fullsquare

it's like the time when some crypto exchange bought ads on one stadium for years in advance and then went under

from bsky photos looks like entire gathering was 30 people. t h i r t y p e o p l e i might have counted some reporter or someone passing by randomly by accident

30 rationalists gathered outside and nobody told them to touch grass

i think that business logic goes against your first point. spatially: if you have source of cheap energy and want to make money out of it, instead of making little money (by making fuel) why not make more money? (by setting there energy intensive manufacture) this seems to be current meta, with places like iceland and norway making aluminum and nitrogen fertilizers respectively. this can continue in other places and maybe extended to some other industries.

temporally (because there are also sunny and windy days when regular people won't consume all energy): this scheme requires cheap electricity, which is needed for cheap hydrogen. this requires massive renewables buildout, which means electricity is cheap for regular people, which means that every gas stove/heater and car will get replaced with electric ones, both residential and maybe perhaps faster for industrial users (more available loans). this means you have to reinforce transmission grid anyway. this also means cheap hydrogen, and because main input to its production is electricity, it makes more sense to use electricity when it's cheap. this means it's naturally suited to suck up all excess generation (both daily and seasonal), and also if electricity production is seasonal then so should be price of hydrogen. if price of electricity or hydrogen varies, then some industries can suck it up at greater rates when it's cheap. i'm thinking here of aluminum smelting (electricity input, daily variation, already done), or ammonia synthesis, or direct reduced iron smelting. i bet there's more. the point is, maybe you get to avoid storing hydrogen to some degree, because you can effectively store energy in finished or semi-finished goods. you can, for example, make some direct reduced iron and just store it when hydrogen is available, and then smelt it into steel in arc furnace when it's not. fertilizers are already sold in annual cycle and stored long term, and anyway ammonia is much easier to store than hydrogen. how it plays out will depend on energy/hydrogen costs vs storage costs vs capex for overcapacity costs. all together, i think this means that because of large amount of generation needed, you don't actually need to store energy this way at all, because when generation is low then electrolyzers turn off, and something will work at all times, probably. when you're able to do that, you won't need to

in terms of scale, first your lunch is eaten by EVs of various shapes, then by use of hydrogen for transportation (rocketry fits there), then you have to compete with biofuels (jet engine will take anything that burns without ash and can be pumped). then some of methanol will be used for fuel first, because it just works in engines and fuel cells, and it's a step before hydrocarbon synthesis. only then synthetic petroleum makes sense, this basically leaves some aviation (that won't use methanol) and military uses

drones can be also shot down and operators radiolocated very quickly

no, because they have separate comms using completely different bands. esp when you're talking about military

if you switch to different band, probably nonstandard and unlicensed, then there must be someone else to listen

not everybody heard of gas town within first two weeks

i don't know if they started it. what i suspect as their contribution is bold claim that electrofuels might be cheaper than regular petrol in the glorious future, while currently they're much more expensive. (30x?) strict prerequisite for their competitiveness is cheap electricity, but at this point they're not needed. there was also Porsche owned wind power to methanol plant, and while methanol works as petrol replacement, all the plastics in contact with it must be resistant which is not a given. i guess the main value of it for them is propaganda, they're not ready for EV manufacture

the point is, as always, to continue doing business as usual (in this case, by inhibiting BEV adoption). that fuel is carbon-neutral but also extraordinarily wasteful. trump's deal is something called "clean coal", which isn't (it suggests carbon capture, but it's not a thing, they marketed normal emissions control like we have in europe as some unusually green innovation). i think he was also captured by gulf monarchies for the one hour when their representative talked to him

e: wait it still makes smog so checks out

recently learned about electrofuels. it's a hypothetical rube goldberg scheme where you put enough energy to propel 5-7 EVs in, and pull out enough gasoline to fuel one car. it's sold as a green technology, because now gasoline is green somehow. this spin ignores that it would require massive buildout of renewables + nuclear, and just by doing this electrification of many energy end uses just makes sense, including transportation. (what the fuck is train??) it's also sold as a long term storage for renewables, but i struggle to see how scheme that has less than 30% roundtrip efficiency can be considered "storage". just build more renewables and don't use them all if needed

i thought they were yet another rationalist offshoot

real. every prediction i got from computational chemists was wrong