Slashdot Mirror

There is a concise, succinct summary at Technology Review's “The Download” page (link below):

DeepMind’s AI is predicting how much energy Google’s wind turbines will produce

Google’s subsidiary DeepMind has created a machine-learning model to boost the use of wind power by predicting its likely output 36 hours ahead.

Drawbacks: Although the adoption of wind power has grown thanks to cheaper turbine costs, it will always suffer from unpredictability. That limits it compared with other energy sources that can reliably deliver power at a set time.

An experiment: To help solve this problem, last year DeepMind started building algorithms to boost the efficacy of Google’s wind farms in the US, according to a blog post. Researchers trained a neural network on weather forecasts and past turbine data, so it could predict power output 36 hours ahead. On this basis, the model recommends how to allocate power to the grid a full day in advance. This boosted the “value” of Google’s wind farms by about 20%, DeepMind claims, though it hasn’t really specified what form what value takes, or how it’s measured.

Implications: While it’s only been tested out internally so far, it’s not hard to imagine Google hoping to sell this technology to wind farm operators. And it’s another boost to Google’s carbon-free credentials.

Posted by Charlotte Jee
February 27th, 2019 7:28AM

Ref: https://www.technologyreview.c...

The algae keep dying off at certain levels of scale.

Could you be more specific? Say, providing any information at all?

Well, something is very wrong with the process. Here is more info. All those biofuel companies are pivoting away from algae. They know something we don't. As I said, current speculation on what it is is that you can't keep the algae alive at scale. Algal blooms in the wild often poison themselves and everything else in different ways after a time, perhaps that's the issue. Maybe its something else, cost of maintaining the pools perhaps. Either way, it doesn't work. Its yet another unicorn.

The whole idea of 100% renewables shows a lack of understanding of the costs involved or the feasibility of achieving it. Here is an article that explains the difficulties and highlights the questionable assumptions made in such plans.

If we want to significantly lower emissions a much more feasible plan is the Rocky Mountain Institute's Reinventing Fire.

And if your capacity factor is 65%, you need half of that.

Citataion needed?

Proposed: https://www.greentechmedia.com... Approved: https://www.greentechmedia.com... One more source: https://www.energy-storage.new...

Citataion needed?

Proposed: https://www.greentechmedia.com... Approved: https://www.greentechmedia.com... One more source: https://www.energy-storage.new...

...and renewable energy with battery storage is now starting to eat Natural Gas' dinner: https://www.greentechmedia.com...

It is clear that Natural Gas Peaker plants are on the danger list of becoming extinct due to:

1. Battery storage reacts in ms to loss of grid power which is much faster than spinning up a gas fired steam turbine.
2. Battery storage has lower maintenance costs due to no moving parts
3. Battery storage can be used to capture any local power produced and from other sources on the grid including surplus Nuclear so providing power buffering
4. Battery storage has no emissions
5. Saves costs by not paying for keeping Natural Gas Peaker plants on standby
6. Renewable energy + battery storage is scalable from domestic (small) to industrial (large)

You can't deny that the economics of renewable energy + storage will kill off Natural Gas Peaker plants and that will be good for the environment.

While there may be tax credits at the Federal level, at least 17 states charge additional registration fees for electric vehicles once the battery gets above a small (hybrid) battery size.

They do this to make up for loss gas taxes, but charge for such at a flat rate that does not factor in mileage or if you have a plug-in hybrid.

So if you purchase your electricity from charging stations which try to be gas-price equivalents, you end up paying more to fuel an electric car than had you just fueled a gas one.

When Georgia implemented their fee (one of the highest at $200/year, $300/year for commercial use), Tesla sales fell 83% and did not recover. This was true even though the state also had an electric-car income-tax purchase discount.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and claim that this is a product of bias and mental issues by the authors.
Much like how the authors of SuperFreakonomics couldn't have resisted their "one clever trick to fix global warming" chapter thanks to their personal biases. Which came back to bite them.
Also, the claim made in the paper is clearly false, even fraudulent.
Whether due to bias or to drum up publicity, I don't know. But they actually show that they are wrong.
More on that below. First a word or two on authors.

David W.Keith is a pusher of solar and geoengineering as a solution for climate change.
Also, best way to solve that climate change, according to him, is to start spraying sulfuric acid into air.
And he owns and runs a geoengineering company.
Which kinda runs on tar sands money.

