Very informative come back. Care to show electricity sales from a Spanish company to Germany or Poland? Take a look at this article. Do you see Spain anywhere on that graphic? Electricity is imported from neighbouring countries.
Should I have made explicitely clear that those effects are countered by grid operators?
That is my point exactly. Grid operators are having trouble countering those effects when they are dealing with large numbers of fluctuating local grids. The power on the main grid must fluctuate from the load by only a few percentage points. When drawing power from a number of communal grids that fluctuate more than thet is is very difficult to keep the grid power smooth.
For every surplus watt comming from the sun or wind the grid operators pump water uphill. For every down shift in solar production water is going downhill. Grid regulations happen more or less instantly, except super sensible equipment no one notices anything.
I also think you may be misunderstanding me in what I mean by fluctuations. Solar and wind generation can change by several percentage points minute to minute. If enough plants are at low output and then go to high output the power can fluctuate significantly, may by 10%. Surges like this can cause the grid to overload and shut down.
Ten, fivteen years ago, grid operation was done on a more central level. Now with decentralizations regulation means are also decentralized.
Care to cite that change? The grid is one central connection and needs to be controlled centrally. One can think of it as a closed irrigation system where the only control one has is how much water goes into the system. If the pressure fluctuates by more then a few percentages the system shuts down to protect itself. If one has too many variable inputs then it is very difficult to keep that margin of error.
The movement will always be in the right speed. It is not like that you simply can connect a plant to the grid and thats it.
That is exactly what they are doing right now. The grid can handle some fluctuations but there is a point that these fluctuation will overload the grid. Do you really want to find that point by experimenting with people's electricity?
Maybe never. One can come up with many scenarios in the future that may or may not happen. As of now they are loaded. If there is a proposal in the future to not load them that is the time for protest. Getting your nickers is a twist about something that may or may not change in the future is a waste of time.
You miss the point completely. Yes Europe is connected together with a grid but right now power generated in Spain is not powering Germany or Poland. To transmit power that far requires a new DC grid.
Regarding the PDF, keep in mind this is a very low yield decentralized power plant, not really a plant. But that is what europe is going for: decentralizing power generation.
These statements seem to contradict each other; a decentralized power plant has stability issues yet you seem to advocate a decentralized power generation system. How can small decentralized power plant be unstable yet a larger decentralized power generation system be stable? Fluctuations from small systems are just as likely to combine in larger systems to produce bigger fluctuations as they are to average out and create a stable power system.
The "disturbing" or destabilizing effects are very local, on the level of a communal grid.
When you connect enough unstable communal grids together you get more instability not less. Yes they are working on the problem but the technology is not here yet. I am not saying that it is impossible but that movement too quickly will cause power problems. The other issue is that no one has done a complete economic study on how new technology and installations will effect the price of electricity. Sure, almost anything can be done if you throw enough money at it. The question is one of risk/reward. Is the risks of high capitol costs, high electricity prices and possible power failures worth the minimal safety benefits of closing down nuclear plants? In my opinion the question right now is no. Maybe in 10 to 15 years when storage and distribution technology catches up with generation technology that answer may change.
How long before circumventing the secure boot mechanism is considered a DMCA violation and a felony?
The answer to that is never. Using the installed configuration tools to turn off a security feature is in no way "circumventing" anything. By that logic, turning off the windows firewall so one can use another firewall would also be "circumventing". To fall under "circumventing" external software or unconventional editing (such as using a third party bit editor to change non-volatile RAM) would need to happen.
Stop with the sensationalism. The issue is that Red Hat has two choices; pay for certification or describe how to turn off the security feature. From a sales point of view it is better if the user does not have to do anything to their BIOS settings to install an OS. On the other hand it is a good Idea to make it difficult to unknowingly install a hacked version of an operating system.
We have discussed this issue before and it is not a "big bad Microsoft blocking Linux" issue. Microsoft is trying to make their installs safer.
Mr. Bloomberg has made public health one of his top policy priorities and has run high-profile campaigns against smoking, obesity and the consumption of salt.
The biggest factor in New Yorkers’ increased life expectancy, however, was unrelated to any of those efforts. Instead, officials attributed it to expanded H.I.V. testing and treatment, which resulted in a substantially reduced death rate from H.I.V. and AIDS. The mortality rate from H.I.V. infection in 2010 fell by 11.3 percent since 2009, and by 51.9 percent since 2002.
