Oneser

Ew. Get your 6G macrowave transmitter needle away from me you pervert.

Global energy demand is not expected to fall, especially as more people gain access through economic development of traditionally poorer nations.

That is why increasing renewable generation capacity is so important now.

What?! Noooooooooo!

Ah wow, I had current lfp at around 220-250 but that looks like it's on the R&D lines and not in series production yet

I guess with the sheer amount of research being lumped into Lithium batteries at the moment, I would be surprised if it is overtaken by anything short term at least in the auto space. Let's see...

Just to clarify, the article states these are for low voltage systems inside cars, and not powering cars themselves.

Which makes more sense as the density of Na-ion is ~30% less that Li-ion.

Do the economics of nuclear make sense though? A quick search showed around $5k/kW capacity. That's $5 billion per GW. Then there's permit and build times on top of that.

Surely renewables + distributed storage is going to become key?

Is there already extensive precedence of undersea, long distance power distribution? I could imagine the losses would be outrageous at that distance.

Obviously, more plants are needed to combat the destructive USB industry.

True, but ensuring this is done on a shorter time scale (e.g. hourly) would take a lot of the green washing out of the certificate system IMO.

The headline makes no sense to me and the article crosses over 2 problems in the energy transition.

Microsoft is only involved in purchasing the power, not the facility itself. In my understanding, that means that Constellation is the only party here involved in the government backed loan. Noting also that the loan itself is not malicious, nor is its use to restart the facility - if nuclear facilities should not be funded or have any special tax status then that should have been considered in the government's legislation.

The 2nd part about the power from the plant going to grid, and not to Microsoft's data centres directly is a known issue which close to all companies exploit by buying green certificates which I understand are currently done monthly in some areas. That means we do not trace that each electron provided to a user was from renewables, instead we aggregate that a company (via purchasing "green" certificates) shows that enough "green" electricity, anywhere on a connection, was produced to cover their usage for that month. This has nothing to do with Microsoft, their data centres, or this facility in general but is currently being dealt with. It will be clear in the power purchasing agreement how much power Microsoft will purchase from the facility directly and how it is delivered.

Am I missing something?

And no, I don't think nuclear power is overly helpful given the exorbitant cost, time and waste aspects

I'm sorry, are we really going to pretend long haul flights will become hydrogen in the near future? Has any airport begun building, or even thinking of, refueling infrastructure?

4D chess?