> What?

What 'What'?

I'd like to add the possibility that all these clever people did look at how people around them will be affected, and they either consider the personal gain to be worth the pain, or they think "if I don't do it, the other guy will!"

Economically speaking, each of them is behaving rationally. And since economics also tells us that locations refusing them will be left behind, we can't say no, right? And let's not even think about how much money these people are pumping into politics... IMO the obvious conclusion is that our economic system is fundamentally broken, because it affords far too much power to individuals.

As a thought experiment, consider that comparable mountains of money would have been available to massively increase the housing supply while making positive RoI, but it didn't happen because these people wouldn't have made enough money.

Sure, some new fields will open up. But there's a good chance that the majority of us will be competing for physical jobs that robots aren't yet able to do. What other choice will we have, especially if prices keep rising and inference hardware becomes too expensive for normal people?

Now consider the effect on a market if the supply suddenly grows a lot, while demand stays largely consistent.

Over this summer, a huge number of nuclear plants in Europe went down all at the same time, because they either would have killed the nearby river ecosystem by overheating it, or because they didn't have enough water to operate safely. This issue is only going to get worse as climate change progresses, and unlike most Dunkelflauten, the heat & drought really affect most of the continent at once.

> Also keep in mind the overbuilding a massive problem anyway _outside_ of those 1-2 weeks worst case scenarios.

It's only a problem because power generation tech like nuclear is so expensive, and it would become even more expensive if they couldn't run as much as possible. If we had a fully renewable+battery-driven grid, the issue would disappear.

> Finally I don't think it's once in a century, probably most years have a significant Dunkelflaute event.

I think you might unknowingly be ideologically motivated, because I specified that we should build enough to cover every Dunkelflaute in 99% of years. The amount of battery storage in this scenario by definition suffices for 99% of years, which makes the point about unreliability moot.

But I do still take some issue with your own approach. I would have preferred to criticize your arguments, had you brought any up! Of course it's impossible to always respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of anyone's words, but at least you should have settled on any plausible interpretation. Your reply clearly showed that you chose an implausible interpretation, and I stand by my view that it is a bigger violation of the guidelines than you seem to think.

Don't get me wrong, I get where you're coming from! But especially in the last 2-3 years, it seems like people always evaluate solar under the worst 0.01% chance scenario, which other power sources never have to survive. For example, not even half the days in January 2025 had single-digit outputs, yet they're still called "close to 0".

What I'd love to know is e.g.: in 99% of years, what's the worst Dunkelflaute we can expect? How much battery storage/solar overbuilding would we need to cover that, how much would it cost, and how much will it cost in a few years (based on current development rates)? I'd argue it'd be okay to reduce power-hungry industry for at worst few days, in case a once-in-a-century year happens.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

It is very frustrating that, as long as there's even a tiny bit of ambiguity, dismissive quips (like your response to my initial comment) are very likely to happen. They derail the discussion by deliberately choosing a weak interpretation that has obvious inconsistencies.

The best way to fulfill their mission is to advocate for protecting all rights.

If the issue was "leaving more room and resources for humans and wildlife", it would be much cheaper and easier to put DCs into the ocean. Yes, it's a hostile environment for such hardware, but it would still be much cheaper to handle all the downsides for the same amount of compute - including maintenance, which is currently economically impossible for DCs in orbit.

It would be really ironic if we were similarly destroying institutional knowledge by optimizing away lots of "unimportant" roles, wouldn't it?

Instead, we're depleting resources faster and faster primarily because the people directing most of the world's economic resources want to accumulate even more money even faster. They just don't give a damn about what comes after.

You don't have to replace them. After 30 years the panels will still be producing >80% of their initial output.

Of course it might be economical to replace them with newer panels, since solar tech is getting better every year. 30 years ago solar cost roughly $8/W of peak capacity (adjusted for inflation), and today were somewhere around $0.1 to $0.3 per watt. Assuming $0.25, that's a 32x increase.

Imagine in 30 years we replace them with solar panels 32x as cost-effective as today's (and same for batteries, whatever the factor might be). How competitive does the nuclear plant look?