🤦🏼‍♀️🤣🤦🏼‍♀️🤣🤦🏼‍♀️🤣🤦🏼‍♀️🤣

…several years ago. You’d think that would have put an end to that particular narrative, but no…

Thank goodness for solar when there are no outside outlets.

and made the connection, pardon the pun.

Not sure what they have now, but we love them!

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

It's to reinforce the anti-wokeness of the MAGA. A general fueling of their bigoted grievancees.

Benefit for the greater good = socialism = white taxes for minorities and immigrants

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

Once again, performing for an audience of one.

and now must abase themselves regularly by reiterating the orange idiot's batshit beliefs.

Either he doesn't know his ass from his elbow about clean energy or he's playing dumb to justify polluting the entire globe to line the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

extraction industries monsters.

as it plows through.Earth’s resources creating massive wealth for the few while leaving destruction and suffering for the masses. The madness fostered by wealth hoarding and power wielding addiction, if left unchecked, will destroy our planet.

Every time I look at him, I think to myself,
“That boy ain’t right”

...something of a crime against humanity.

Literally. The conditions associated with cobalt slaves in the Katanga province in Congo admits no moral excuse.

There is an excellent book on this topic, recently published called "The Elements of Power."

I have long held the opinion that one should not be able to graduate from high school without being able to state the second law of thermodynamics in a simple form, which would be something on this order: "Storing energy wastes energy."

The material and land requirements of so called "renewable energy" makes it tragic enough. But the dependence on redundant systems, most often fossil fuels, makes it even worse.

Neither solar energy nor batteries are sustainable. The common belief to the contrary held on our side of is our answer to their creationism.

...one and only one, form of sustainable energy, nuclear energy.

However, what is your solution for the disposal and storage of the spent nuclear fuel.

I don't have time at this point to discuss it here, but I would note, that used nuclear fuel has remarkable record of storage without killing anyone.

I wish people were as concerned with fossil fuel waste, aka, "air pollution" which kills millions of people each year without a peep from people concerned with so called "nuclear waste."

Used nuclear fuel is a valuable resource for which I hope future generations will have the wisdom to use. That recognition is rising.

My journal on this website features discussions of many of the components of used nuclear fuels, most referenced to the primary scientific literature.

Without the recognition that nuclear energy, developed by some of the finest minds of the 20th century, and denigrated by some of the smallest minds, is the only form of sustainable energy, not merely one with a "role to play" there is, in my view, little hope for the future of our planet.

It certainly can help to add to the capacity of the grid. But what role will it play in transportation. I assume you're not suggestion nuclear powered automobiles.

In general it comes in threads where so called "renewable energy," which I reject on environmental grounds, as if there are wind powered cars and solar powered cars on any scale that matters. (I don't see cars on the freeways with sails.)

I do not, in general, support the car CULTure on a planet where more than 1 billion people lack access to improved sanitation.

That said, as I had to answer this question already once today, here's my most recent response:

The solution for self propelled vechicles...

From Google AI: Dimethyl ether (DME) is a clean-burning, non-toxic, synthetic alternative to diesel and LPG that can be produced from natural gas, biomass, or waste.

...these conditions.

As is the case with Olah, I support it as a way to close the industrial carbon cycle, at first using a technology developed by Heather Willauer at the US Naval Laboratory, to use ion selective electrodes to remove and collect carbon dioxide from seawater.

I can be and am supportive of SMR's not wasting the energy pumping it across the country on grid from a centralized power station being too big to safely decommission with too much energy loss due to resistance. I remember when they said it's too cheap to meter. But then I remember Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, I'm watching the supercritical flashes and Fukushima on video.

It established, for all time, the worst case for a failure of a nuclear power plant.

Everyday, about 19,000 people die from fossil fuel waste, aka air pollution, around the world according to a paper I frequently post here from one of the world's most prominent medical journals, Lancet. That works out 7 million per year

Chornobyl took place almost exactly 40 years ago. This means that around 280 million people died from air pollution since the reactor, with its poor design and positive void coefficient failed. The population of the United States is 340 million. That means if you're in a room of 10 people, it is the equivalent of having 7 of them so die. This ignores deaths from extreme weather driven by the continuing destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

The city of Kiev is less than 100 km from Chornobyl. During and after it's dangerous and deadly nuclear phase out, Germany purchased huge amounts of coal, oil and especially gas from Putin. The revenue from these sales went into building fossil fuel powered weapons of mass destruction now raining down on Kiev. Before Putin's attack Kiev remained a thriving city.

