctuate wildly, it just needs to be scaled properly and the business model needs to be reworked. Not likely to happen under the current private system, but Bernie wants publicly owned power, which would be the easiest way to organize this.

I like your microgrid idea. In towns, that should be perfectly feasible with every house having solar collectors on their roof. Not so sure about cities, but for those wind farms and solar farms might bridge that gap.

However, the fluctuations will not go away by this. I'll have to find the chart with the German energy production again, because on it you could clearly see what weather that day had just by looking at how the solar or wind energy spiked or dropped. And while they account for about 23% of total power in 2018, when they both spike together, they reach about twice the output of the power plants Germany has, and often in such cases, some part of the power is simply not getting collected since that's way too much to not overload the grid.

Here, you can actually see the power output of each day in Germany: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_generation/06.08.2019/16.08.2019/

You can see the fluctuations very well that come with solar and wind. More conventional power plants will be needed until we have batteries that can store several hundreds of MAh @240V (120V for the US. And that's Mega Ampere Hour, not Milli Ampere Hour @5V or 3.3V like in those puny little powerbanks - so just about 50 billion times bigger), we can't depend on Wind and Solar alone. That works well for towns, but not so much in cities where the consumption is much bigger than could be collected by such means.

Also from that chart, you can clearly see that German is turning off power plants or running them at a lower power output to not overload the grid during daytime or high wind power output at nighttime, otherwise they would probably be net energy exporters. So reasoning that the high price might come from the power imports is most probably wrong, otherwise they would certainly produce more power, as they have the capacity for it. This is one of the main benefits of having some non-renewable energy production: you can turn them on and off at will if needed.

I would say however that there could be a way out: having to force buildings that they need to install a battery which size depends on the power consumption of it. This could become pretty huge batteries in skyscrapers (or several smaller ones), but that way we would escape the need for the megabatteries mentioned above. But who else will get that idea? And more importantly, who would want to put this motion forward politically, no matter which country? I doubt there's much political will to enforce something like this.

I hope I'm wrong, but that sounded to me like he might be in a very early stage of Alzheimer disease. My granddad died due to Alzheimer and before he was diagnosed he also started to go on such weird tangents and non sequiturs.

To be fair, you wouldn't need batteries per se. Modern thermal energy storage matches most types of battery in efficiency and use materials far more abundant and cheaper than lithium. That's what Spain and California are doing with concentrated solar power.

I was counting those also when i said batteries. Under battery I meant any device that can hold the electricity produced in some form and released it when needed, which includes those energy storages.

Solar and Wind is a complete waste of time. 70-80% of all electricity consumption happens 24/7, now what you do when there's no wind at night? You're dead. You can look at germany for this, they are a complete failure that is pushing solar/wind. They have 100% political will, among most advance technology country and endless amount of money, despite this they are a complete failure.

Compare to Sweden, each swede let out half the carbon per citizen and our gdp/capita is higher than theirs.

Link to 70-80% electricity consumption 24/7 (Thank u bafferbru)

https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_generation/06.08.2019/07.08.2019/

I don't think it's as black and white as it seems. Warren might have a lot of rich white people supporting her but she comes in 2nd in small donors and 5th in large donors (both behind sanders). So a large chunk of her base are not rich.

Her supporters tend to be more wealthier more college educated and white and that is the difference between her and Sanders who leads with working class individuals and has a more diverse range of support. I'm not saying that their supporters always fit this bill, I'm just saying that if this trend continues, which the media coverage of her suggests it might, you could see this becoming more apparent.

https://politico.com/interactives/2019/how-the-2020-candidates-break-down-in-the-polls-so-far/

Yeah, I expected them to drop out after it was clear they would miss the first debates.

Actually, I expect Delaney being one of the candidates surest to stay until at least Iowa caucus. He gave up his house seat, started early campaigning, invested a lot of his own money. He wants something from this candidacy. I am not sure what, probably he believes his own ideology deeply and thinks only he can solve the problems. Anyways, as he is self-financing, he CAN stay until Iowa. Other candidates might be forced to drop out for lack of money, as you said for Williamson.