Other significant factors in the increased life expectancy are a decline in deaths from heart disease and cancer, a decline in drug-related deaths and a decline in infant mortality.
Running out of gas and oil does not occur on a monthly basis and there is not real consensus when oil will run out. Nuclear will not run out for hundreds of years. What I am trying to say is that nuclear power should not be thrown out, due to irrational fears, yet as the "alternative energy" solutions are not mature enough. There are issues that need to be addressed before we become overly dependent on sun and wind. There are a number of theories on how to deal with the issues but little or not practical experience in implementing these theories. We are risking major electricity outages, dramatically increased electricity costs and economic slowdown as we become more and more dependent in the weather.
Solar and wind power can not be treated in the same way as conventional power plants for the following reasons; 1. They fluctuate based on the weather 2. Output can not be increased when needed. 3. Minute to minute fluctuations in electricity output put a strain on grid switching which causes instability in the grid. 4. Large weather systems can cause energy to need to be transmitted great distances which today's grids can not handle.
To create a stable wind/solar based electrical system one needs redundancy of production(to deal with weather systems and seasonal variability), large amounts of storage (to smooth out power production and be able to increase output when needed) and a much sturdier DC grid (to transmit power from where it is produced to where it is needed). All that costs money and research. Too much research is going into production and not enough is going into distribution.
Here is an interesting quote from that site that states exactly what I am saying:
Integrating renewable energies into the grid – A challenge for grid operator Alongside rising electricity consumption and the connection of new power stations, the increasing feed-in of electricity from renewable energies is posing major challenges for the operators of distribution systems and transmission systems. This is in part due to the difficulty of planning how much energy solar and wind power can be expected to feed in currently and in the future. This can lead to significant variance between power fed in from renewable energies and power plant schedules, thereby putting system reliability at risk. An example analysis of the load profiles of an individual photovoltaic installation shows:
How much the power fed in from renewable energies fluctuates How energy production and consumption varies throughout the day and during the year How the actual production of the installation deviates from the installed capacity
It si well known that DC is better suited, however whole europe is interconnected with AC lines, and that is far far longer and wider than mere 1200km.
There is a grid that is over 1200km long but energy is consumed much less than 1200km from where it is produced. Think of it like a huge piping system where water is injected and removed at many places along the pipe. The issue with AC electricity is when you inject power very far from where it is used. for example, If Western Europe is producing a lot of power and Eastern Europe is using a lot of power than the power has to be transmitted a very long way with high losses from AC lines.
You are looking at this in too small a scale. Country to country with AC is fine but long distances do not work.
The issue is that a large weather system can effect every wind turbine and solar plant in Germany. Many have touted sending power from areas outside of Germany to compensate for the weather issue. This requires a DC grid because AC loss is too high over long distances. According to this article the practical distance limit of AC lines is 1200km. For example if electricity needs to be transferred from Spain to Germany, at distance of 1600km, it would require DC.
The daily amount of wind power and solar power fed into the grid can be looked up on the companies web sites.
If one can get to the command line you can execute "perl vurus.pl" and use the path to find the interpreter. That works wherever perl is installed as advised by most Perl packages.
I suspect that an office mono culture never develops, we go back to the situation in the 1980s when there was genuine diversity of productivity applications.
Monocultures in software are an effect of the necissesity of training or knowledge of software. A company can not reasonably expect a new employee to know a piece of esoteric office software that is only known by 5% of the people qualified for the job. Therefore the company would have to train the person on the the company's software and most new employees will waste time getting familiar with the local office suite. It is much simpler much more cost effective for a company to ask for experience with a standard software suite. Already Open Office is used on 22% of desktops. It is easy to see that Open Office will me the predominant office suite if Linux gains popularity.
Diversity is only possible if people choose divers options. Standardization is desirable to most people. They want to be able to go from job to job and not have to worry about what software they will be using to do basic things like writing a document. Even if multiple options are available most people will choose the popular one. Diversity is only possible if people choose divers options. Why does Open Office have so much market penetration? Where Microsoft office is the standard for office suites Open office is the standard for free office suites.
If one can get to the command line you can execute "perl vurus.pl" and use the path to find the interpreter. That works wherever perl is installed as advised by most Perl packages.
As for would they do it, both Microsoft and OSX have found nagging and easy one click to work well to get people to update. No reason not to follow their example.
Here is a quote from this article written in June 2011;
In the previous month alone, four of the Top 10 computer malware programs had been targeting Java security holes for which Oracle had been offering an update since March 2010. There's also been an increase in malware that installs adware or tries to lure users to install bogus antivirus programs.