Which killed more people in Kiev, radiation from Chornobyl - the area now existing as something of a nature preserve, teeming with animals rare elsewhere in Europe - or German funded weapons of mass destruction launched by Putin, who by the way, has a former Chancellor Germany, Gerard Schroeder as a paid employee?

No one will ever again build a reactor with a design like the RBMK, one with a positive void coefficient, that failed at Chornobyl, but people do build coal plants that kill people whenever they operate normally.

Nuclear energy, the most reliable and cleanest form of energy on the planet, need not be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

Have a nice day.

...that was made in 1954 that nuclear energy would be "too cheap to meter" you are very old. You must be well into your 80's.

If so, your generation, and mine, left humanity with a burning planet, because we held nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy to a standard you hold for nothing else, based on a remark by an idiot in the 1950's.

What form of energy is "too cheap to meter?" Name one that you will not use because it's too cheap to meter.

The reason the planet is burning is that people hold nuclear energy to standards they hold for nothing else.

As it happens, my son is in his last year of graduate school for obtaining his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering with specific focus on reactor and fuel materials.

The amount of steel required for building a nuclear reactor - not steel per se but advanced alloys - is trivial, much less that the steel consumed to destroy wilderness to make industrial parks for wind turbines. In fact, nuclear energy is the most parsimonious user of metals there is.

I can't say that I believe you have even a passing familiarity with nuclear energy.

Solar and wind resources are continuously replenished and inexhaustible, unlike finite fossil fuels. They produce little to no greenhouse gases in operation, and they produce a durable energy supply. Every serious appraisal of solutions to reach climate goals includes a mix of energy sources, including solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. The renewable sources have a lower regulatory burden than nuclear energy because they are inherently safe, and this lowers the cost of installation and operation. Utility-scale Solar is now the cheapest energy source for new electricity generation in many regions. Renewables don't require fuel extraction or processing, and do not produce a fuel waste product.

The environmental impact of renewable energy on things like land use, wildlife, recycling requirements, etc. must be considered as with any other source of energy, including nuclear. The urgency of the climate crisis forces some trade-offs such as considering the direct impact of wind turbines on bird populations vs. the potentially much larger impact of climate change on those same populations. The relative simplicity of solar and wind systems lends itself to innovation to meet environmental challenges.

So those monstrosities are not "sustainable" either. That POS is entering the December of it's life in the next decade or so and rate payers with be BENT OVER paying to have it decommissioned.

Since 1985 about 280 million human lives have been lost to air pollution. These deaths were not instaneous either. It costs vast sums of money to meducally treat the terminally ill.

I'm sure the massive droughts arising from climate collapse are inexpensive, and now that Kansas has strip mined the Ogallala aquifer will be inexpensive too.

I'm willing to pay for clean energy of which there is one, and only one, form, nuclear energy. I consider this my responsibility to future generations.

I do understand that there are people who have no interest in the future of humanity or the planet, cheapskates in my view, not the kind of people I admire or like, but otherwise I'm quite happy.

The Wolf Creek nuclear generating station is licensed through 2045, and will be saving human lives from air pollution for another 19 years if not shut by appeals to fear and ignorance. It provides 20% of Kansas electricity without contributing to the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

If I lived in Kansas, I would regard the reactor as a valuable resource, a gift from an earlier generation to the current generation.

By the way, fossil fuel based electricity, besides killing people in normal operations is about to get very expensive internally as well as externally.

Have a nice day.

I'm pretty clueless about this myself.
Hydrogen?

To crack water to produce hydrogen. And then you need the extensive infrastructure to store, distribute, and dispense the hydrogen.

So what energy source is best then?

...consumer product.

It is an essential industrial intermediate on which the world food supply depends, but the hydrogen fantasy is a tool to greenwash fossil fuels.

I covered this point here:

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

As mentioned before, I know very little about this issue.

Congratulations on that.

