Yes to this thread, but specifically also this comment. And not just in Australia. “If only climate people were *for* stuff not just *against* stuff” is not my experience at all.

@jorkussmellington.bsky.social On coffee (and really, I would say most other food-related questions OTHER than unchecked consumption of red meat, which the biggest single food-related source of emissions and unsustainable use of land/water resources), this post makes an excellent point!

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

Have you and @cstross.bsky.social read each other's work?

oncoming lights have started producing a lot more strain on my eyes as I age, but the difference between being up in a pickup or down in a low sports car is night and day this is an underrated aspect of the vehicle size arms war dynamic

If we reduce global CO2 emissions over the next ten years at the rate at which we increased them from 2000 to 2010, we will be pretty close to aligning with the 2C budget robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/

One thing I learnt from this episode is that sodium-ion batteries can be built without active cooling. That's interesting for cost, but also maybe for locating grid-scale projects near residential areas. Episode webpage: www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-... Media file: api.substack.com/feed/podcast...

I'm at All Energy for the third time. My reflection is that it's so much more boring than 7 or 14 years ago. There are few crazy ideas. Just stuff that works and is being deployed at scale. EVs, BESS, flexible retail, policy, REZs etc. It's all just happening and growing.

Do any Aus research students want to see if this replicates in Australia and figure out what the policy implications are if it does?

This cheeky thing has learnt to ride the mower looking for bugs.

26. BNEF’s New Energy Outlook model doesn’t want to just solve the intermittency problem with loads of batteries. This is because the batteries get lower utilization rates the more you build. Batteries cannibalize batteries long before you get 100% clean power.

21. Everyone is defining long-duration storage technology wrong. It's not about 6 or 8 hours — you can do that with lithium-ion and probably would — it's about having the capex to add more GWh of capacity decoupled from the capex of adding more GW.

13. By 2030 most countries will have spot power prices of zero in sunny hours. This will be passed on to end consumers, to encourage them to shift power demand to sunny periods by electric vehicle and battery charging, preheating, precooling, etc.

This is something people who are chatbot-curious should be doing by default: ask it about something you *do know about*, not something you *don't know about*.

And since we call all machine learning "AI" now - even vanilla stuff like time-series forecasting for wind power, solar power, or electricity demand - it may actually look to a casual observer like "AI" adoption stays flat or goes up even as the LLM hype cools down.

look at what covid lockdowns did to Australia's transport emissions

Surely we have to consider the possibility they kicked him out bc he was winning all the footy matches www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

you get a lot of useful information when you follow links and read the actual papers being reported on :)

Tapping the sign. Also, power emissions stopped falling.

Tom Studans now going door-to-door asking media organisations to substantively cover welfare rights issues

"The sun may not always shine and the wind may not always blow, but neither can they be halted by an embargo or balance-of-payments crisis." lines I wish I'd thought of carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...

I’m sure this point has been made elsewhere but not only did they openly lie about how many recommendations were in the robodebt final report, the one they erased was to reform FOI and now they’re heading in the opposite direction. Surprise is not a feature of my reaction.

People are singing the praises of induction in the comments, as they should, but no one has yet called out how *easy they are to clean*, especially relative to gas. As the kitchen cleaner in the Volts household, this is quite meaningful for me.

Commonwealth Ombudsman already smashed them and now not even govt's chosen auditing firm can say if the house of cards system of punitive mutual obligations is legal. Quite literally, they say, it is indefensible. Yet it persists. Even after Robodebt. www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politic...

We’ve been doing a bit of thinking and come to a similar spot conceptually, though with a “keep total revenue of road user charge and fuel emissions charge in the same range as net excise/credits/heavy vehicle charge revenue today” envelope for the early years, for acceptability reasons

Stop the free ride: all motorists should pay their way, whatever vehicle they drive theconversation.com/...

The government will quickly discover that the answer to the question 'how does internet work' isn't magnets. Anyways - stated vs revealed preferences of public safety concerns etc etc. "We (the public) want YOU to do something, but anything that makes ME do something will not be tolerated"

shame on me for missing the 10yr anniversary of the best climate social posts ever By @scottwesterfeld.bsky.social -->

In October 2016, in the wake of SA's blackout, then ABC journalist Chris Uhlmann (now with Newscorp) declared the problem was only "synchronous" generators could manage power system frequency. Chart below shows what type of technology has supplied frequency control services in NEM since 2001.

Yep. Normalize just getting renewables done as a job! Should have wide-eyed idealists who do not know how anything works but want to Do Good, finance folk who see everything as a series of revenue flows and barely know what they work in, incompetent activists and horrible fossil lobbyists.

Yes, that would scare most people off. Did you see this from Gniewomir: www.linkedin.com/posts/gniewo...

Here's the FY25 "we're only adding RE at ~1/2 the rate needed" update .. 🥲 www.afr.com/policy/energ...

Read both and you'll have a good steer on what it all means: Victoria has put in place a big, bold suite of policies on household electrification that will deliver for households and industry. There is an always more to do – as we have noted! – but this week's announcements are a bloody good start.

One thing worth noting / reinforcing on this is that yes, inertia is a real thing that needs to be managed, but the idea that grid operators have no clue about this and need 700 retired engineers to tell them this via ChatGPT-written LinkedIn posts is very funny www.entsoe.eu/2025/01/23/e...

Hey @tennantreed.bsky.social , did you or someone else have a chart of word count/page count of AEMC materials over time?

Lots of hydrogen portfolio project/portfolio managers adding '& data centres' to their linkedin job descriptions lately

don't even talk to me unless your limo company has one of these bad boys

Just did an hour long interview with AFP to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of "Accelerando" (which was in turn a fix-up of stories published over the previous 5 years). Feeling ancient now.

But care is needed interpreting the rapidly rising support seen for 'others'. A substantial chunk of it is actually increasing votes for the racist-right: One Nation, Family First, the Palmer parties. This partial split is indicative:

The Greens Party has "lost it's way", but Labor has had a huge win. Except, wait a sec.

Help! ❤️ YouTube flagged our @cleaninguppod.bsky.social documentary on #ProjectBo as political advertising. 😬 Using #solar power to help save babies' lives is NOT political! 🌞 We've re-edited, now we REALLY need your likes, comments, RTs and shares to get the word out! 🙏 youtu.be/z-5QjSfy2SM?...

Much ado about the role of renewable energy (RE) in the Spanish blackout. The investigation into the effective cause is still ongoing, but many pointed to the fact that RE has no ‘inertia’. Is that true? The answer is: yes, but ... 🧵

This episode was a hit with the 8,6&3y.o. demographic. Particularly @lukemenzel.bsky.social 's dramatic numbering. Episode webpage: letmesumup.net/episodes/if-...

But the proven experience of TfL over both bus and rail has ALWAYS been that the level of permanent modal shift, and the speed at which it happens (and thus becomes revenue-positive) leaps SIGNIFICANTLY just by operating 5 services an hour instead of 4. So always aim for that at launch. /END

Wrote about this many years ago on Twitter, but your actual goal should be 5 trains/buses an hour - so a 12 minute interval. This breaks a couple of important psychological barriers for people, based on research by TfL (London's transport operator). Will explain. 🧵 /1

A fantastic explainer from the ABC on how the grid works - please share far and wide! www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04...

Renters are getting such a raw deal. We need better nationwide protections - longer term tenancies, more rent stability. These charts show how completely unsustainable things are on current setting and the anguish ppl feel.