Security vulnerabilities were still be exploited over a year after a patch came out. Many desktop users are loath to update anything as they fear breaking their installation. I do not see that Linux desktop users will be any different. If Linux gains business share there will be many more non-technical users which will be very different from today's geeky users.
As any OS penetration it will gain more and more of the issues the Windows has and will have very similar security issues.
If yo don't have noticed: germany is proving this right now.
It reminds me of a joke about an economist, an engineer and a mathematician traveling on a train to Glasgow Scotland. The economist looks out the window at the pasture full of black sheep and says, "Wow, all the sheep in Scotland are black!" The engineer looks out the window at the same scene, shakes his head and states "Some of the sheep in Scotland are black." The mathematician out the window at the same scene, sighs and states "There exists in Scotland at least one field where there are sheep that are black on at least one side."
The mathematician statement is completely correct because all that they saw was one field and one side of each sheep. Therefore that is all they can prove. Any other statement is supposition. All we have seen from Germany is two days supply. So using the mathematician's vernacular; "Germany has supplied two days of high solar power output in the last year". It says nothing about what will happen during a winter storm.
Given enough space and diversity you easy get reliable minimum input into the grid. Regardless if it is solar or wind.
You are correct in that but the "given enough space and diversity" are very loose terms. How much space is needed? Do power plants need to be thousand of moles apart so that one area can compensate for shortages in other areas? Who pays for the DC grid to transfer power that far? That also means that there must be enough capacity in the production area to cover their needs plus anyone who is in low production. This means more power plants everywhere increasing the costs of electricity.
I am not saying that it can not be done but that the costs will be so high that the economy may crumble under the weight.
The reason that typical old base load nuclear plants run at 90% is simple: if one or two others have to go off grid, the rest can increase its output.
You have finally hit the crux of the issue with wind and solar generated electricity. In the case of conventional power generation when one needs more power one can increase output by just turning up the plant. This issue is taken into account when plant size is planned.
When using solar and wind one gets what one gets.If the output of solar drops one can not just turn up the wind turbines as they may also be having an issue (low or high winds). To compensate for this one must have a much bigger overhead than that with conventional generation. How much is needed is debatable. This additional overhead costs money to build and maintain and will be reflected in the cost of electricity.
Be careful about talking about averages when dealing with energy output. With conventional generation these averages are human controlled and can be adjusted to deal with issues. With wind and solar one has to look at lows and how will these lows be compensated for. If wind and solar make up for 50% of a country's electricity generation and a large winter storm passes through generation may drop to 10% of capacity for several days. Does one build 5 times the solar and wind? Does one build enough storage to deal with 40% of a country's energy needs for several days? Does one keep conventional plants at idle just in case they are needed? It will probably be a combination. One has to look at a worst case scenarios or we are inviting blackouts when these scenarios occur. To build all this redundancy will drive electricity prices up and will damage an already fragile economy.
Setting up a wind farm is soon on par with building a new coal plant, especially as coal plants become more and more expensive because of CO2 storing.
A coal plant can be scheduled to supply 90% to 100% of it's rated supply 90% of the year with short down times to deal with maintenance. It is completely predictable and controllable. A wind wind farm may produce from 0% to 100% of it electricity moment to moment based on the vagaries of the wind. It is unpredictable (it can be forecast but as all weather forecasts it may not be actualized) and can not be increased when needed. This requires much more storage to compensate for the fluctuations so the output can be controlled as needed.
The issue is not power generation it is power storage. Sure pumped hydro is an option but it can not be used everywhere.
The reasons there was only one injury are as follows; 1. Most spikers marked the trees that they spiked. The hopes were to make the trees so difficult to make safe that it was not worth cutting them down. 2. In response there was a huge increase in the sale and use of metal detectors to find and remove the spikes or sections of trees that had spikes. 3. Most times a mill blade hit spikes the blade did not shatter but just lost a few teeth making it unusable and costing the mill time and money to replace the blade. The blade that caused the injury probably shattered due to a weakness in the blade. That only one person was injured is a testament to the procedures to find and remove the spikes and not the peaceful intentions of the protesters.
Actually it does. cross platform viruses require a common application that is they come from a situation of lack of diversity, like open office viruses.
So what software do you think companies will use on a linux platform to read and modify Office documents? I bet that will be OpenOffice. There is your common application.
So for example all desktop users use applications that assume Perl/Python scripting is available.
