US Dept of Interior denies canceling largest solar project after axing review

He literally didn't

Oh wait, I can rewrite this for you. Here you go:

Yeah, ultimately they denied that you could group together all these projects under one environmental review as an exception to normal rules. But many of the most influential environmental organizations, and a majority of those shaping modern permitting policy, have supported or defended regulatory structures that make large-scale energy projects extremely difficult to approve while also actively using those regulatory structures to kill major projects. Many prominent environmental groups have, at various times, opposed nuclear, solar, wind, or geothermal projects in the US: sometimes over local impacts, sometimes procedural grounds, and sometimes due to broader philosophical objections. Taken together, the net effect of those positions may have been to slow or block clean energy deployment more than almost any other political force, and therefore they may have been the largest policy contributors to climate change in much of the United States.

There we go. I think you can probably retune every comment you read with an LLM so that there's lots of hedging in it like this and then you can satisfy your own need for sufficient phatic phrases. But this one is from a human, given to you for free. If you don't like my comments, ask dang to ban me.

I don't see why its so ironic. The environment isn't a binary. Its a complex system where the same thing can have both good and bad effects on different parts. Conservationists aren't climate change scientists. They are both going to be focused on the separate parts of the environment they specialize in.

Green account myself, it's an older code, sir, but it checks out.

Is it a conspiracy if companies are paying it?

I really cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience. I guess because it has something for someone of any political stripe to dislike (fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables and storage - take your pick!) but in a few years when we’re all paying twice the electrical rates we’re paying today, we will probably wish we hadn’t been so doctrinaire.

Yeah, it is dumb to require battery storage for new solar. We can use gas peaker plants like we always have. China is using coal peaker plants.

We will need to retire them in future where renewables are everywhere. Maybe wind is good enough to fill the hole at night. Maybe new battery chemistry is cheap. Maybe some other storage tech works out. Maybe they can be converted to hydrogen for long term storage.

It's tough to turn that into a scalable, sustainable business. There are so many different types of EV battery packs and you can't just pull one out of an old car and hang it on someone's garage wall. You would typically have to break the old pack down, test the individual cells, and use them to construct a new pack. This is such a labor intensive process that it might not really be cost effective.

I hope we see this more at the municipal level. Just thinking about dense neighborhoods with sizable lithium storage solutions raises eyebrows. One house fire could spread so quickly.

"Compared to lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries have somewhat lower cost, better safety characteristics (for the aqueous versions), and similar power delivery characteristics, but also a lower energy density (especially the aqueous versions)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#cite_note-:...

Also, recent CATL PR releases about sodium ion only mention 'future cost savings' rather than anything about a 90% reduction in prices.

Battery tech research claims are always outlandish. As usual, the proof is what can be brought to market.

Yeah, let’s wait for that tech to mature just like we waited on building high speed rail because hyperloop was around the corner… \s