Not all australia is moving g at the same speed. Check south Australia, and it is a massive success. The difference is that the government invested in renewewals, along with solar in rooftops. As SA is smaller they did not had pressure from lobbies. Now, are almost 100% renewal energy all year long.
Ahh yes. France’s investment in replacing carbon free nuclear with… carbon free intermittents. Fortunately that hype-driven waste is not stopping France from building out new EPR2 reactors.
»US electricity demand jumped by 135 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025, a 3.1% increase, the fourth‑largest annual rise of the past decade. Over that same period, solar generation grew by a record 83 TWh – a 27% increase from 2024 and the biggest absolute gain of any power source. That single jump in solar output covered 61% of all new electricity demand nationwide.«
This article equates generation with consumption which is a fallacy.
Lots of solar and wind generation is actually produced without meeting demand meaning that the generated electricity often has to be wasted.
There are alternatives, like "pay as bid", which heavily incentives the best price guesser instead of the cheapest producers. And is a system more fragile against collusions in concentrated markets (i.e. a handful of big producers that agree on high bids).
The non renewable operator would be free to sell at a competitive price or not at all. Perhaps on nights when there’s no wind at sea they might be able to make their obsolete infrastructure pay for itself briefly.
But that is exactly what is happening. Each seller can offer their price and each bidder can also offer their price. And since running a gas turbine is more expensive than wind power they are forced by the market to turn their gas turbines off when there is wind. However when there is only a little wind they can power up their gas turbines and sell to the highest bidder. But since there is also a little bit wind, the wind power people can also sell to that highest bidder. That is how it happens that suddenly wind power is just as expensive as the gas turbines, because there is simply not as much wind power to go around for all the people that need electricity.
France was not affected and guarded the rest of Europe because the have reliable, dispatchable power.
It’s not really surprising that an electricity grid becomes fragile if you remove large rotating masses which can act as power reserves which can react to power variations immediately.
Rotating mass is a suspect in this case, not necessarily the primary one but the lack of control authority in the presence of frequency fluctuations is the exact opposite of what you are suggesting. It means that something with a fairly large amount of source/sink capability caused a local stability issue. Almost all modern grid connected windmills are - and this may surprise you - connected to the grid using inverters because that gives them a much better chance at following the grid fluctuations than the older direct connected types did (which did have the potential to cause issues and which resulted in much higher start-up speeds than the present crop). These inverter based interconnects give response times that rotating mass based systems can only dream of, resulting in much smaller errors in phase and thus voltage tracking.
The European grid is stupendously reliable, far more reliable than any other power grid worldwide to the point that most houses and business do not have backup power plans (datacenters, hospitals, telcos and some others excepted). France is doing ok but do not pretend that without France this outage would have spread further. The Iberian peninsula has one of the weaker and heavier loaded grids in Western Europe, in spite of the above, they should have probably invested more into their infrastructure but Spain has a lot of other issues it needs to deal with which cost it a fortune every year in terms of crop losses, fires and floodings. Both Spain and Portugal (and to a lesser degree Italy and Greece) are in the line of fire when it comes to climate change damage.
> far more reliable than any other power grid worldwide to the point that most houses and business do not have backup power plans
What modern power grids typically have backups for individual residences and businesses? I haven't noticed that in Europe, Japan or South America; and it's certainly not normal in the US.
In Canada and the US it is fairly common to have a genset in rural areas where the power goes out multiple times per year due to fallen trees, lightning and maintenance. And I did not write that it is the grids that have backups, it is the businesses and the residences that have backups. For instance, my rural Canadian gas station had a 6.5KW backup generator to ensure the pumps and the freezers would keep running when the power would go out.
Battery storage, solar, and wind can all operate as grid forming and provide synthetic inertia when provisioned to do so. Thermal grid services are not required for grid reliability.
Europe has languished on battery storage deployment, and as they rapidly deploy it, it will improve grid reliability.
France guarding the rest of Europe, that's funny! The connection had to be dropped because it did not have the capacity to supply Spain with enough power at that moment. And the connection is so small, because the French do not want competition from cheaper Spanish power generators.
not the same person but in the flow of doing things those little pauses (tens of milliseconds) do matter. I open/close nvim (and less-so tmux) a ton, and run lots of commands per day. I don’t want to wait
and once you get used to things being that fast, it’s hard to go back (analogous to what people say about high-refresh screens/monitors)
all that said the speed of the default mac terminal (and other emulators I tried) was always fine for me, performance was not why I switched to Ghostty
I think this kind of thing just bothers some people and not others.
I first started to understand and notice update rates and responsiveness as a gamer playing 1st person shooters.
I hate (ok, I find it a bit jarring) the jerky scrolling of a phone in battery save mode limited to 60(?) FPS. It’s so obviously not connected to your touch anymore.
In terminals it’s things like the responsiveness fuzzy finders and scrolling that I really notice.
I turn off animations everywhere I can.
It’s not impossible to use something slower, but when everything feels instant it’s just much more pleasant, smoother, and feels more productive as a result of the computer working at whatever speed my brain does.
So anything that uses a less popular language is considered over engineering? Distros support lots of different languages already and there are likely other packages built with zig already.
A 50-ish MB build time dependency that doesn't need any special privileges or installation to run? That's over engineering? A binary release of just CMake is bigger than all of Zig.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, but the fact remains that the German government has full control over Deutsche Bahn and any mismanagement can be blamed 100% on the German government.
If you want a good example, rather look at France!
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