Yeah, Ethereum kind of tied the two together in my mind.

IMHO smart contracts are generally high-risk due to their adjudication system being code rather than people

I’m at friend of friend of friend level with one of the organizers.

Pretty much anything in the SF area has an effort to shunt cryptocurrencies into it whether or not it makes any sense. This feels like one of those things

It struck me as a bio-oriented rather than the electronics-oriented solarpunk, but whatever makes you happy

Even a dry trail is pretty efficient on a bike

There’s a deep human need to engage in death-related rituals, and burial is one that’s been around for a very very long time. I do not expect to end the use of burial.

The problem is that idle time is something the rich have aplenty, but the poor don’t.

I’ll take electrical power from the heavens any day.

That funny dot was deliberate; on most browsers, it bypasses the paywall.

I’ve changed it out for a gift link now that one is available, since that seems to cause fewer problems for people.

They’re fracking, but in granite, rather than in an oil and gas deposit. So you shouldn’t see the same kinds of hydrocarbon releases and contamination that go with fracking for oil and gas, or the same huge production of contaminated wastewater that needs to be disposed of.

That’s an inherent problem in any capitalist economy; competitive pressures mean that the owners are always trying to push down wages as much as possible. Without unionization (and few of the clean energy companies are unionized) there’s very little to resist it.

Utility-scale lithium batteries currently deployed have almost all been designed so that they kick out some number of watts for four hours. (How many depends on the facility)

It means that the economic benefits of being the world’s low-cost producer go to people in China instead of the US.

No; it’s a fairly distant thing with there being some aircraft design happening.

It’s not a “next tuesday thing”

Ammonia, steel, and some petrochemicals could be moved much sooner.

Make the utility responsible for the bonds and have them go bankrupt.

The IRA is absolutely a bill which uses capitalist mechanisms to achieve some decarbonization.

The problem is that electricity will be free intermittently. This means it’s going to require finding ways to use it that are not capital-intensive.

For sure. The challenge is that there’s a cost of capital, and intermittently available excess power is difficult to use cost-effectively with anything like current technology.

The issue with biofuels is that we can’t actually produce enough of them to support anything like current levels of aviation, at least not without substantially displacing food production.

The issue with chemical synthesis is that it’s quite expensive.

So there’s a possibility that we’ll end up using hydrogen still.

Yes, there are times when there is excess, but big capital expenditures like an industrial-sized electrolyzer come with ongoing interest payments, so there’s a huge financial incentive to run them 24/7. Running it only sometimes means sharply higher capital costs for each mole of hydrogen produced. It’s a nasty balancing act.

They’re doing it in places with no oil to just get the heat.

There may be issues with what’s used for fracking granite, bit probably won’t be the issues with hydrocarbon leakage or waste injection