Carbon Engineering is funded by several government and sustainability-focused agencies as well as by private investors, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and oil sands financier N. Murray Edwards.[5][6][7]

Lee Miller on the other hand really hates them windmills.
And both windmills and photovoltaics should be kept out of the cities, tucked away somewhere in the desert.

In fact, he's done resear... I mean he played with computer models to "prove" that installing windmills will basically... stop the wind. Well... slow it down.
Someone should have told him about all those sails we used to use globally, that we're no longer using.

I.e. That a reduction of things to preindustrial levels actually requires reduction of wind speeds as well.
Or remind him that the air moved by the wind is a fluid. Like water.
And just like how water in the sea doesn't stop moving because of all the boats blocking it from moving freely... neither will global air currents actually slow down.
And even if they do - we could just reduce the number of flags and start driving cars only downwind, while wearing more tight fitting clothes, right?
Or tell him about the chance that his model is NOT REALLY a completely accurate representation of reality.

As for the study... It claims the following:

generating today's US electricity demand (0.5 TWe) with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24 C.
...
The warming effect is: small compared with projections of 21st century warming, approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity generation, and large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity with wind.

It also claims that solar effect would be smaller but that's besides the point, unless you're looking for more bias fodder.

The issue is that those "approximately equivalent" and "large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity" are COMPLETELY ignoring that the US is a part of a global system.
As seen from the graph they've provided.

They claim a warming of 0.24C over Continental US from 0.5TWe produced with wind power, by 2080, at which point it would level out.
At the same time they claim a cooling of about -0.48C over Continental US from

You continue to assert that the backup source must be fossil fuel. It does not. I don't know where you got the 80~90% base load number from since there are places that already exceed 20% renewable energy:

https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/...

And places that have almost gone fossil-fuel-free:

https://mashable.com/2017/01/0...

But if you must include these distant and difficult to estimate costs, let's include them on both sides.

On the fossil fuel side, let's include the flooding, the levy-building/land reclamation costs, the refugee crises, the wars, the oceanic mass extinctions, everything bad that global warming has in store for us. These are about as far off as renewables' storage costs and we don't know exactly what they'll be. Do you think those will be cheaper than renewables and energy storage? Looks like it won't:

https://www.greentechmedia.com...

And that's not even accounting for the wars and such.

This says otherwise. This source confirms and says the numbers are from Eurostat. EU emissions are up. Do you have a source stating otherwise?

Here's a powerful interest for you: Value.

Solar generation, including storage, has fallen to the point that it is often the cheapest option. Cheaper than coal (which isn't all that cheap) and significantly less than natural gas peaker plants. 10-year production contracts at under 3 cents per kWh are the norm.

But don't believe me. Do a bit of googling or check out this.

You are correct that there are powerful interests on both sides, but both will soon disappear. The green energy advocates will be unnecessary because they will be the norm. The fossil fuelled electrical generation interests will be too busy talking to bankruptcy lawyers to bother anyone else. (Yes, there's some hyperbole in this paragraph, but some truth too.)

Nothing to do with GDP, this story is a straight up frothy beat up, attack Russia and China story and nothing else, the lamest shite science and the lamest shite journalism, why, https://www.greentechmedia.com.... So what the fuck are they even talking about. A measure of street lighting is not a measure of GDP, more a measure of tax levels and willingness to pay for street lighting.

GDP is not a reliable measure of anything because it is gross, heh, heh and not nett. You can be generating all the revenue you want but if you are generating it at a loss, you will go bankrupt. Street lighting is more a measure of taxation, those with higher taxes are more likely to have well lit cities, those skimping out to keep taxes low and basically privatise the profits and socialise the losses will have low levels of lighting.

Here is a more sound question, what fucking government doesn't fudge the numbers at election time, answer, fucking NONE. They must have been masturbating when they wrote this story because that would be the only excuse for the level of froth in it.

Is in what is called "ancillary services".

An ongoing issue with operating and maintaining an electrical grid is how to balance electrical generation with electrical consumption. The two vary throughout the day; for example, solar energy adds a surge of power to the grid during sunlight hours, while peak consumer demand for electricity happens around 7-8pm. If you have five minutes, I suggest you watch this video, produced by Vox, discussing it further.

