admiralteal
Georgia has every reason to be a solar powerhouse. They have sunlight to spare and every reason to want to build it. Batteries are finally getting cheap enough to outcompete fossil generation, too.
And they ARE building it, so they even are achieving learning curves on it. There are even Republicans on the PSC (Tim Echols) that are highly, highly pro-solar.
Meanwhile Georgia Power is currently planning more fossil gas plants and extending the life of a handful of coal plants because they think they have a shortfall in energy forecasts for future demands. Because, among other things, so many huge tech datacenters are moving to the state (which of course many were doing on the promise of the quite green grid Georgia has to offer, which was the bait that is now being switched on them).
Why? Because they’re lazy, super conservative, and they get guaranteed profits off of capital investments. The Southern Company is one of the most powerful forces of great evil in the country and goes largely unnoticed. They are actively incentivized to fuck their own ratepayers in order to increase their profitability by the agreements and statutes that allow them to be the utility.
The reality is that Vogtle was built and we should be glad for it and use it. It’s spun up and producing gobs of power, and will continue to do so for a damn long time. Great. But in a state where fossil production is still being actively expanded, putting money towards ultra-expensive nuclear over incredibly cheap solar and storage, betraying your own potential “customers” in the process, is just idiotic.
It’s also for reasons with nothing to do with nuclear in particular. The US is just terrible at executing large civil projects. It costs more to build at large scales here than virtually anywhere else, for a confluence of reasons – highly decentralized project management (state, county, federal, city governments all fighting for authority), lack of sustainable learning curves, NEPA being weaponized by NIMBYs to kill every project including environmentalist ones, plain dumb politics… you know you have a problem when you look onto the efficiency of Italian bureaucracy with envy, but meanwhile they can build e.g., rail projects at something like a third to sixth the budget the US can.
A big part of the problem is that we insist on fully custom and experimental projects. Every fucking time. We never just use the catalog builds. We never set and stick to a standard. Not even in road design, where the AASHTO green book is treated like a fucking Holy Bible – we follow its (largely dumb and dangerous requirements while still bespoking every fucking project.
Don’t be too depressed about it. The Texas grid actually isn’t doing too badly in its emissions trends, in spite of their best efforts. It’s so easy to interconnect resources to it that renewables don’t need to stare down awful queues and huge fees to get onboard and selling power.
That’s sort of the other side of the story from what this policy announcement is about – for the rest of the grid, a combination of FERC, state regulators, utilities, and such have created a system where it is very hard to get new generation online because of infrastructure problems.
This is a gross simplification, but the way it kind of works is that in Texas, infrastructure is up to ERCOT and the utility. Generation is a lot more decoupled from its eventual transmission. It doesn’t face the same terrible barriers to come online because of the deregulated market.
Since solar is a fractional cost per unit energy than gas and coal, it out-competes them any time the sun is shining – it can sell way cheaper and so gas/coal will either have to sell hugely below cost to compete or else they’ll have to curtail. Wind is still a bit more expensive on average, but when the wind is going it tends to be able to do the same since it has no marginal cost. And the same situation also means that anyone who can make economically grid storage (which is already getting possible thanks to rapidly declining battery prices) can also out-compete the literal and figurative fossil generators.
Both Texas and the US East and West grids need MASSIVE transmission upgrades to deal with an increasingly-electrified future, though.
Don’t misunderstand, Texas is a total mess. A profound lack of planning and both reliability and resiliency. But there’s lessons to be learned from it – decoupling production from transmission and some degree deregulation of that production can take advantage of very powerful market forces that already favor renewables. A post-transition future isn’t just better for consumers because of eliminated emissions, it should also be cheaper power.
If you work any ground meat extensively, you develop extensive myoglobin networks. This is a process almost identical to kneading bread to develop gluten. Also turns the meat bright pink.
This results in very chewy, tougher texture – like in Swedish meatballs (or really good Chinese dumplings/bao!). It’s also essential to sausage-making. It also makes them feel less juicy (because the ground beef holds onto the moisture more tightly). Not necessarily worse or better, but certainly different, and in my experience most burger-lovers find it undesirable.
Maybe you prefer it. All the power to you if you do. Cooking like you were raised on often has a special place. But there’s a reason nearly all the burgers in more elevated cuisine are not formed this way – they want them to be tender and juicy.
That said, I’d call this product a meatball, meatloaf, or sausage sandwich, not a burger.
edit: also, given the way you like to make burgers, I’d encourage you to try plant-based meat for it. I think you’ll find it tastes much the same – the exact properties of ground beef that get damaged by this extensive mixing are the exact ones that are hardest to replicate for all the plant-based meat brands, and since you clearly don’t care for them you could probably really reduce your environmental impact by not buying the cow product.
Also the DoL is perpetually under-resourced and short staffed. They aren’t one of the “good” law enforcement agencies that get bipartisan support – only the ones who beat up protestors get that kind of universal appeal, somehow. Even though funding to places like the IRS and DoL have insanely good return on investment.
The whole “retail theft” wave is a moral panic anyway. It’s not backed up by numbers. NYC and LA saw some elevation because of a small number of actual criminal organization that largely got rounded up and prosecuted. Most other “organized retail crime” stories are utter nonsense.
Most of the rise in theft that people cited was based on a completely bullshit statistic which came from the NRF citing one of its own members testimonies in which that member cited an incorrect number. It was actual dogfooding being passed as statistical analysis and even they have backed down on it.
I enjoy how “Climate change is making the problem worse” can basically be tacked onto any regional issue headline in a 100% honest and serious way.
The political reality in ND is that having the (D) is the end of the road for you. Since neither party actually represents a specific policy platform, I guess it’s 6 of 1 in an environment like that.
After all, what are modern Republicans even about? Obviously they want to deny global warming, police uteruses, kill queer people, theocratize the government… but what policies do they actually care about that aren’t equally present in the Democratic caucus?