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Low Information Voter | 4 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Britain by itself was a majority of world coal production by 1640, and remained that way for two and a half centuries.

China now has the crown.
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Layerjack (Onion Knight) | 4 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Cause there's no more decent grade coal there. They claim to have 40% of Europe's wind though. It oscillates between 10 and 25 TW though, and no way to store efficiently yet.
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Low Information Voter | 4 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 Truth, but they were still mining the bad stuff  into my lifetime. The shutdown was politics.

Wind will be interesting.

Used to know an engineer who worked maintainence on offshore turbines. Awful job, but the pay was apparently epic. (It all went to his ex tho.)

Lots of power, but only where you don't need it and when you don't need it. Grid scale storage isn't going to be worthwhile without new physics and new chem, but development of markets for responsive demand has promise.
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Layerjack (Onion Knight) | 4 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Shutdown was cause it was cheaper to get coal shipped, or to use gas like all civilized world. 

Storage chemistry exists. Either ammonia or formic acid. Japan funded ammonia for ships, but adoption is very low so far. We're probably 50 years and 2 major wars away from it catching on. I think it will scale eventually unlike batteries. EU is big on fuel cells now.