How do electrical companies then compensate for the differences? Or for contingencies, like when an electrical generator needs to be brought offline for emergencies or maintenance? This is where "ancillary services" plays a vital importance. Utilities are desperate to find an efficient way to store surplus power generated when supply is higher than demand, so that it can then be released when demand is higher than supply. Currently, when supply is too high, it is reduced (ex: solar panels and wind turbines turned off), wasting energy. When supply is too low, expensive generators are brought online to meet demand. But if we can make battery technology cost-efficient to store surplus electricity for peak-demand use, it would save vast sums of money, as this article highlights.

My only real concern is how much battery waste this will lead to. Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years. Until superconductors or high-energy-plasma devices become reality, the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal. Hopefully molten-salt storage technology succeeds in this regard.

Ancillary services are generally not load peaking support but rather VAR and frequency control in relatively rare/extreme conditions, for short durations.

Is in what is called "ancillary services".

An ongoing issue with operating and maintaining an electrical grid is how to balance electrical generation with electrical consumption. The two vary throughout the day; for example, solar energy adds a surge of power to the grid during sunlight hours, while peak consumer demand for electricity happens around 7-8pm. If you have five minutes, I suggest you watch this video, produced by Vox, discussing it further.

How do electrical companies then compensate for the differences? Or for contingencies, like when an electrical generator needs to be brought offline for emergencies or maintenance? This is where "ancillary services" plays a vital importance. Utilities are desperate to find an efficient way to store surplus power generated when supply is higher than demand, so that it can then be released when demand is higher than supply. Currently, when supply is too high, it is reduced (ex: solar panels and wind turbines turned off), wasting energy. When supply is too low, expensive generators are brought online to meet demand. But if we can make battery technology cost-efficient to store surplus electricity for peak-demand use, it would save vast sums of money, as this article highlights.

My only real concern is how much battery waste this will lead to. Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years. Until superconductors or high-energy-plasma devices become reality, the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal. Hopefully molten-salt storage technology succeeds in this regard.

There is a ton of room for improvement in terms of energy efficiency. Combine that with increased renewables, improving battery technology, and a transmission system capable of moving more power from where it is generated to where it is used and you can dramatically reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

Unsubsidized renewable energy is now the cheapest energy source on the planet (not quite in the US yet, due to our relatively low energy costs compared to other countries). Xcel Energy recently won an energy contract in Arizona with their solar + storage offering priced at just $0.036/kWh, which is a game changer. Prices will only keep falling, while fossil fuel prices will either stay where they are or rise.

Cost of a PV system was in the "balance of system" since 2012.
And the price of a PV system will continue to drop at almost the same level as the tariff - 4.4% per year.
So the tariff will be meaningless in half the time.

Also... It's pretty much obvious from the graph on the link above that even with that 30% hike on Chinese solar panels - they will still be cheaper than the ones Made in USA.
Aaaand... that India is making China look like USA with their prices - 65 cents per watt.

On top of all that... If anything, this will push China to cut costs further and to export more to non-US customers.
Or, to simply have the government of China "eat the difference" for a while. It's not like they can't do subsidies too.

But hey... China doesn't have the benefit of being run by a "stable genius".

Most of the "facts" you have quoted for this product are demonstrably false.

The tiles are stronger than conventional roofing materials and even if they aren't, they have a warranty to guarantee you aren't affected by this.

According to steveha's link the tiles are lighter and cheaper than conventional roofing materials

So, basically what you are saying here is that you spread false information for someone who stands to loose out.

twice as heavy as a regular roof

This article claims that the Tesla tiles are one-third the weight of typical roofing tiles.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/heres-how-much-a-tesla-solar-roof-will-cost-you

According to Tesla, the roof is "three times as strong as standard roofing tiles" and one-third the weight of a normal tile.
[...]
Musk said the strong tempered glass makes it easier to ship than conventional tiles. And because the product is one-third the weight, the cost of shipment is also much lower. "We save on logistics and breakage," he said.

Tesla price right now, with no adjustments for eventual deflation versus premium metal after generations of use.

No, ICEs face huge taxes and EVs avoid them, like I explicitly stated.

No, a Tesla does not produce 17,5 tonnes of CO2 to manufacture. That was not a peer-reviewed "study" and was based on data that was never valid let alone currently valid. More to the point, Tesla is moving toward having their production entirely solar powered.