What you're saying in true to a certain extent. But much of the environmental and human cost is due to the typical negligence of all extraction industries, much of which can be ameliorated with proper regulation. Of course that will increase cost, but the end result will likely be worth it. However, battery and solar technology are improving rapidly and the use of fewer rare earth minerals is also being reduced. Fe2+/Fe3+ batteries that are larger and heavier than lithium ion batteries and aren't suitable for transportation, but they can be used for large scale industrial level storage. Additionally, there are other ways of storing solar energy than just batteries. And the land use argument is a red herring. Rooftop solar doesn't take up any additional land and can be used in industrial settings as well as for residential applications. However, what is important is that progress continues to make more efficient and more environmentally and labor friendly processes.

We had a whole building full of these ginormous battery cells. You didn't want to go in there unless it was totally necessary because the smell of as much sulfuric acid as we had in that place will curl your nose hairs just before it causes them to fall out. But seriously, lead-acid batteries have the distinct advantage of not needing rare earths at all to work, just tons and tons of lead.

It's the casting part that's the problem. Proper process control will keep lead dust and lead fume at bay.

But...lead-acid batteries aren't "sexy" like lithium or other new-tech batteries are.

there are many others, many of the less expensive ones depend on gravity or doing some other form of work ( pressurizing a gas for example ) that stores potential energy that can be released later. Still others store energy as centrifugal force ( flywheels ), all of which can be made without the use of exotic materials. Of course there is loss involved with any stored energy solution, but then there is also a great deal of loss in the transmission of energy over long distances ( like from nuclear reactors ) to places where work is needed.

Storing energy has always "wasted" energy - not sure what the point is here.

Sodium ion batteries (which will soon likely be the battery of choice for stationary apps) don't even require lithium (and some variations don't even use nickel)- not sure why the blanket statement that neither solar or batteries are sustainable.

Fusion energy, magic batteries, the hydrogen economy...

So many of these ideas, which I first started exploring in the 'seventies, keep coming back like zombies only to disappoint again and again.

Meanwhile humanity's dependence on fossil fuels increases.

Unlike nuclear power, "renewable" energy is not an existential threat to the fossil fuel industry. I think that explains a lot.

LFP and sodium batteries aren't magic batteries. They are in production now, especially LFP.

Qualitatively the batteries you name are not any different than batteries we already have. This universe puts absolute limits on what batteries are capable of. Renewable energy utopia lies beyond that limit.

Even if these new batteries cost half as much as today's batteries and they are made entirely from materials that are abundant, they still won't get us through winters of little wind and sunlight.

We now have real world operating experience with gigawatt scale solar/wind/battery power generating systems. It's clear to me that this energy resource cannot support a human population of 8 billion people. Nor can it significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions -- significant in the sense of "saving the world."

Our current civilization is not sustainable and it will crash, but nuclear power could make that crash more survivable.

Something I think many solar enthusiasts are aware of, either consciously or not, is that nuclear power makes all these solar, wind, and battery systems redundant. This makes nuclear power an existential threat to both the fossil fuel industry and the "renewable energy" industry.

rather than they can replace a substantial portion of energy now generated by fossil fuels. It doesn't have to replace all fossil fuel consumption, just enough to result in a significant reduction i.e. fossil fuel powered and nuke generators can still be utilized as backup as required.

Sure, nuclear power has potential to generate all required power but at what cost (SMRs for example although having some intrinsic safety features ain't going to be cheap so it seems and we are still left with what to do with the nuclear waste).

I would again refer to the China and Australia results:

...................

As of 2025, both China and Australia have reached record-high levels of wind and solar penetration, significantly outpacing the global average of 17%.

China

China is currently the world leader in sheer volume of renewable energy deployment. In 2025, for the first time in modern history, China saw an absolute decline in coal-fired generation.

Wind & Solar Combined: 22% of total electricity generation.

Total Clean Energy: 42% (This includes wind, solar, hydropower, and nuclear).

Milestone: In early 2026, China's cumulative wind and solar capacity reached 1.84 billion kilowatts, accounting for 47.3% of its total installed capacity—surpassing coal/thermal capacity for the first time.

Trend: Solar alone grew by 40% in 2025 compared to the previous year.

Australia

Australia has one of the highest penetrations of solar energy in the world, largely driven by "rooftop" solar on residential homes.

Wind & Solar Combined: 33% of total electricity generation.

Total Clean Energy: 39% (Includes wind, solar, and hydro).

