I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable.

For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc.

Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.

Public and observable information makes it trivial to make high-accuracy assessments about the veracity of the claim.

And $2m is sufficient budget to finance spot checks, especially given you'd have to apply them to an exceedingly small percentage of ships. A year salary of an average Iranian police guard is about 5k, for context.

Plus you can create a scenario where fraud being detected is prohibitively expensive, and may even result in the captain being imprisoned in Iran. I wouldn't expect a lot of lies.

Suppose Saudi can produce 100 barrels at $10 (cost+profit) each, and Brazil can produce 100 barrels at a price of $50 (cost+profit) each, and John wants to buy 120 barrels.

- John will pay what is necessary for his Oil, but seeks out the cheapest price available. - Sellers Brazil and Saudi will accept a sale of their own production if their minimum price of $50 and $10 is met respectively, but will sell to the highest bidder for their supply.

You'd think John will go to to Brazil to buy 100 barrels at $50, and then buy 20 barrels in Saudi at $10.

But guess what, Brazil could simply go to Saudi and buy their 100 barrels for $10, and then sell them to you for $50.

So now Saudi has demand from both John and Brazil at a $10 price. Who gets to buy? Well whoever decides to bid more to convince Saudi to sell their oil.

If John increases his bid to $15, Saudi will prefer that to Brazil's $10 bid. But Brazil would then increase its bid to $20, knowing they can sell it to John for $50.

This bidding keeps going up until the $50 point. For Brazil there is no longer any profit in buying Saudi Oil at $50, and selling it to John for the same price. For John there is no point in bidding more than $50 for Saudi Oil, because he can get a $50 price from Brazil.

Any point below $50 means a bidding war starts between John and Brazil, because at less than $50, Brazil has a cheaper source of oil (Saudi) than their own production cost.

And this is true for every commodity in a free market. It's not some 'UK system', it's just the consequence of free trade.

Of course in reality it's trading intermediaries that do the bidding, it's not Brazil buying from Saudi, but traders jumping in to arbitrage. But this is a simplified example.

Inverters a different story.

Essentially it's not an isolated market, but part of a bigger whole.

As an example imagine a village that constituted 1% of the population of a country. The village was 100% renewable, and the country was 0% renewable. If the village disconnected its grid, in isolation its prices would be dictated by its renewables. But if its connected, its renewables just get traded on a market with marginal prices. If a person elsewhere in the country has more expensive generation, they'll but your cheap renewables at their price level. Thus the village will experience high prices like everyone else.

Now suppose Germany is that village in an interconnected EU market. Of course the numbers from my example are exaggerated, but the point remains: Germany's renewables aren't enough, if pricing is set at a much larger market, with fewer renewables.

Today about 20% of Germany's electricity was exported. While only about 6% of its demand came from gas. In other words if Germany was disconnected, it'd have needed no gas, and thus prices would've been lower.

Of course disconnecting isn't a good idea for other reasons, as on other days Germany imports. And Germany's ability to export its renewable excess generates significant revenues, creates incentives to build more renewables, and offsets emissions and pollution in other countries, too.

But long story short, it'll take more for one part of the whole to go renewable. As the EU is generally transitioning towards renewables we see a decoupling happen.

It's true that even 2% of usage being gas, means 100% of the demand pays the gas price.

But (!) that's only true for the spot market at that particular point in the day. And that changes all the time.

Example: if you use zero gas for 80% of the day, and use just 10% gas for remaining 20% of the day, then that day gas was just 2% of total demand, like we said earlier. But it's not true that gas prices dictated 100% of the price that day.

After all, gas prices dictated only 20% of the day's prices. The remaining part of the day there was no gas demand, and thus it did not dictate the price. And that happens more and more often.

The more renewables + storage are built out, the more time of the day that gas is displaced, not used and thus not part of the price mechanism.