The problem with watering with saltwater is that you leave the salts behind in your soil. And basically turn it into a salt pan. And nothing grows on salt pans. Forget the problems with biofuels in general, that right there is a showstopper.

https://www.greentechmedia.com...

Musk doesn't invent anything. He's a PR guy and he's very good at promoting himself and his companies. Martin Eberhard seemed to be the engineer behind Tesla, but Musk kicked him out in 2008 so he could take all the credit.

https://electrek.co/2015/05/16/teslas-original-team-where-are-they-now/

His Gigafactory batteries are actually made by Panasonic, with the Wikipedia article saying "Panasonic will lead the battery cell production portion of the manufacturing."

https://www.greentechmedia.com...

His "Hyperloop" is an idea that has been around for a long time, and he just gave it a stupid name.

Yep, been around over a century! In fact, Robert Goddard proposed a maglev inside a tunnel that would go from Boston to New York in 10 minutes, essentially identical to hyperloop... back in 1910. http://www.businessinsider.com...

I'll give him credit for PayPal. Only Musk could create such a scummy company as that.

Nope. That was Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, who started it originally under the name Fieldlink, later renamed Cofinity. They named their product PayPal, but didn't change the company name to Paypal until they merged with a different company that Musk founded.

https://www.fastcompany.com/1837839/reid-hoffman-paypals-pivoted-path-success

(posting as AC because I'd already moderated some earlier posts in this topic)

There's an interesting thing to consider about the megachargers. I think a lot of people considered Musk's line about the stations being solar powered to be a throwaway remark, along the lines of "they'll have solar awnings, so "a little" of the power provided is solar". Furthermore, I think a lot of people see the announced price ($0,07/kW) to be just a loss leader. But after going over the numbers.... I think they've hit on something huge. Much bigger than just Semi.

Semi uses NMC cells, same as Tesla's grid products. And when you compare the price on the 500 mile vs. the 300 mile Semis, you come up with a price per kWh of something like $80-85/kWh... *after* profit. Tesla usually uses a 25% margin, so you're looking at under $70/kWh. Now, while impressive, and a huge leap forward in battery prices, it's certainly possible. The whole point of the Gigafactory was to make battery prices approach raw material costs, and raw materials for them are something like $50/kWh (and that's with currently elevated raw material costs).

Traditional superchargers draw straight from the grid, but they're increasingly starting to use Powerpack battery buffers, and Megacharger will certainly require them in bulk. The battery buffers reduce demand charges from the grid by evening out load and simplify the charging process (cheaper chargers), but you have to pay for them, and they're expensive.

Now let's diverge for a moment and look at solar power. Solar power is getting *cheap*. Around $1,10/W installed in the US nowadays, and falling. The problem with solar (which increases its costs) is, you need either peaking or a battery buffer to handle nighttime and cloudy days. There's also wind power, which is also now very cheap, but also suffers from the same intermittency problem (only more random). And battery buffers are very expensive.

Or, at least, they were. Because the prices on these NMCs are crazy cheap, and they're the same batteries that are used in Tesla's grid products. But wait, it gets even better. Megachargers need a battery buffer to be able to surge charge vehicles. Solar and wind power need a battery buffer to handle intermittency. The key is, you don't need two separate buffers - only the one. The very battery buffer that lets you run a megacharger will also buffer solar and wind. And the price on said buffer should now be far cheaper than it used to be.

I've run some numbers over on the Tesla Motors Club forum, but the short of it is... if Tesla's batteries really are this cheap, then they really should be able to run the stations for solar and wind at $0,07/kWh and turn a profit. Not mere "solar awnings", of course; it means grid-scale solar plants (and/or wind farms), connected to the megacharger. But it's a paradigm shift. And the drop in storage prices is a paradigm shift everywhere, not just for chargers.

Caveat: some assumptions had to be made:
  * The size of the battery packs on the Semi models (but that should be pretty accurate)
  * That Tesla isn't deliberately undervaluing the cost of the larger battery vs. the smaller one (lower margin, etc). Although it's not clear why they would want to do that; it seems just as likely that they would do the opposite, and either way, the cost of the vehicles as a whole argues for cheap batteries.
  * That the trucks in general aren't some sort of big loss leaders (but there's no way Tesla could afford that - at least not for any significant length of time)
  * That the prices Tesla thinks the batteries will cost are correct

Honestly though... I think that it's simply what it appears to be: that through manufacturing scale and advancing research, li-ion batteries are (finally!) starting to approach their raw materials costs. And that's a game changer.