Milestone: In the first quarter of 2025, renewables briefly powered 43% of the National Energy Market (NEM) grid.

Solar Specifics: Australia has the world's highest solar generation per capita. About 43% of Australian households now have solar panels installed.

Trend: Fossil fuel generation in Australia fell by roughly 4% in 2025 as large-scale wind and household solar continued to push coal out of the mix.

.....................

And, all this is now accelerating due to the v high price of crude oil (China is selling solar cells at a record pace).

The foremost defender of fossil fuels on the planet seems to feel no threat from nuclear power. Make no mistake, Trump and his beloved fossil fuel industry are scared shitless of renewable energy.

First of all, wind and solar are trivial, essentially useless, forms of energy. On a planet with a rising energy demand of over 650 Exajoules of energy eac year, solar and wind garbage produces, combined, 18 of them. This has taken place with the expenditure, in the last 10 years alone of well over 5 trillion dollars, for no result other than the acceleration of the destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

The land and material intensity is atrocious and unsustainable already.

There is always some grand "fix" proposed in public handwaving; sodium batteries, being just one. Whence the copper to connect all these batteries, which would only be accessible a short period of time? If the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine for months at a time, a condition for which a German word has been coined, Dunkelflaute, how big must a mountain of sodium batteries must be?

Decades into this wishful thinking exercise, the conditions are growing more and more dire.

Reliance on the weather for energy was abandoned in the 19th century for a reason, that being most human beings, even more so than today, lived short miserable lives of dire poverty. The effort to return to these conditions is reactionary, not at all "progressive," whatever "progressive" might mean.

Playing "whack a mole" with the periodic table is neither wise nor viable. Solar and wind are already mass and land intensive; the destruction of virgin wilderness to make industrial parks for this crap is a crime against the future.

There are a whole lot of issues that handwaving doesn't cover for any battery, the chemistry of electrolytes, the transport of materials to make them, the temperatures required, etc.

It's not solely about cobalt or nickel, although I think the handwaving that they're unnecessary is bullshit. I note that the automobile, one of the greatest environmental disasters of all time, was invented and promoted to solve the problem of horse manure in city streets. It's true that horse manure is now rare in major city streets, but I'm not sure that the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is an easier problem to solve. The automobile, much as tearing the shit out of virgin wilderness for solar and wind garbage that will be landfill before todays toddlers can finish college, only made things worse, not better.

The planet is burning. If we don't face reality, the size and scale of the fires will be worse.

Maybe you should especially go preach your Luddite gospel in China and Australia. I'm sure you would get a fine reception.

anticipate having small 'pocket' fusion nuclear reactors power-grid-ready by 2030. Is that what you are referring to?

Otherwise, particularly in areas in drought, hydroelectric power may not be an option. And coal isn't 'clean' by any means.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this because big oil has so polluted the dialog here with pseudo-scientific 'studies' and big-dollar lobying that it is difficult to get to the bottom of much of anything concerning energy.

cobalt is rapidly being phased out. Stationary energy storage systems, which have lower requirements for volume and weight, have largely shifted to lower-cost and safer LFP chemistries. Feb 11, 2026 https://www.tycorun.com/blogs/news/cobalt-in-batteries#:~:text=In%20applications%20that%20are%20not,cost%20and%20safer%20LFP%20chemistries.

Smaller amounts of cobalt will still be in the lithium-ion batteries in portable devices and EVs for the foreseeable future. What we are likely to see is more recycled cobalt coming into the mix, as governments accelerate recycling of lithium-ion batteries and promote recycled minerals to be used in new batteries.Feb 18, 2026 ]https://theconversation.com/blood-cobalt-is-disappearing-from-batteries-and-cheaper-cleaner-batteries-are-arriving-263808#:~:text=Smaller%20amounts%20of%20cobalt%20will,be%20used%20in%20new%20batteries.

the wind generators will let their homes go dark. So we educate them about batteries and challenge
them to use their smart phone to look it up.

TIA

We were on a bus and she showed me a photo of the wind turbines on the Lake Erie shore at Buffalo. It was a winter scene, with ice and snow. The "windmills" were totally still. She laughed. I said did not get the joke. She said that wind energy is useless when everything freezes.

