It clearly is a bubble. But that doesn’t automatically mean AI is useless. The .com bubble was the biggest of them all, but lots of companies survived and business largely moved online. The data centres (which nobody likes but which is clearly providing some value to somebody, whether we like it or not) don’t disappear overnight if the bubble bursts.

Behave

Storage isn’t a technological problem anymore?!

Let’s take a country like the UK, which is well ahead in the renewable transition compared to most other countries. In the last 3 years we’ve had 619 periods where renewables covered less than than 50% of our mix, the longest lasting 19 days (October-November 2024), where the average cover was 16%. Let’s work out on the basis of just that single dunkelflaute as an instructive example.

To see us through that period Britain would have needed 12 TWh of storage. How much is that? Well, we have 0.04 TWh of total storage, across pumped storage and batteries (pumped storage almost double our grid batteries - and when I say grid batteries that counts for every single battery installation at home too, because they are tracked when they are installed in the G98/G99 application).

So you need to make our storage 300x larger just in Britain. And don’t say “we will just import electricity from other countries”, the dunkelflaute covered almost all of Europe.

How did we get through that one? Gas, gas, gas, burning all across Europe, plus a lot of coal in Eastern Europe.

Could we conceivably install 300x more storage in every country (bear in mind the situation is worse in most other countries, so adopting 300x across Europe is optimistic)?

Yes sure, everything is conceivable. You could dig out every mountain for water storage and strip mine the whole planet for the metals you need for batteries.

But if you add nuclear to the mix, prices fall dramatically, since nuclear adds baseload, meaning your dunkelflautes get much smaller and fewer. It’s a lot more conceivable with nuclear in the mix.

Look, I’m not one of those “nuclear will fix everything” people. Nuclear has downsides, but so does everything else. The key is to mix upside and downsides, not rely on one single thing out of philosophy (whether renewable or nuclear).

If you think “storage is solved” I urge you to speak to someone who works in grid management.

New nuclear power plants and current reprocessing can absolutely make this a non-problem. There’s plenty of radioactive material.

Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.

My point is globally. Globally we need nuclear.

You’ve got some valid points in your criticism of nuclear. They are also points that could be addressed - we built lots of nuclear power plants within budget and timelines, once. Like solar, and like everything, nuclear benefits from scale.

Similarly, there are valid points of criticism that solar gushing ignores: Power is needed 24/7, solar doesn’t deliver power 24/7 and batteries (pumped hydro, chemical, heat etc) are nowhere near large enough to see the whole of society powered through the winter. If we built renewables like we built traditional power plants we would say “I’d like 1 GW, 95% availability, steerable down to 0.6 GW”. Solar right now goes “weeell, not really my problem what you want - I can give you power sometimes and sometimes not”.

So like coal power socialises the cost of pollution, renewables socialises the cost of consistency.

We could instead say “storage is the solar field operators’ concern” and then you’d be able to see what solar really costs”.

And hear me right; I’m ALL in on renewables. I’m also ALL in on nuclear. We need everything that can deliver power with low carbon output. If nuclear goes away, you’ll have to start a tonne of gas peaker plants when there’s not enough wind and not enough sun to power everything.

It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.

This is borderline fake news. This pilot project was launched poorly by the ministry responsible for digitisation because the minister wanted his own project running so he could bash other ministries for not doing anything. It’s ironic, like rain on your wedding day.

There are multiple pilot projects across the Danish range of ministries. Many are in much better shape because they’ve actually been thought through: example

You know what, I’ve been a Firefox user since the days of beta Phoenix. I’ve expressed your view for years now - Firefox was great, but held back by a commercial org that wanted fancy SF offices, fancy SF compensation etc.

But I tried out Helium a little while ago and in truth, I’m not sure Firefox is all that good these days. Helium is basically ungoogled-chromium + extension support + super lean UI.

The upside is that you no longer have to contend with sites that have given up on Firefox testing. The downside is manifest v3. But all in all, I find it a better browser. Firefox is so busy telling its story, and finding revenue, that it just seems to have left behind product market fit.

I know. AI text and AI website just reeeeeks of slop.

And the site is vibe coded. You couldn’t write it…

Which is unenforceable in most countries.