Why the water isn’t killing the fire?

Could be anything from sodium to calcium carbide to fluorine. :) Sodium makes hydrogen with water, carbide makes acetylene with water, and flouride just oxidizes water by grabbing hydrogen away from oxygen.

If the character’s plan is to try fascism next, I think they’re into fairly agressive substances. :P

I mean sure, if you’re at such extreme latitudes that you have months of total darkness, then solar will have a problem there. Maybe small modular reactors make sense for those niche applications.

Currently, solar still makes economic sense, but from April to October. Lots of it was built rather fast, now the adoption is slowing since the grid can’t accept it everywhere.

Consequently, summer is when oil shale miners rest and prepare for the next season.

Since the goal is to get rid of mining oil shale, big plans exist to install a lot of wind power. Sadly, this has gone embarrassingly slow, and it cannot cover winter consumption, and there is not enough storage.

As a result, some companies and building out storage, but only enough to last a few hours.

…and in the next country southwards, there is a huge gas reservoir that could accept methane, enough to last the whole winter, but nobody has a good enough handle on methanation to renewably produce a considerable quantity and store it there. :o

With regard to reactors, it seems likely that getting one would take 10 years and the local country here doesn’t even have legislation built out for nuclear power. They’re drafting it. Starting from zero is quite slow.

That’s a pretty big gap to cover with spamming more panels. I would venture to guess: this approach would work up to latitude 45 or so.

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/surface-solar-radiation-d_1213.html

Where I live, in midwinter, the day is 6 hours long. Over here, wind turns more heads than solar. But yes, solar is riduculously quick to install.

Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.

Closing will come later, when alternatives are widely available. What renewable energy does currently - at least here - is forcing those plants temporarily out of the market, especially during summer months and windy weather. The plants will exist and stay ready in case of need for well over a decade, maybe even two - but they will start up ever more rarely.

Technically, the deal is: we don’t have seasonal energy storage. Short term storage is being built - enough to stabilize the grid for a cold windless hour, then a day, then a week… that’s about as far as one can go with batteries and pumped hydro.

To really get the goods one has to add seasonal storage or on-demand nuclear generation. The bad news is that technologies for seasonal storage aren’t fully mature yet, while nuclear is expensive and slow to build. There’s electrolysis and methanation, there’s iron reduction, there are flow batteries of various sorts, there’s seasonal thermal storage already (a quarter step in the right direction)…

…but getting the mixture right takes time. Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions. To remain hopeful, the sum should stop growing very soon.

They 100% know that electrolysis methods won’t be economically viable.

I would argue against that any day. Electrolysers are viable, they are just not the current state of the industry because dirt cheap solar and wind weren’t around in previous decades.

It’s the storage that might not be viable in most countries (because only some have geology that allows for underground gas storage). Producing hydrogen from water at 95% efficiency is doable with today’s tools, if you have somewhere to put it.

Just wait for the zombie engine. :D

It’s actually a bit more complicated. :) They made vessels from copper when they could - copper is a superb heat conductor. But copper gets toxic fast when you cook acidic food. It gets worse if you don’t clean your copper vessels. Wikipedia tells:

Copper is reactive with acidic foods which can result in corrosion, the byproducts of which can foment copper toxicity. In certain circumstances, however, unlined copper is recommended and safe, for instance in the preparation of meringue, where copper ions prompt proteins to denature (unfold) and enable stronger protein bonds across the sulfur contained in egg whites. Unlined copper is also used in the making of preserves, jams and jellies.

Despite not having adequate chemistry or medicine, people in old times had a clue - they saw that copper sometimes fouled and turned green, and suspected this was not good, preferring tin-lined copper vessels as the economical alternative to silver-lined copper vessels.

(Needless to say, industries of that time didn’t produce stainless steel - maybe some alchemist blacksmith knew enough to make it, but it was not a thing.)

Lining copper pots and pans prevents copper from contact with acidic foods. The most popular lining types are tin, stainless steel, nickel and silver.

…but the chemistry of the time being what it was - shoddy - sometimes tin was contaminated with lead (Pb), sometimes it was deliberately adulterated with lead, and shit happened.

In the middle ages, guilds had a system of proof marks and inspectors to ensure craftsmen wouldn’t add too much lead to tin alloys. The Nuremberg standard for example specified 1 part of lead against 10 parts of tin, but in Luzern, Switzerland, a problematic alloy was used.

As for Romans…

However, the use of leaden cookware, though popular, was not the general standard of use. Copper cookware was used far more generally and no indication exists as to how often sapa was added or in what quantity. (Grape syrup)