It seems increasingly likely that nuclear (fission and fusion) is going to lose hard to geothermal. Three reasons: speed and cost, which together determine capital efficiency. Even if geothermal does not hit expected cost metrics, you can still deliver electrons a lot sooner than with nuclear. 🔌💡

CAISO planning calls for 30GW in the Central Valley. This 21GW is just Fresno County and doesn’t include the Darden project that was approved this summer and will be the largest solar + storage project in United States, and biggest battery. bsky.app/profile/dust...

This development could by itself take out most of the remaining gas generation in California, and on sunny days a good chunk of electricity imports as well. 🔌💡 bsky.app/profile/dust...

'Moon at Musashino' - Tonouchi Misho, ca. 1937. From the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art collection. #FullMoon #JapaneseArt

The financial superiority of renewables over fossil fuels, and in particular their superior capital efficiency, was a major theme of the first installment of The Sun Has Won (2022). www.planetarytech.earth/the-sun-has-... 🔌💡

To be sure. But there is a cost of capital for both, and The Sun Has Won also identifies that the cost of capital for renewables is lower than it is for fossil projects. Presumably this is a major reason why fossil companies are returning cash to investors rather than investing more into capex.

Perhaps worth noting that oil majors rely less on banks/loans than renewables because of operating revenues -- but direction of travel clear.

During the startup periods of various energy sources in the USA, researchers have found that fossils have gotten 15X what renewables have received from the feds, and 10X what nuclear has gotten.

It isn't just that renewables are growing, they are growing because they are more capital efficient, they carry less risk, their cost of capital is lower than fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are a boom and (often) bust investment. TL;DR Bankers don't like to lose money. bsky.app/profile/robc...

Thread: Each week I run a simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid using rescaled generation data to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with 24GW/120GWh of storage (5 hrs at av demand) Results: Last week: 100% RE Last 227 weeks: 98.6% RE (1/5)

Rock and dust samples brought back from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu contain organic matter, including amino acids and all five DNA and RNA nucleobases, according to two papers published in Nature Astronomy and Nature in January. go.nature.com/40SlwfF go.nature.com/3CC6ZLO 🔭 🧪

For more details, see:

Humans have emitted 2750 gigatons of CO2 since the industrial revolution from burning fossil fuels and land use change. To put this in perspective, this is more than the (dry) mass of all living things on earth and everything humans have ever built combined:

The financial superiority of renewables over fossil fuels, and in particular their superior capital efficiency, was a major theme of the first installment of The Sun Has Won (2022). www.planetarytech.earth/the-sun-has-... 🔌💡

The financial superiority of renewables over fossil fuels, and in particular their superior capital efficiency, was a major theme of the first installment of The Sun Has Won (2022). www.planetarytech.earth/the-sun-has-... 🔌💡

A piece on the research trying to fill the very, very large gap between life-support systems and terraforming www.economist.com/science-and-...

Happy New Year's Eve 🎆🎇🎆🎇 This woodblock print showing fireworks at Ryōgoku bridge was created by Utagawa Hiroshige I in 1858. It features as part of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series. We'll be closing our doors tomorrow, 1 January 2026, and will be reopening on 2 January. 🎆 EAX.4365

"The US power sector is poised for a landmark transition in 2026, with all net new generating capacity expected to come exclusively from renewable energy and battery storage, according to forecasts from the US Energy Information Administration"

Sunset, #Seattle 30.12.25

Sunset in #Seattle.

"The offensive and defensive power of low-cost commercial drones was known by the US military as early as 2017." Hmmm. Yes. I wrote this four part series back in 2012: Are These The #Drones We're Looking For? (Parts I-IV) www.synthesis.cc/synthesis/20...

The US Must Stop Underestimating Drone Warfare www.wired.com/story/the-us...

DUNE (dir. David Lynch, 1984)

🏳️‍⚧️

Does AI Really Make Coders Faster? TL;DR "a growing body of research suggests that the claimed productivity gains may be illusory" AI coding is "increasing the number of harder-to-pinpoint flaws that lead to maintenance problems and technical debt." www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1...

Lots of good stuff here. "the AI narrative is ‘Uber for X’ on hallucinogenic steroids. …appeals to investors and partners of every stripe...uniquely powerful in its bubble-inflating capacities. And so dangerous to the economy." AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All www.wired.com/story/ai-bub...

"AI tools into the workplace [have] not resulted in some magic productivity boom and instead [have] increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.”" AI #Workslop Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable www.404media.co/ai-workslop-...

"OpenAI has admitted [hallucinations] may result from fundamental mistakes it makes when training its models." And this isn't even facing to the information theoretic limits on ML yet. OpenAI Says Models Programmed To Make Stuff Up Instead of Admitting Ignorance slashdot.org/story/25/09/...

Sure, chatbots can help you write code faster, and it "works" and looks good. But it is full of security holes. "Out of 80 carefully designed coding tasks completed by over 100 large language models, nearly 45 percent of the AI-generated code contained security flaws." nerds.xyz/2025/07/ai-s...

Ahem. “AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster Predicted a 24% boost, but clocked a 19% drag” www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/a...

I think will see, over the next 12-24 months, “executives” who did not understand what LLMs are, or can do, backtracking on crucial business decisions due to rising costs. “We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately bsky.app/profile/hamm...

This is a metaphor for the tech industry overall circa 2025

We are now advertising for the position of Assistant Professor of Marine Invertebrate Organismal Biology @uwsafs.bsky.social The position will be based out at Friday Harbor Labs in the San Juan Islands. See the ad below for details. @csucoast.bsky.social apply.interfolio.com/178804

“fossil fuel cosplay” aka energy security theater.

We will see what 2026 will bring, but in 2025, renewables and storage continued to grown both in the U.S. and globally. 🧪🔌💡☀️💨💧🔋 www.canarymedia.com/articles/cle...

Merry Christmas! Global green debt sales hit record www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

A rhododendron in #Seattle blooming on Christmas Eve, confused by abnormally warm weather.

Georgia O’Keefe early morning clouds in Leipzig a few weeks back.

Thread: Each week I run a simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid using rescaled generation data to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with 24GW/120GWh of storage (5 hrs at av demand) Results: Last week: 100.0% RE Last 226 weeks: 98.6% RE (1/5)

This week the Westlands Water District board approved the Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan to develop 21 GW of solar + 21 GW of batteries on 136,000 acres of the west Central Valley into solar farms, with over 400 miles of new transmission lines and substations. ☀️🔌💡 ceqanet.lci.ca.gov/2024020124/3

I couldn't resist sharing this beautiful snowy print of Mount Fuji in winter for #LegendaryWednesday. 🎨'Mount Fuji After Snow from Tagonoura Bay' - Kawase Hasui, 1932. #JapaneseArt #shinhanga

The fucking kitchen roll, man.... 😂😂

@greatdismal.bsky.social talks about "the jackpot" in some of his novels not a single breakdown, but a mess of small things adding up, of unintended consequences. Reading this made me shiver, and feel that this is a harbinger of exactly that pattern.

Paraplegic engineer becomes the first wheelchair user to blast off for space

This is great! And It would be fantastic if some resources could go towards planting native wildflower seed mixes beneath the panels, to provide some space for the plants & pollinators that have been smote by agriculture!

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Important analysis here from Ember. Compare dispatchable solar at $76/MWh (given these assumptions) to the most recent LCOE numbers from Lazard. At these price points, it's game over for thermal generation. (NB: combined cycle gas isn't particularly dispatchable)

If the gas networks still can't contain methane after more than a century of practice, why should we trust them with hydrogen?

😳