You can’t have distributed low power density intermittent solar and wind electricity generation at scales that matter without stupendous amounts of steel and concrete transmission infrastructure having to be built where no one lives or works, nor wants to, to connect them to places people do want to live and work.

There’s no way that can be separated from grid-scale wind and solar.

The level of self deception renewables advocates subject themselves to would be funny if I wasn’t forced to pay for it.

You also can’t have it without peaking capability. Which means being able to cover possibly all demand instantaneously, and that was always going to mean expensive gas / battery projects that sit idle a lot of the time. We tried it I warn you.

That wildly profitable Neoen battery? Where do you think the profits come from? Thin air? The end user. That’s you and me mate, we’re paying for it. Low income earners disproportionately so. Renters who can’t have solar or batteries. They can just freeze in the dark.

I’m all for profits when they’re mine. I can’t understand why anyone would worship someone else’s profits. Your profits are my costs.

I just drove half way across the country, from the south east to the middle of South Australia.

Broken wind turbines 300k, from the nearest industrial centre. Probably 600+k from the nearest capable industrial centre.

They’ll never get fixed. No one is driving a $1200 an hour crane five hours each way to spend six days set up waiting for a technician and parts from Europe who was supposed to be here two weeks ago to fix one or two turbines / broken blades. Those handful of broken turbines probably don’t even have spare parts available, every wind farm is a new model of turbine, locked in to one manufacturer indefinitely for after sales parts and service, and if they do have spare parts and service available the payback period on the repairs would be astronomical.

It’s cheaper to let them rot in place and build new ones elsewhere. You don’t get greenfields grid-scale rebates for performing maintenance on ten+ year old equipment.

I dare you to run the numbers on the quantity of steel and concrete needed globally to transition to wind and solar.

Or don’t, cos it will put you off renewables. And there’s nothing worse than having your preconceived notions of what’s right and wrong jump out of the math and throttle your brain. The concrete related CO2 emissions alone will choke the planet way beyond what we’ve merely dabbled with getting to this stage.

I used to do paid and volunteer work for The Wilderness Society and donate to Greenpeace. Then I learned applied mathematics.

> stupendous amounts of steel and concrete transmission infrastructure

Rooftop solar and home batteries keeps power where it's used for domestic use. Large scale solar is also deployed near to mining and refining sites, and not by mandate, but because it's the most economic option. If you have batteries you don't need to build out transmission.

> You also can’t have it without peaking capability.

Once again, enough batteries and gas peakers are out of business.

> That wildly profitable Neoen battery? Where do you think the profits come from? Thin air? The end user. That’s you and me mate, we’re paying for it.

They come from arbitrage. Buy low, sell high. They same thing that anyone with a home battery or EV can do. Neoen actively reduced the market prices for electricity by increasing supply at the right time. That means the people of South Australia profited mate ;)

> Renters who can’t have solar or batteries.

The OP article is about distributing free power to everyone to take advantage of. Assuming that plays out, I can only see this as Good News™ for renters.

> They can just freeze in the dark.

Lighting isn't really what's chewing up the power. But certainly people going cold because of high energy prices sucks. Again, the prices have increased due to gas export prices increasing the wake of the Ukraine conflict. This isn't "self deception" it's just economics.

I could list ways that free energy in the middle of day could be used by renters and for low income earners to stay warn, but I get the vibe that you've got an axe to grind and I'd be wasting my time. So, as promised, I'm moving on.