Dan Schroeder

I was there too! Wish I remembered it better.

I admire this attempt to address a real problem with energy reporting and discourse. And I do think it's helpful to focus more on the consumer end, and on electricity.

But the details here seem too complex for most audiences, and "useful energy" seems too hard to define and measure. 🔌💡

When I see these headlines I pull up BloombergNEF's solar exports from China tool, and yeah, Cuba was the destination for $117 million (about 1.3GW) of Chinese solar panels in 2025.

That's a great photo, btw. The clouds of condensing vapor are from the arrays of cooling towers for the two new gas units, now both operating and sending power to CA. The two idled coal units and their big (shared) smokestack are at right; their cooling system is off the right edge of the photo.

Plenty of folks interested in operating the IPP coal units if the state of Utah will pay them enough to do it! 🔌💡

Doesn't even try. Sheesh.

That was what bugged me about Klein and Thompson, come to think of it. On the first page they promise carbon-free electricity so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill. The book ends before they make the slightest attempt to check whether that's plausible.

The political blunders are fascinating, but so are the science and technology blunders. He has no credentials in science/engineering, right? Does he appear to have done any serious research into science/technology or is he just parroting Elon's late-night ramblings?

Chart of 12-month running totals of world electricity generation by source, from January 2020 through November 2025. The largest three sources during this time period are coal, gas, and hydro, in that order, with wide gaps between them and relatively little recent change. The next three are nuclear, wind, and solar, but nuclear has held steady while wind has increased and solar has increased even faster, so by November 2025 they are nearly in a three-way tie, with the order soon to become solar, wind, nuclear. The three minor sources, now far below solar, are other fossil (mostly oil), bioenergy, and other renewables (mostly geothermal).

Hydro is about 14% globally.

A naive extrapolation from Ember's monthly data suggests wind will exceed nuclear for the year 2026. This could be wrong, but if it's right, then nuclear will be behind hydro, solar, and wind.

Thanks!

U.S. military flew a small nuclear reactor to Utah. Here’s what it means for the Beehive State. A small nuclear test reactor arrived in Utah aboard U.S. military aircraft. It won’t power homes, but state and federal leaders say it signals a new chapter for Utah’s energy future. Here’s what to kn...

I remain doubtful that Valar Atomics will ever produce a commercial product—whether or not they manage to turn on this 250kW (thermal?) test reactor by 7/4. It's telling that they're talking about niche off-grid applications rather than competing in the grid business.

www.sltrib.com/news/politic...

I wrote a bit about it in the essays linked below, but I'm a humorless pedant. Someone really oughta have some fun with it.

especiallyfuture.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-...

especiallyfuture.blogspot.com/2023/01/ener...

Have you done this to the flying cars book?

Brief excerpt from NYTimes article (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html): "The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be."

Was there ever a consensus in the US that we should regulate vehicle efficiency for the sake of climate (or for other environmental reasons)? Or was it merely a fragile alliance of environmental interests and "energy independence" hawks, the latter having vanished now that we're a net oil exporter?

I'd sincerely like to know whether the book has any redeeming qualities. Hardly anyone is wrong about everything. Anything at all that's genuinely insightful and hasn't already been said a hundred times?

Yeah but the more granularity you try to add, the worse the issue of imports/exports gets. To paraphrase @solarchase.bsky.social, energy footprint calculation is a scientific and sometimes philosophical pain.

I don't know of a single handy chart.

Malanima's dataset includes trad. biomass by region and selected countries: histecon.fas.harvard.edu/energyhistor...

OWID has an attempt at consumption-based energy accounting but it doesn't include Qatar, Iceland, etc.: ourworldindata.org/energy-offsh...

There's a wide spread in energy use per person across the world, but charts like this exaggerate it.

Some small countries just happen to have energy-intensive export industries.

Meanwhile these data exclude traditional biomass, the main energy source in poor countries. 🔌💡

Chart from https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=Cuba&fuel=res showing annual electricity generation from renewable sources in Cuba from 2000 through 2023. The total has ranged from just over 1 TWh in 2002 down to just under 0.5 TWh in 2005. The largest share is bioenergy, which has declined significantly since 2000. Solar generation has grown to make up for much, though not all, of the decline in bioenergy. Hydropower has fluctuated over the years with no obvious long-term trend. Wind power has grown but remains the smallest of the four renewable electricity sources.

The Reuters article refers to a "shift toward renewable energy" but doesn't elaborate. Maybe they mean solar+wind, or maybe they think electric vehicles automatically use renewable energy.

Ember says Cuba's biggest renewable electricity source is actually bioenergy, which is on the decline.

Construction on the Faraday solar farm began in 2023. It should have appeared in EIA listings even earlier, yet it never did. The fault may lie with EIA or with the developers, but I don't see how we can blame it on the current administration.

So in case I wasn't clear, I'm just wondering whether there's a similar way to summarize in a sentence (or a paragraph) how randomness and probabilities enter the DQD theory and its derivation of Born's rule.

So in the pilot-wave theory the randomness of Born's rule is built into the initial conditions.

In spontaneous collapse theories it comes from some kind of new physics.

In Copenhagen it's an axiom, I guess.

In many worlds they claim to derive it, though I don't see how they could.

Then maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "quantum theory itself". Presumably that includes the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. Does it also include the Born rule?

I guess I thought the goal was to somehow derive the Born rule from the TDSE.

Is there an easy way to summarize, in this view, where the randomness (or perhaps apparent randomness?) of quantum mechanics comes from?

Here's another half GW of solar that is inexplicably still omitted from the EIA listings. bsky.app/profile/dvsc...

Ah, I see. Thanks!

But there's no data for 2025 at that link.

700 jelly donuts

Without discounting the importance of politics, I have to wonder what Iowa would even do with more wind power. Surely the bigger obstacle must be getting the power out of the middle of the country and to the distant population centers that can use it (also made difficult by politics). 🔌💡

Tweet from Elon Musk on Sep 7, 2024: "The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. "These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years. "Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet."

Just for reference:

A tweet from Elon Musk, posted yesterday: For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years. The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars. It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city. That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.

Have fun with that, Elon. A city on the Moon in ten years is somewhat less absurd than a city on Mars in twenty, but neither one is going to happen.

The tone here is interesting, though. Almost as if he heard someone criticizing his Mars plans recently…I wonder how that might have happened? 😁