Here you just blow you own argument. If it is possible for a browser like Firefox (a common application) to download an execute a virus written in Perl or Python that virus will work on all flavours of Lunux. Commonality breeds venerability.
That's not what makes it effective. What is effective that a security layer or configuration can be added across the board. So for example when Microsoft wanted to move to divide user and system dll's they couldn't do anything drastic without breaking applications. Linux distributors can just change the configure step and recompile the applications.
All of that does not matter if the desktop users do not update their OS or software. Yes it is possible to keep systems updated but will people actually do it? The fact that applications can be recompiled is meaningless if people do not do it or download the updated binaries.
I'm saying the diversity and the role of distributions makes it impossible assuming a popular desktop Linux that looks like today's Linuxes.
You have pointed out a few very powerful commonalities that could leave all versions of Linux vulnerable to viruses.
Now that might be impossible and it might be that any popular Linux would look like Android and thus lose these advantages.
It looks like we almost agree. My point is that one can not guarantee that the Linux found on desktops in the future will be as secure as the Linux today.
The point is that production numbers when conditions are optimal are meaningless. This numbers make it seem that solar power is a viable alternative to the nuclear power plants that are being closed and that the cost of the electricity is comparable. The crunch comes when conditions are abysmal and there is not reliable replacement source. The only way to deal with this issue is to be able to build enough wind and solar plants to produce much more power that needed during optimal time so that during times when there are low production there would still be enough. That is what I mean by redundancy. This will cost money and will significantly increase the cost of electricity.
It is not lack of money but increased cost of the produced energy. That increase may cause increased stress on an already fragile economy.
Actually there are two parts to the program; EDWOSB and WOSB. Contracts that are open to EDWOSBs can be bid on only by EDWOSBs. Contracts that are set asside for WOSBs are open to both EDWOSBs and WOSBs. The EDWOSB program just restricts some contracts to economically disadvantaged businesses. Both WOSB end EDWOSB contracts are part of the 5%.
All EDWOSBs are also WOSBs. The only difference is that it is possible to designate certain contracts as directed at economically disadvantaged WOSBs instead or regular WOSBs. By removing the "disadvantages" part the bill makes EDWOSBs exactly the same a WOSBs.
I think it somewhat hypocritical that an owner of a business advocates designating contracts for WSOB but not EDWSOB. Why is it OK to discriminate based on gender but not gender and economic disadvantage? Perhaps because her company is not "economically disadvantaged"?
LAMP is a server package and not a desktop package.
Also the Linux distributions acting as distributors for 3rd party applications has already shown itself more abel to respond to security threats by coordinating directly between hundreds of applications for security increases
This is only effective if the desktops are updated when a new patch comes out. Servers are almost always updated because there are people to do that. Getting a desktop user to update may not happen as often.
It is possible that malware numbers may not increase but it is also possible that they may increase to some significant extent.
All I am trying to point out is that the article poster is making a huge assumption when looking at today's numbers and stating that malware on Linux is not and never will be an issue. The current numbers may change as penetration increases.
The issue that is actually brought up by quoted article is that there are many contracts to do not fall under WOSB because there are less than two women owned small businesses bidding on them. The writer and a senate bill want this restriction removed. The reason the restriction is there is that if a contract is designated WOSB by the procurement officer then all non WOSB bids are rejected and competition is between only the WSOB firms. If only one WOSB firm bids that there is no competition at all. A woman owned small business should not get a contract just because it is the only one bidding.
From the summary;
From the article: 'Wendy Frank, founder of Accell Security Inc. in Birdsboro, Pa., wishes she had more competitors.
That is not true. She wishes that the two WOSB bidder restriction was gone so that she could get contracts as a sole bidder.
It is human nature to go against government edicts. When minimum quotas are imposed resentment is created. The most effective way of protesting those edicts is to make the minimum a maximum. So when the law says that a minimum of 5% of contracts have to be awarded to women owned companies it is easy to see that eventually only 5% will be awarded. The law says it has to be at least 5% so we will make it exactly 5%.
I never said the growth in OSX malware was an issue today but as an indication of how a small growth in penetration will have a much larger increase in malware creation. As market penetration of Windows decreases and market penetration of Linux increases (if the poster's scenario comes true) the production of mallware for Linux will approach the production for Windows and the main reason to change to Linux will go away.
You seem to be assuming that demand will be constant throughout day and night,
That is completely untrue. I am well aware that demand is higher during the day. Many people tout solar as the fix for that issue. All I am trying to do is point out times when solar power will not be enough to deal with daytime demand.
