SomeoneSomewhere

Trump is beholden to the public?

Apparently they kept saying things like 'long-term investment is important and private companies are bad at that', 'worker productivity is harmed by poor health and education', 'strong urban planning is necessary'.

Fibre needs bigger bend radii proportional to the cable size, but they're still rarely over 15mm diameter cables so you can bend them in like 150mm.

Once you start getting to 11kV MV cables, they do like 2m bend radii.

In NZ, David Seymour at least axed the old Productivity Commission (which his own ACT party founded) to create his new Ministry for Regulation.

Apparently they didn't like the answers they got out of the previous version.

Yeah, directional thrusting is a thing. It was used a lot when contractors were installing NZ's new fibre network about a decade ago. I don't think it's in as widespread usage for power because power cables tend to have much wider bending radii.

Regular trains don't run underground. Lots of opencast mines exist .

Basically all mines have an above ground terminal where whatever you mined is unloaded from your underground trains, lifts, haul trucks or whatever else onto storage piles, then loaded onto the actual long distance trains.

If the mine entry is up a mountain, then the trip down from that point will be a net energy producer regardless of anything else.

Those of us in NZ would like to point out that access to the ocean does not necessarily mean shipping is cheap.

Does that only apply as long as the person isn't pregnant, or possibly cannot be pregnant?

Two religions is not more statistically significant than one.

Referring to yourself in the third person and acting like this comes off as extremely condescending.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are electrified railway lines doing the same. Regenerate large amounts of energy into the grid while descending loaded; consume a relatively small amount of energy to haul the empty train back uphill.

If you're thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it's unfortunately a really bad idea.

Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.

To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.

Indeed.

In addition, there's a lot of consumption that was non-electric (e.g. transport, heating) that is moving to electric. Most of the increased grid consumption is not new consumption, it's consumption that was previously direct fossil fuels.

The exception is basically bitcoin and AI, plus electrification of underdeveloped areas.