The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.
I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.
"He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version.
Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/replace by thesaurus. But I think different words have different connotations, even if they mean roughly the same thing. Writing would be poorer if we only ever used "walk".
We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our word and grammar choices.