I'd take issue, AC, with "other technologies". For example:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
https://www.greentechmedia.com...

Straight up alkaline, abundant base materials, and the same technology can also be used to make other kinds of batteries. Bill Joy is Not An Idiot, although he did miss the chance to make Sun Microsystems' SunOS into Linux before Linux got off of the ground (and in the process, put the hurt on Microsoft) back when he had a perfectly good 386 Unix and nobody else did. Outside of that one mistake (and sure, it was a doozy) he isn't likely to be pulling a scam or anything like it. This is technology that is probably going to work, and will be commercialized (I'm guessing) in a lot less than five years if early mass-marketable prototypes work as well as the early demonstration cells do. Joy is talking about dropping the cost of house or car batteries from the current $500-ish/MWH to under $100/MWH, maybe as low as half that. And if you follow /. and other science sites, you must be aware that there are advances constantly being made in battery technologies that can, and almost certainly will, revolutionize energy storage within the next few years ASIDE from this one. Synthesis of different advances may yet make zinc oxide batteries work (which would be huge all by itself).

TESLA'S hype may not measure up to reality, but overall the reality is that battery technology is already cheap enough and robust enough to make houses that run well over 90% of the time fully off grid, houses that can run for one to two days on limited sun including AC, at an investment that amortizes in roughly 10 to 12 years at typical power prices. At PR prices of $0.20/KWH it would be more like 7 or 8 -- that is well above the national average. 8 year amortization is actually damn close to being a no-brainer, provided that you install hurricane-proof cells on hurricane-proof houses in a hurricane-prone part of the world, something that one really should do ANYWAY because it doesn't do anyone any good to build a house and have it blow away in a storm.

What Musk proposes is far from crazy, and could conceivably be one of the most cost-beneficial solutions -- but probably NOT if one buys it from Musk himself, as his prices for solar roofs and batteries are at least 50% higher than market average and kicks amortization back up to the 12 year plus level of not obviously worth it. If Joy's batteries come through with 1200+ recharge cycles at $60/KWH (and maybe fronted by supercapacitors to buffer daytime utilization and extend this still further) it will drop the amortization time for solarizing a house to five years at the up-front cost of a cheap car and with the loan repaid entirely by money saved on electricity. Well within five years all of this is going to happen no matter what happens with oil and coal and Paris accords or the like, driven by the simple fact that it will be the cheapest way to get power in 2/3 of the word. Power companies are already building solar as fast as they can afford to because for them, economies of scale already make it a no-brainer (they don't need batteries, for the most part, and can feed the energy straight into their grids to reduce fuel costs at their fuel based plants and avoid having to build expensive GW-scale new plants to keep up with demand).

It will be interesting to see whether or not centralized power generation and distribution survives my lifetime (at this point, likely to be somewhere between 10 and 20 years, small chances of 30 or more). I expect to put solar on both of my houses well within the decade not to save the Earth but to save money, sooner if batteries get cheaper faster and cell prices keep coming down or if meter prices for electricity go up. I'm waiting for

How will these Powerwall units be recharged after they have been used up on the first go around?

From solar panels.

The electricity infrastructure is going to be down for quite a while, as the power plants and transmission lines have to be replaced.

Yes, that's exactly why you want the solar panels and battery storage.

Whilst solar panels sound like a good idea, how will you install PV when the vast majority of buildings are wrecked, and building materiel is going to be prioritised for reconstruction of homes and public structures?

I would think that setting up solar panels to provide emergency power would have a high priority. Setting up solar panels (or, repairing some of the installations that already exist on the island) is going to be very quick compared to reconstructing a demolished building; devoting a day or so to restoring the power grid is not going to delay the months-to-years long process of rebuilding the island.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-solar-industry-wants-to-help-puerto-rico.

Solar panels are relatively light and cheap, and Puerto Rico has a lot of solar power. This is a good idea, a quick way to get usable power in place fast.

The storage is the tough part, and that's the part the powerwall is good for. There's already 88 MW of distributed solar and 127 MW of utility-scale solar available in Puerto Rico
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-solar-industry-wants-to-help-puerto-rico.