I said that rhe energy gets stored when the turbines are active and winds off the lake at Buffalo are known to be strong and usually continuous, especially in winter. Plenty of stored energy for windless days. She looked puzzled and hurt that I mentioned storage. Did not say anything more about it.

The driver overheard us and winked at me.

He knows that…he’s Trumps fool is all.
They all want to either push their racist agenda or keep the grift going or both.
They have no personal integrity.

Back to the Dark ages.
That may be the way out.
Go Dark for some generations and start again.
Before we kill ourselves and most of the life on our Little Rock.
The Planet will go on until the Sun eats the Earth.
Nya nya nya nya nya nya.

... the sole purpose of which is to assuage the guilt that affluent people feel for their environmentally destructive lifestyles.

Seriously, sometimes fascist Republicans owned by the fossil fuel industry can be right about a single issue for entirely the wrong reasons.

Here in the solar utopia of California we have some of the most expensive electricity in the developed world. Outside the municipal power districts (which historically have first dibs on hydroelectric power and storage) electricity costs 40 to 45 cents a kilowatt hour.

Electricity is similarly expensive in "green" Germany and Denmark.

Adding more batteries to California's electric grid will only increases the cost of our electricity further. Solar and wind power are EXPENSIVE. It's not the cost of solar panels and wind turbines alone, it's the cost of integrating them into a reliable electric grid. And no economically feasible amount of battery storage will eliminate the need for fossil fuel backup power.

Like it or not, solar and wind power cannot displace fossil fuels entirely, which is something we need to do.

Believing that solar and wind power will magically eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels is just an alternative form of climate change denial.

You can watch the behavior of California's electric grid here:

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

As I write this only 4% of my electricity is being generated by natural gas. Batteries are being charged at a rate of around 9 gigawatts.

The twin nuclear reactors at Diablo Canyon are generating a little over 2 gigawatts and they are running 24 hours a day.

The energy mix will change a lot when the sun goes down. You can check it out yourself.

or when the rivers run dry.!!!!.......
Hoover Dam has just had to shut down their massive hydroelectric generators for the first time EVER.
They produced a Humongous amount of electricity for Vegas, Phoenix?, SoCal?
With the entire south west burning up in the heat, they are gonna need electricity from somewhere to power all the Air conditioners,, Data Centers, etc
By the end of summer, I predict that all these huge desert cities, supplied by the Colorado River are gonna be lucky to barely have water enough to drink and cook.....And all their fountains, backyard pools, lawns, gardens, data centers, and golf courses will be going Bye-Bye.
Due to the record high temperatures all winter in Colorado, and the drought producing precious little snow, and NO snow pack to slowly melt off all summer long.....we have ZERO melting snow to send downstream..........

... as the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. Recently it's not even close. It's not a "humongous" amount of power and it won't really be missed.

The same is true of Glen Canyon.

Water flows uphill to money, possibly to an elevation of 2,000 feet or so, which means Phoenix and Los Vegas are probably all right, even if they have to scrimp for a few years.

The people of the Upper Colorado River Basin may be in for some tough times.

Eventually Southern California cities are going to increase their use of desalinization. Arizona is going to pay for that in exchange for California's share of the Colorado River. The first of these exchanges are beginning to happen now.

Cities can afford expensive water -- recycled, transported long distances, desalinated, etc. Agriculture cannot. That'll be the first thing to go away. That too is already happening.

we will just have to wait 3-9 months to see how this plays out with Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, etc...........................

Believing that only nuclear will magically eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels is just an alternative form of climate change denial.

We should push for all forms of safe clean energy.

You mean batteries don't really store electricity?

store electricity. They do not produce it.

sycophantic oil guzzlers will go to prop up their defense of pollution over clean energy is predictable, but depressing nonetheless.

One wise President- JEC led the way with solar panels on the WH and we’re still fighting these Neanderthals.
Trump would burn every antique in the WH and cuddle up to it’s warmth just to spite every Democratic President from Kennedy on.

He needs to worry less about the sun going down and more about the sun going out permanently on him.

He is clearly having cognitive problems. That word salad he spews in the video makes me question his ability to form cogent thoughts and simple basic meaningful sentences at the very least.

Cognitive test time!!

He's been huffing too much natural gas.

