One challenge with government funding of higher risk projects is that that failure of a project inevitably becomes a campaign issue. Solyndra is a good example. In The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis gives some examples of moonshot problems that will never get funded as long as failure can be demagogued.
That tweetstorm is bad. Denmark is the size of a US state and the contiguous US is about the size of Western Europe. US states can and do import and export energy like European nations, and it's possible for regional transfers to mitigate the issue of intermittency. It also doesn't even mention improvements in storage, or the large expected decline in the price of wind and solar power.
There might be good arguments against solar + wind (I'm pro nuclear), but that tweet thread doesn't properly engage with the issue.
One challenge with government funding of higher risk projects is that that failure of a project inevitably becomes a campaign issue. Solyndra is a good example. In The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis gives some examples of moonshot problems that will never get funded as long as failure can be demagogued.
That tweetstorm is bad. Denmark is the size of a US state and the contiguous US is about the size of Western Europe. US states can and do import and export energy like European nations, and it's possible for regional transfers to mitigate the issue of intermittency. It also doesn't even mention improvements in storage, or the large expected decline in the price of wind and solar power.
There might be good arguments against solar + wind (I'm pro nuclear), but that tweet thread doesn't properly engage with the issue.