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/01/tesla-powerwalls-solar-panels-sent-puerto-rico/

https://www.greentechmedia.com...

China has set an aggressive goal for solar and has already surpassed the US. Feel free to leave your head in the sand and ignore the facts. That's not to say China is running clean, since many cities like Beijing is clogged with smog. But that was their plan. Burn coal to power the country and then transition to renewable.

it can also save you having to fire up another power station and wait for the power to come along or it could bridge the gap until power is generated. The UK's grid is also investing in battery backup -
https://www.greentechmedia.com...
In case you don't want to read the link, here's an excerpt
"The U.K. requires about 2 gigawatts of frequency response for a system with nationwide peak demand of about 45 gigawatts. National Grid spends between £160 million and £170 million ($212 million to $225 million) per year to manage this need, and has previously relied on slower-reacting assets for frequency response -- either 10-second primary services, or 30-second secondary services, which can react to correct frequency excursions after they’re wandered outside their boundaries.
But assets that can respond in less than a second can step in to “improve management of the system frequency pre-fault,” or before frequencies go out of range, National Grid notes on its EFR web page. That’s important for a grid operator that’s seeing more and more volatility due to its increasing share of intermittent wind and solar power, and could help save National Grid about £200 million ($262 million) over the four years of the contracts it’s awarded."

Then someone ought to tell Elon that his "World Record Battery" is gonna have a rather short stint at the top of the list.

See https://www.greentechmedia.com...

Quick summary, due to be completely installed by January 1, 2021.
Able to supply 100 megawatts for 4 hours (400 megawatt hour capacity).

So Mr Musk's "3 times larger than the next largest battery" is soon gonna be "One third the size of the world's largest battery"

It's starting to happen already, but it will take some time to get enough storage capacity installed to catch up with the amount of solar power already on the grid.

Many industrial processes can be designed to soak up excess power and release it as needed https://www.greentechmedia.com...

A GWh here, a GWh there, pretty soon you are talking real energy storage.

Like these? Or these?

Germany land area: 348,900.0 sq. miles
United States land area: 9,147,420.0 sq. miles
Over 26 times the land area. In other words, it's easier to get the power
from the source to the people in Germany, than it would be in the USA.
It's the same argument, people complain about, when talking about internet
speed. "Japan & South Korea" have x times the speed and x cheaper price
of internet, than in the USA.
Japan land area: 364,560.0 sq miles
South Korea land area: 97,480.0
It's easier in smaller countries to build out, than the USA.
Ok, so the liberal logic would say, move all the people to large urban population
centers, and make living out in the middle of the nation illegal. Yeah, that would be
the way their liberal minds would work. After all, it's "for your own good".
You want renewable power, fine, but leave coal, gas & nuclear alone.

Well thanks for showing us how your mind works. You spout a random statistic of no particular value, the size of the US versus Germany, but don't consider the population distribution, the same as with your claim about the Internet. Despite numerous and extensive discourses on both flawed argumentations of yours having been available for quite some time. The one they have in common is that you're trying ignore the distribution of population, which is not even across any of the nations, and in fact, you can see how there is plenty of concentrated population in the US with any number of maps. The next part is that you're ignoring the actual state of affairs, as the complaints about power production and internet provision actually don't just depend on the averages, but on particulars, such as North Carolina's complaints about pollution to North Carolina's actions to inhibit municipal internet.

Then, of course, you haven't actually considered that efforts to create a better interconnected grid in the US are ongoing, that alternative power production can work better with distribution.

But instead of looking at those details, let's just let you try to boil things down with an irrelevant argument that isn't particularly important. No wait, let's not.

Of course, that you ended it all with a false conclusion of what you think your strawman concept of a liberal mind would say, just puts another nail in the coffin of your argument. Why do you bother? Is it simply because you don't realize how poor a case you're making, or is that the point? Heck, maybe you're around to make conservatives look bad, that'd be offensive, but at least I wouldn't feel quite as bad.

But I mean really, Mitt Romney gabbled his nonsense over the size of the US Navy and Air Force, what else can I expect?