Second, if the market pays at the gas price, the renewables reap all the profits (because their costs are far below the gas price). This incentivizes further renewable capacity build-out, eventually displacing gas entirely. This incentive structure pushes the market the fastest towards lowest-cost generation, which is renewable nowadays.

edit: terrific 15m explanation on spot pricing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paun0siu67o

Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.

Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.

Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.

And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.

You'd have to stop sauna for a while and see if it reverses to strengthen the anecdotal case I guess.

Same for Andreessen, a VC's success is built on his ability to raise capital and pick winners. His whole strategy, like Musk, was also on building a public persona to raise capital and get people to believe in his picks.

If I look at Elon and Marc's interviews from 10-15 years ago I am still roughly 80% in agreement, 20% disagreement. I feel the same about what they used to say today, as I did back then.

Now I'm 20% in agreement (they definitely still have interesting thoughts) and 80% absolutely disgusted (with both, but particularly Musk).

So I genuinely think they changed in this regard.

The point I have more issue with is that a 60 or 100 PE ratio only makes sense in a high-growth scenario. Telecoms are valued at 9x by comparison. 60 or 100 only makes sense if you expect it to grow by 10x from here, and face no competition and keep prices this high.

And that seems like a bit of a reach. The richest people on the planet live in urban environments in US/EU/Asia, with fast and widespread 5G.

Yes, rich people on boats in the pacific, hiking remote mountains, and researchers in Antartica exist, but they're not a market of 200 million people. And even if you get there, that's still just 120b, not 380b valuation.

1. Tesla was priced at $2.5b end of 2010. 2. Tesla started production that year of the model S, with nearly 500km range and 0-100 in 4.4 seconds, still competitive 16 years later. It was an obvious disruption of a proven market. 3. that car market was valued at half a trillion at the time.

So Tesla being valued at 0.5% of the market, with disruptive technology, seems fine. Of course it was a moonshot, but hindsight is 20/20.

But what is the total market here that it's stepping into? Seems like SpaceX is servicing the majority of the market for years, yet it just has 16 billion revenue. How that gets you to 1.75 trillion, I don't know.

I mean if you value a company for its future cashflows, how long will Starlink be the only game in town? Will we not see other rockets/space-internet competitors in 2040 for example, in 15 years from now, from any other company (or even, any other state actor)? I think we will, and I think that timeline is generous. Without a monopoly you're competing the price towards marginal cost to cater to a tiny and shrinking fraction of the world that needs satelite internet. The vast majority of people live in urban environments, particularly among those who can afford internet in the first place, and it's only growing further in that direction.

I think Starlink is a wonderful product but there's a reason it has $10b revenue, while telecom companies around the world do more than $1.7 trillion in revenue.[0]

[0] https://dgtlinfra.com/top-telecom-companies/

1. are your finances going to be screwed from overpaying for SpaceX IPO shares through your index fund? No because as you say, it's a small fraction of typical index funds.

2. Is this a form of financial malfeasance? I think yes. The average 401k has about $150k in it. Even if just 0.5% goes to SpaceX, that's $750 per American. That's a few hundred billion. It's serious cash. If that's going to overpaying Elon 3x or whatever it is for these shares, that's a travesty. Even if for each individual it's a tiny blip that doesn't show up in the annual ROI graphs, it's a form of corruption. Like the programmer infamous Salami slicing stories at banks.

If the SpaceX IPO is wildly overpriced, even if you have just 300k in your account, yo

It's 24 years old with 16 billion revenue. Suppose you had a warchest and had the option to buy SpaceX at 1750 billion, or to spend a fraction of that to replicate its technology. Could you?

I've seen estimates that SpaceX spent less than $50-60 billion in cash during its lifetime. That's in the range of its cumulative revenue + capital raised, too.

I just don't really see how this couldn't be replicated, if the market was big enough. But it seems to me that Space isn't that useful yet, and the market isn't that big yet, to the point that it doesn't warrant lots of competitors like the thinking on AI.

But keeping nuclear open is an entirely different thing than building out more nuclear. OP was talking about the former, you about the latter.

Otherwise agreed on your point.