• hissing meerkat@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    No. This is the alternate history of energy. We could have been building primarily molten salt solar plants for the last 40 years. They had similar costs to coal, fuel plants, could be built with no semiconductor manufacturing bottlenecks, provided more consistent base generation than wind, had no fuel dependencies, combustion emissions. Now photovoltaics and battery storage are cheaper, more efficient, don’t require water and cooling, and work with wind as well as solar, and aren’t really bottlenecked by manufacturing.