The only true constant is wave power. 24 hours a day. 3 coast lines. The further out you go the more intense waves often are. We have oil rigs out in those areas because of the profit and need motive. At some point in time, we will not have the oil/gas capacity we have now. It's not an unlimited supply forever. Wars will be fought and lives and treasure lost over it. A certain segment of the population has done everything in their power to curtail the use of wind capture anywhere near the coastline. It just seems to me if all the incessant arguments and investments over oil, gas, solar, wind, hydrogen, batteries and nuclear were to keep going on as they have been why should we expect a solution anytime soon? They all have their faults. The fault of utilizing wave power is strictly a dollars and cents issue that can be solved via a concerted effort of scientists and engineers with a sprinkle of AI. Beyond that, it would cause the least harm to both the on land and underwater environments if done correctly.

Politicking comments. We need a politician who can just come out with, “Are you a fucking idiot? You’re a goddamned fucking idiot to not know that there are many storage options to capture the energy and discharge it at night. Why the fuck are you still fucking alive? I’m surprised you can use a fork to eat and not stab yourself in the fucking face. Gods, what a bunch of fucking idiots we have to deal with from this administration. And enter this into the goddamn records.”

I want that read into the Congressional record.
Our plan for 2027 is to install panels, batteries, charging station and then purchase an electric car.

At sundown, we'll light candles and aim flashlights to energize the panels.

"Wind turbines don't make electricity when the wind isn't blowing."

Besides that the wind turbines can be wired to batteries - which is actually beneficial even if there's wind because the batteries absorb transients from the turbines to smooth out the power delivery - they put the hub 300 feet in the air above the top of a mountain, where the wind is always blowing, and mount really long blades on them that catch even the smallest winds. Or they put them offshore where not only do they piss off Donald Trump, which is a perpetual joy, they are in an environment of constant wind.

...dunkelfluate in that coal dependent hellhole Germany.

The Number of Tesla Powerwalls Required That Would Address the Current German Dunkleflaute Event.

has no cobalt (it is LFP) so the argument is moot. And its continuous power output BTW is 11.5 KW

...on their external costs and sustainability would require a full post, which I cannot produce quickly, as I'm at a scientific meeting in an unrelated field.

Now that electricity from wind, solar, coal, gas, and petroleum, is "too cheap to meter" this represents an interesting case.

Remind me to get back to you. This should be fun.

(I still do not know how to make the sarcasm thingy work.)

That sounds like the nonsensical rumblings of Trump himself. Surprised he didn’t break out a “on a cloudy day they don’t produce electricity either”.

I still think he's clueless.

If you're watching TV at midnight, it's not the midnight moon producing power... it's your batteries delivering power produced during daytime hours.

Financially one must analyze the cost of production, storage and delivery and calculate how long, if ever... the cost will outweigh traditional power delivery.

Full of Shit.

Glad someone brought up batteries. If he has a problem with the technology, fund US manufacturing

a fossil fuel shortage caused by a war of the Dotard's choosing?

I wish I could call that bold and audacious, but it is absolutely on par for their usual purposeful obliviousness.

Whadda Genuis

I got the solution!
Lunar Cells
1: work at night
2: never get hot
3: don’t sap the sun’s energy

— Fortunate Son (@mossadwarrior.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T18:18:07.551Z

Damn inconvenient!

Get rid of them!

Oh yeah, batteries!
Highly technical, so Burgum wouldn't understand.

Got a shiny new battery farm here in South Australia.
Currently soaking up grid power, for blackout protection and demand smoothing, but wind farms and solar farms are coming online to feed the batteries via the grid.

Wonder if Burgum has heard of home solar panels and battery type setups?

"Secretary Doug Burgum:
Doug Burgum is the 55th Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. "

Seriously?

In the not-to-distant future the vast Solar and Wind Energy "reserves" of Australia could not only provide enough energy for Australia itself but could also be used to produce hydrogen for markets in Japan, Korea, China and even Europe. Ironically and hopefully, Australia's biggest competitor will be Solar in Africa. I believe there is already a project to export hydrogen produced by a coal plant in Australia to Japan. A ship has been built in Japan to transport the hydrogen. Eventually the coal plant can be replaced by Offshore Wind or Solar. The transition is like a giant puzzle-board with pieces slowly being filled in.

use excess electricity to pump water up behind the dam from below - in other words make the dam a battery of stored energy.