You also seem to be assuming that solar-produced power is the only thing that will be transmitted. Here's a clue; the electrons don't care.
Where will these electrons come from? Nuclear power; not there because people are afraid of it. Wind power? May not be there due to low or high winds? Fossil fuel? Too much CO2. The point is that when people rely on power generation that is controlled by variable atmospheric conditions there will be times when not enough power is generated. Some people say that can be compensated for by more conventional plants. Since thay take days to come up to operating capacity from a cold start that would need to be maintained at idle. That costs a lot of money and would significantly increase electricity costs.
Oh no! We have to run a cable from Europe to North America! It's never been done before!!! Not even for telecommunications [wikipedia.org],
Telecommunication cables do not carry gigawatts of power. It is a very different engineering challenge to do so.
and we've never been able to create anything like the sort of cable [htstriax.com] that would be needed.
That is a superconducting cable that requires cooling to -200C with liquid nitrogen to work. Until room temperature superconductors are found this technology is not feasible for long underwater cables.
Next time you want to say something's impossible, please pick something that's actually impossible
How about this statement "It is impossible with today's technology or any technology in the foreseeable future. The OP seems to believe it can be built today and that is not true.
The 2 is due to redundancy. If one needs 1MW of power from a wind farm one mist install turbines that will produce at least twice as much under optimal conditions due to the following issues; 1. Some will be down for maintenance 2. some will be in areas where the wind is below optimal speed so the it is not generating the maximum amount of electricity 3. some will be in areas where wind speeds are above 25M/sec 4. During winter and cloudy times solar generation will be decreased therefore wind will be needed to compensate.
Solar has similar issues; 1. During winter solar panels do not operate at maximum efficiency 2. During cloudy days solar panels do not operate at maximum efficiency. 3. During times of very low or very high winds wind power generation will decrease and solar will be needed to compensate for it. With all those factors taken into account can you see how one can not look at the rated ouput of a solar or wind generator and use that number in your supply calculations?
And you are aware that the cost of distribution is mainly covered already, as germany already has a power grid?
the European Super Grid. Someone has to pay for that grid.
The issue is that countries like Germany are already replacing reliable power with unreliable power. In doing this they are endangering the stability of the electrical grid. The difference between VOIP and electricity is that if there is a problem with the VOIP system there are still other phones that can be used. In the case of an electrical grid that relies on renewable energy, if there is a problem with the renewable energy then no one gets electricity.
That can me mitigated by keeping conventional power plants on standby but that costs money and will drive up electricity prices.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it is!
Very informative come back. Care to show electricity sales from a Spanish company to Germany or Poland? Take a look at this article. Do you see Spain anywhere on that graphic? Electricity is imported from neighbouring countries.
Should I have made explicitely clear that those effects are countered by grid operators?
That is my point exactly. Grid operators are having trouble countering those effects when they are dealing with large numbers of fluctuating local grids. The power on the main grid must fluctuate from the load by only a few percentage points. When drawing power from a number of communal grids that fluctuate more than thet is is very difficult to keep the grid power smooth.
For every surplus watt comming from the sun or wind the grid operators pump water uphill. For every down shift in solar production water is going downhill. Grid regulations happen more or less instantly, except super sensible equipment no one notices anything.
I also think you may be misunderstanding me in what I mean by fluctuations. Solar and wind generation can change by several percentage points minute to minute. If enough plants are at low output and then go to high output the power can fluctuate significantly, may by 10%. Surges like this can cause the grid to overload and shut down.
Ten, fivteen years ago, grid operation was done on a more central level. Now with decentralizations regulation means are also decentralized.
Care to cite that change? The grid is one central connection and needs to be controlled centrally. One can think of it as a closed irrigation system where the only control one has is how much water goes into the system. If the pressure fluctuates by more then a few percentages the system shuts down to protect itself. If one has too many variable inputs then it is very difficult to keep that margin of error.
The movement will always be in the right speed. It is not like that you simply can connect a plant to the grid and thats it.
That is exactly what they are doing right now. The grid can handle some fluctuations but there is a point that these fluctuation will overload the grid. Do you really want to find that point by experimenting with people's electricity?
Maybe never. One can come up with many scenarios in the future that may or may not happen. As of now they are loaded. If there is a proposal in the future to not load them that is the time for protest. Getting your nickers is a twist about something that may or may not change in the future is a waste of time.