I found an article with a better description of the proposed technology.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-startup-is-building-an-electric-airplane

The aircraft will be a battery-first series hybrid, or an electric-powered aircraft with a range extender -- sort of like General Motors' Chevy Volt. All of the propulsion will come from the electric motor, said Kumar, and if there's enough battery power to run the entire flight, the jet fuel won't need to kick in. The company will also offer all-electric options.

Thanks to the internet and Google, it's very easy to find out the cost of wind and solar renewables and how they compare to nuclear and fossil fuels.
Here are a few references from the first pages of Google results:
https://cleantechnica.com/2017...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
https://www.greentechmedia.com...
https://cleantechnica.com/2016...

Try it yourself, you might learn something.

Here is VW building a new plant
Here is Daimler's second factory
Here is Seimans

For the regular car maker, the battery is about 1/3-1/2 of the price because they have not gotten their costs down low. OTOH, Tesla has batteries that costs a fraction of what the big players do. As it is, Tesla now sells more batteries than all the rest combined. With the Model 3, it alone will sell more batteries, than the entire rest of the industry, which includes the Model S and X.

The major car makers will be bankrupt again, unless they learn to start making their own cars and parts.

Presumably they're talking about something like this: Using renewable energy to synthesize liquid fuels for storage and transport. They can either work in conjunction with carbon capture or simply harvest CO2 from the air. I've heard of several ways to do it, but thus far it's mostly still in the lab. I haven't seen any "grid-scale" deployment. Apparently the Chinese intend to be first.

https://www.greentechmedia.com...

Microsoft and Apple are the only two companies you mentioned founded since 1916. China has changed a wee bit since then. So has the US. I think it's ridiculous to speak of today's environment as it were the environment of pre-First World War US. That world hasn't existed for a long time.

The concept of innovation still exists. Massive technological innovations don't come along every day, the steam engine, the automobile, flight, transistors etc. Successful countries were the ones that got onboard early and led development. In fact one of the main reason the US has been so rich and successful is its early adoption of technology. For some reason this went out the window with the latest technology for reasons that make no sense.
You can be a leader or a follower. Renewable energy is already taking over the world, even if the fossil fuel lobby in the US doesn't want to believe it. I'm not American, and I travel a fair bit. Your attitude to renewable energy sounds exactly like a typewriter salesman from the 80's.

Microsoft and Apple are notable both for their lack of manufacture and the amount of brainpower they bring to their respective industries.

Apple are massively into manufacturing, they do all the design work, and own all the IP, then outsource the labour to cheaper markets. They are the model the US could be doing with renewable energy.

Solar power doesn't require what those big companies have.

Elon Musk says otherwise.

And we've already seen a massive die-off of US companies in solar power at the expense of the Chinese, who fared far better when there was oversupply around 2011.

That is normal for any new industry. Do you think Ford is the only guy that ever tried to make cars? There will a lot of failures before the nut is cracked, but you'll never succeed by giving up.

China has already won in this particular market with the only remaining significant US competitor being Elon Musk's SolarCity which is heavily subsidized and being propped up by Tesla Motors as well.

So do you think Elon knows something you don't, or you know better?

The obvious rebuttal is that the US already tried and just ended up giving a lot of solar tech to the Chinese. Seriously, there's 60 years of development of solar power in the US. Similarly, there's something like 20-30 years of history of solar power subsidies as well. You've had plenty of time to show your strategy can work. It's time to stop wasting our money on this crap.

It's not my strategy, but it's quite clear the decades of effort are finally paying off, and this is the time you want to throw in the towel? Are you the guy that sold your Microsoft shares in 1994?

So what? You still don't get that they have to offer it cheaper than the alternatives or we don't buy it. Meanwhile Germany and China are squandering their wealth on these poor strategies. Works for me.

Time will tell if they are poor or rich. Good luck selling those typewriters...

Like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Ford, GM, Boeing etc.

Microsoft and Apple are the only two companies you mentioned founded since 1916. China has changed a wee bit since then. So has the US. I think it's ridiculous to speak of today's environment as it were the environment of pre-First World War US. That world hasn't existed for a long time.

Microsoft and Apple are notable both for their lack of manufacture and the amount of brainpower they bring to their respective industries.

Solar power doesn't require what those big companies have. And we've already seen a massive die-off of US companies in solar power at the expense of the Chinese, who fared far better when there was oversupply around 2011.

