No benefit to longer hours, except that shorter hours makes for a profession that is kinder to the people working in It and easier to convince people to join it. Good when we have healthcare worker shortages....

Double battery life would be great.

It's not a battery. It's a set of generation sources that have to be ramped up and down to meet demand. And ramping up variable sources to meet peak demand times tends to be expensive for the grid.

Only where utilities have idiotic net metering policies right now that let you effectively use your noontime summer production at any time of the year. Resulting in oversupplies if electricity during daylight hours.

Sensible policies that paid people differing amounts depending on what time of day electricity was released to the grid SHOULD be in place and would favor batteries.

Could be a typo of roof panel

>five-year survival rates have increased from roughly 50% to 67%

Sounds more impressive if you flip it around slightly in my opinion. 1.5x fewer people are dieing of cancer within the first 5 years of their diagnosis.

Well yes, antivax stuff based on a real incident of badly mishandled trust from lies and fraud.

Lazard levelized cost of energy analysis a nice place to look at summaries overall of the cost of different energy sources.

For off-shore wind, you can also take a look at recent UK off-shore wind contracts, which are coming in at <40/MWh GBP (37.5GBP which is $42 USD). That's the guaranteed price the wind producers are contracted to sell their electricity at, so the actual pre-profit cost is absolutely lower than that.

Can also see back here discussion of on-shore wind purchase agreements in the US for $20 / MWh in 2019, which was noted as being more expensive than just the natural gas fuel itself per MWh (before this whole Russian gas crisis skyrocketed the prices), without considering actually amortizing the cost of building the gas power plants.

I'll admit though, my 'north of $100 / MWh' number for gas is a bit fluffy. It's true if you look at peaker plants in general (which are expensive because of such low capacity factor meaning ammortized capital costs / MWh generated are high), or if you look at current natural gas prices for gas generation in general, but for pre-crisis CCGT baseload, costs were definitely still well under $100 / MWh.

You're right, this is often talked about as a power source being 'dispatchable' or not. Gas generator, particularly peaker plants, are dispatchable because you can easily turn them on and off as needed, and quickly ramp up and down.

Wind turbines, on their own, aren't really dispatchable because they depend on wind conditions.

Ways to make wind power into a pseudo-dispatchable source include:

1. Overbuilding wind turbines. If you overbuild them enough such that you always (or almost always) generate at least the required amount of power, you can just activate / de-activate some of your wind turbines to modulate your power output as needed depending on wind conditions . Conceptually this really isn't that different from having a whole load of gas peaker plants in existence, which only operate on average 15% of the time. On average a lot of 'idle' capacity sitting around with both situations.
2. Building long distance transmission lines to link up grids with wind turbines that experience different weather conditions. This will work well in conjunction with 1) because it means that a smaller fraction of your wind turbines are expected to be seeing calm weather (and hence low generation) at the same time, meaning that your required over-building factor becomes lower.
3. Pair wind turbines with energy storage. Batteries, compressed air storage, pumped hydro, possibly hydrogen storage, etc. Wind provides the (uncontrolled variable) power input, storage systems let you modulate when you release it to the grid.
4. Pair wind power up with other renewable generation (e.g. solar) which typically has favorable weather conditions when wind is low. This reduces the over-build factor required to maintain the needed energy output.

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Wind turbines do need to get a bit cheaper for 1) to be realistically viable in large scale, but they are certainly tending in that direction. Locally it kind of already happens in some areas; wind power is routinely curtailed in Scotland because at peak wind times there is more installed capacity than the grid can use, which means a higher fraction of the time where wind can cover the demand (This situation will change if and when more north-south transmission lines are installed to let southern England use more of the Scottish wind power, but still).

All of these increase the cost of renewable electricity over the base cost of wind power itself, but with wind and solar power dropping south of $40 / MWh, and gas power rising north of $100 / MWh, the economics are still quite attractive

This is just straight up lies.

Capacity factor average for wind in the US (primarily on shore with smaller turbines) is recently (last 5 years) about 35%. Recent large off shore wind farms, such as the Hornsea 1 project in the UK (largest off shore farm until this year) easily crack 40% (47% lifetime capacity factor for Hornsea 1), and larger turbines are expected to increase this.

Gas plants ALSO don't "make 14MW day in and day out". Actual gas capacity factors can be found here for the US. 55% for combined cycle gas turbines typically used for 'baseload' type operation, and more like 15% for gas turbines that are used as peakers plants. The weighted average capacity factor of gas plants in the US is actually about 36% for 2021, and similar for other recent years.

So yes, on an average basis, 14MW of wind capacity will approximately replace equivalent generation of 14MW of gas capacity.

TBH, the CIA fucked it up by running a fake vaccination program for hepatitis in Pakistan as a scheme to find Bin Laden. Ruined people's trust over there that foreign medical workers are actually there to help, contributed a lot to the local antivax stuff.

Pretty sure it would be eradicated already if the CIA hadn't ruined trust in medical professionals in Pakistan by running fake vaccination centers as a scheme to get the DNA of bin laden's relatives.

Fortunately solar panel production capacity just keeps accelerating. Capacity for 300GW/year right now, and factories underway to increase that to 900GW a year well before the end of the decade.

May not all run at full capacity, but chances are even more gets built. We currently have just over 1 TW of total solar installed worldwide, and I wouldn't be surprised if we are installing 1 TW/year by a decade from now.