Wind and solar complement each other. The sun often shines when the wind isn’t blowing. We have plenty of historical weather data on how long the lulls where neither would work for a given region. That tells you how much storage you need to fill the gap. Pad that out, and you’re good.
Nuclear does nothing to help this calculation. It’s just expensive.
Not only that, but we don’t have to do this all at once. The math often works out that getting to 95% renewable is far easier than shooting for 100%, with existing fossil fuel plants making up the remainder. This is fully achievable by 2030, by which point we want to drastically reduce emissions. Then we can worry about the last 5%.
There is no such plan for nuclear. If you had all the permits signed off and dirt being shoveled right now, then you would not have a single MW of new nuclear feeding the grid by 2030. They take too long to build. Budget and schedule overruns are the norm, and it’s a wonder that anyone is investing money into them at this point.
In fact, they aren’t. The US federal government has shown a willingness to sign permits for new nuclear plants. Nobody is buying, and there’s no mystery as to why.
Further lowering panel cost isn’t going to significantly cut that price. Cost of labor is the major part of that.
People always focus on rooftop solar, but it’s horribly expensive compared to a field of panels. The economics of scale will almost certainly keep it that way.
What we should be looking at is community solar, where neighborhoods invest in a solar field together.
Rooftop solar is the most expensive way to do it. The graph above is for utility scale systems. Roofs are always custom jobs and they’re priced accordingly. Utility scale uses racks that are all the same for an entire field.
If rooftop was priced alone on the chart in OP, it’s be around the price of nuclear.
Development paradigms spearheaded by MySQL and PHP, where it was discovered that you can be really fast if you don’t care about getting the right answer.
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There’s plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don’t think it’ll happen before then.
I once saw a little blurb at a sandwich shop stating that tomatoes are fruit, but if you pair them on a sandwich with jalapenos, you’re getting both fruits and vegetables. I demand better scientific accuracy in restaurant marketing signs.
I’ve had this theory running around in my head about followups to any series. Every person has a slightly different take on what their favorite part of the show is. For OG Star Trek, maybe you liked the banter between Spock and McCoy. Maybe you liked Kirk’s swagger. Maybe you thought Scotty was hot.
If a new production comes along years later and doesn’t reproduce the specific elements you like, then you will hate it. The producers might have been ultrafans of the original with good writing chops, a solid cast, and high production values, but if it doesn’t have those specific elements for you, then you’ll hate it.
Those elements are different for everyone, though. The list of possible elements can be very long, and no new production can possibly check off even a significant fraction of that list. Therefore, any new production is bound to have a long line of haters regardless of its quality on its own merits.
Was Star Trek supposed to be about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on a ship strutting around the galaxy? TNG changed that. Is it at least supposed to be about strutting around the galaxy? DS9 changed that. Should it at least be about interacting with the alien races we know? Voyager changed that. And so on.
JMS made a Star Trek pitch back in 2004. I like Babylon 5, but I don’t think I would have liked his version of Star Trek. The outline focused on elements I didn’t care about and just seemed meh to me in general.
This goes for any other long running series, of course.
SNW is probably what you want. There are some longer arcs, but for the most part, you can take things episode by episode.
The streaming era is favoring shows with long arcs, though. Just the opposite of where we were in the 90s, where missing one episode of Babylon 5 meant you might not understand what’s going on, and VCRs were clunky and hard to setup right.
Much of what people do on computers these days is through a web browser. An even bigger market is servers, which often run Linux and can port things into ARM with less hassle.
What I’m getting at is there are factors that affect the broader market. Having more people and companies able to work on processors means greater possibility of variation, and therefore has an evolutionary advantage.
There are three x86 companies, and there’s not likely to be any others. VIA is barely worth talking about. AMD is currently killing it, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade ago, a combination of bad decisions at AMD, good decisions at Intel, and underhanded tactics at Intel made AMD nearly collapse. Intel looked smug on its throne, and sat on the same fundamental architecture and manufacturing node for a long time.
This was a bad situation for the entire computer industry. We were very close to Intel being all that mattered, and that would have meant severe stagnation. ARM (and RISC-V) being more viable helps keep that from happening again.
If the Deck can gain critical mass, they’ll be able force the issue. They’re already doing it with targeting Linux. The Switch is ARM, and the Switch2 leaks suggest it’ll be a better ARM chip, so devs are already targeting it.
Unreal/Unity already go to ARM pretty easily, so it’s not a huge deal.