China has already won in this particular market with the only remaining significant US competitor being Elon Musk's SolarCity which is heavily subsidized and being propped up by Tesla Motors as well.

But no, we're too short sighted to see past subsidies=communism!

The obvious rebuttal is that the US already tried and just ended up giving a lot of solar tech to the Chinese. Seriously, there's 60 years of development of solar power in the US. Similarly, there's something like 20-30 years of history of solar power subsidies as well. You've had plenty of time to show your strategy can work. It's time to stop wasting our money on this crap.

So the Germans and Chinese will have it handed to them on a plate.

So what? You still don't get that they have to offer it cheaper than the alternatives or we don't buy it. Meanwhile Germany and China are squandering their wealth on these poor strategies. Works for me.

Should be interesting to see how well Tesla fares with this. Dow Chemical put a lot of money behind the same concept (less the battery whose purpose vs. cost seem like they would be difficult to justify) and they gave up the market due both to technical complications of installation/maintenance and poor sales due to low market interest. And that was just a few months ago, so I doubt much has changed: https://www.greentechmedia.com...

Most people who charge at home, charge at night. So, without storage, solar panels don't help.

That's idiotic nonsense. Most people who charge their electric car at home, switch to peak/off-peak billing with their electric company. That means electricity used before midnight is insanely expensive, but solar panels can offset most of that daytime demand. And after midnight you can charge your car for a pittance.

https://www.greentechmedia.com...

Has it occurred to you that the main reason existing fossil energy is cheap is mostly just because of scale and infrastructure?

After all, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal etc all have zero fuel costs - no mining, no fuel storage and transport, just maintenance (and even that's usually a lot less). The great majority of the cost is construction - and that always gets cheaper with scale (just look at solar's price curve for the last few years). There's also still plenty of room for technological efficiency improvement. These factors also apply to storage, where required. So there's certainly no reason to assume that renewable energy is inherently more expensive than fossil fuel; generally the opposite.

First US usage of power is about 4 times higher per household than Germany, possibly due to Germans mostly not having or using AC in the warmer months. This makes summer the power usage low in Germany. In the US the summer months are the usage high.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

The government (ie taxpayers) subsidize the tune of 20 billion Euros per year and rising (hiding the actual cost)

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/...
http://www.greentechmedia.com/...
http://www.seia.org/research-r...

German prices per kwh are higher (~.34 per kwh) vs US (~.15) mostly due to tax/tariff on energy, and regulatory procedures related to the infrastructure payments of solar and other renewables. The prices are rising so fast the government has had to begin a more restrictive path on new solar.

https://www.eia.gov/electricit...
https://www.cleanenergywire.or...

Based solely on price per kwh and predictable capacity, solar is awful. More specifically awful for germany, because of geography and weather trends.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/qu...

This unpredictability is causing massive new production plants using coal. This is a reult of shutting down nuclear and building solar which only generates an average of >10% of potential capacity. Altogether the solar plan's end result is not bringing them closer to meeting their climate pollution goals.
https://carboncounter.wordpres...

"when the wind suddenly stops blowing, and in particular during the cold season, supply becomes scarce. That's when heavy oil and coal power plants have to be fired up to close the gap, which is why Germany's energy producers in 2012 actually released more climate-damaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than in 2011. If there is still an electricity shortfall, energy-hungry plants like the ArcelorMittal steel mill in Hamburg are sometimes asked to shut down production to protect the grid. Of course, ordinary electricity customers are then expected to pay for the compensation these businesses are entitled to for lost profits."

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

The problem is solved in any case with power more than made up. http://www.greentechmedia.com/...

Looks like I've got company. http://www.greentechmedia.com/...

Germany is producing 40% of its energy with renewables, since last year. Likely 45% this year. No idea about what you are talking.

No, it isn't... Google is your friend:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/...

Seriously, read that, whatever you're being told in Germany, you're being lied to.

Update your figures. There are no less than 3 companies manufacturing panels above 20% efficiency, two of which are shipping in volume:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/...

Panasonic and SunPower are at 22.x% efficiency and shipping. SolarCity / Silevo have manufactured at small scale a 22% panel, and are building a HUGE factory in New York to mass produce.

Electric demand peaks from 3pm to 9pm.
Solar production peaks from 9am to 3pm.
Molten salt shifts the production to meet demand.
See the California Duck Curve for a good illustration.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/...