Also, you couldn't buy a 3080 at launch, it was never in stock. Now, the real 4080 16 GB is too close to the 4090 in price to be worth it. For the moment, it is the best to wait for AMD and hope it will be good.
Main cost driver is the price of green hydrogen. It is already cheaper than the natural gas prices we are paying now (equivalent of about $1700 per 1000cm of natural gas equivalent vs about $2500 we pay), by 2030 it should be down to $500 per 1000cm natural gas equivalent and that's about 2019 price.
Production costs are easily low enough to go further and faster than that. Logistics and economics may slow things down, but it’s not a cost problem right now.
Yes and no. For raw energy production, it is dirt cheap. Storage and transformation is a bitch though, and so far costs are quite high there although they are getting better. Given that we will need to increase green hydrogen production by 400x in 9 years and further 4x in next 20 years, prices will of course drop.
Hydrogen is the easy one. If you want battery storage I agree we need to get it cheaper (the effective cost of battery storage was close to nuclear last I checked, which isn't cheap enough, though my numbers may be out of date), but hydrogen is something I first made when I was single-digit years old.
> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7.
On paper maybe, most people are actually using electricity generated from conventional power plants most of the time, and we are paying the highest energy prices in the world for that.
> On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint.
Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.
We don't Electrolyse Hydrogen in Germany there is not one large-scale installation. You can't pump 100% hydrogen in the natural gas infrastructure, and the gas plants need to support hydrogen burning.
You also need a surplus of energy, which Germany obviously not has.
Germany will just no longer have the fourth-largest economy in the world. There is no way to substitute gas short term, long term you can replace it with electric alternatives. But these electric alternatives do not run on a grid with just wind and solar. I live in Germany and I have no hope. Our heating bills for the next winter can already exceed $900 per month for a 4-person household, electric costs also at $200 per month. The whole economy will just collapse.
I expect Germany to import the smallest amount of natural gas that the government can be confident will prevent economic collapse.
I also expect this quantity to be much lower than it would've been last year, as I also expect significant effort to be put into both improvements (e.g. home insulation) and alternatives (e.g. renewables).
Germany doesn't have the infrastructure to import from other sources. The LNG terminals don't work yet, and the capacity is too low and LNG is much more expansive than the Russian pipeline gas. And even if we have the LNG infrastructure, we have to buy a big chunk of the world market, which screws poorer countries.
Our home insulation is already pretty good and renovating all old buildings is expansive, and we don't have enough craftsman to do that.
Renewables brought us this mess the plan was to use natural gas, this is now over.
We need to go back to coal and build new nuclear plants to phase out coal, but this will never happen under the current government, at least until the winter.
If we can insulate 1% of the worst houses and apartments, that's still an improvement, in that less money goes to Russia.
If we can get 1% of our needs from LNG terminals built in the next 6 months, that's still 1% less fuel trade with Russia.
If fuel oils, benzine, diesel, biofuels, and new wind turbines combined can substitute 1% of Russian natural gas, that's 1% less money going to Russia.
The USA put speed limits on their highways in response to a fuel crisis, if we do that with the Autobahns and it only reduces Russian imports by 1%, that's 1% less of our money that ends up funding the Russian government.
While coal is much worse for the climate than natural gas, a short-term political need to deal with a warmongering fuel supplier can override that, so burn it and starve the Russian government.
Etc.
It adds up. Even if Germany sill buys 90% as much Russian natural gas in December 2022 as in December 2021, that's still better than buying 100%.
I'm relaxed about nuclear power, but unfortunately this is not the majority position and hoping for them here is wishful thinking. Also, nuclear just can't be constructed fast enough to be relevant for this winter, not even with a major increase in their political acceptability.
Don't get me wrong, it's stunning performance, and having it on the same package as the CPU and GPU has other benefits.