You miss the point completely. Yes Europe is connected together with a grid but right now power generated in Spain is not powering Germany or Poland. To transmit power that far requires a new DC grid.
Regarding the PDF, keep in mind this is a very low yield decentralized power plant, not really a plant.
But that is what europe is going for: decentralizing power generation.
These statements seem to contradict each other; a decentralized power plant has stability issues yet you seem to advocate a decentralized power generation system. How can small decentralized power plant be unstable yet a larger decentralized power generation system be stable? Fluctuations from small systems are just as likely to combine in larger systems to produce bigger fluctuations as they are to average out and create a stable power system.
The "disturbing" or destabilizing effects are very local, on the level of a communal grid.
When you connect enough unstable communal grids together you get more instability not less. Yes they are working on the problem but the technology is not here yet. I am not saying that it is impossible but that movement too quickly will cause power problems. The other issue is that no one has done a complete economic study on how new technology and installations will effect the price of electricity. Sure, almost anything can be done if you throw enough money at it. The question is one of risk/reward. Is the risks of high capitol costs, high electricity prices and possible power failures worth the minimal safety benefits of closing down nuclear plants? In my opinion the question right now is no. Maybe in 10 to 15 years when storage and distribution technology catches up with generation technology that answer may change.
How long before circumventing the secure boot mechanism is considered a DMCA violation and a felony?
The answer to that is never. Using the installed configuration tools to turn off a security feature is in no way "circumventing" anything. By that logic, turning off the windows firewall so one can use another firewall would also be "circumventing". To fall under "circumventing" external software or unconventional editing (such as using a third party bit editor to change non-volatile RAM) would need to happen.
Stop with the sensationalism. The issue is that Red Hat has two choices; pay for certification or describe how to turn off the security feature. From a sales point of view it is better if the user does not have to do anything to their BIOS settings to install an OS. On the other hand it is a good Idea to make it difficult to unknowingly install a hacked version of an operating system.
We have discussed this issue before and it is not a "big bad Microsoft blocking Linux" issue. Microsoft is trying to make their installs safer.
If you can not purchase a large the buy two mediums.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/new-yorkers-life-expectancy-reaches-80-6-years-higher-than-national-rate/?ref=nyregion
Mr. Bloomberg has made public health one of his top policy priorities and has run high-profile campaigns against smoking, obesity and the consumption of salt.
The biggest factor in New Yorkers’ increased life expectancy, however, was unrelated to any of those efforts. Instead, officials attributed it to expanded H.I.V. testing and treatment, which resulted in a substantially reduced death rate from H.I.V. and AIDS. The mortality rate from H.I.V. infection in 2010 fell by 11.3 percent since 2009, and by 51.9 percent since 2002.
Other significant factors in the increased life expectancy are a decline in deaths from heart disease and cancer, a decline in drug-related deaths and a decline in infant mortality.
Running out of gas and oil does not occur on a monthly basis and there is not real consensus when oil will run out. Nuclear will not run out for hundreds of years. What I am trying to say is that nuclear power should not be thrown out, due to irrational fears, yet as the "alternative energy" solutions are not mature enough. There are issues that need to be addressed before we become overly dependent on sun and wind. There are a number of theories on how to deal with the issues but little or not practical experience in implementing these theories. We are risking major electricity outages, dramatically increased electricity costs and economic slowdown as we become more and more dependent in the weather.
Solar and wind power can not be treated in the same way as conventional power plants for the following reasons;
1. They fluctuate based on the weather
2. Output can not be increased when needed.
3. Minute to minute fluctuations in electricity output put a strain on grid switching which causes instability in the grid.
4. Large weather systems can cause energy to need to be transmitted great distances which today's grids can not handle.
To create a stable wind/solar based electrical system one needs redundancy of production(to deal with weather systems and seasonal variability), large amounts of storage (to smooth out power production and be able to increase output when needed) and a much sturdier DC grid (to transmit power from where it is produced to where it is needed). All that costs money and research. Too much research is going into production and not enough is going into distribution.
Here is an interesting quote from that site that states exactly what I am saying:
Integrating renewable energies into the grid – A challenge for grid operator
Alongside rising electricity consumption and the connection of new power stations, the increasing feed-in of electricity from renewable energies is posing major challenges for the operators of distribution systems and transmission systems. This is in part due to the difficulty of planning how much energy solar and wind power can be expected to feed in currently and in the future. This can lead to significant variance between power fed in from renewable energies and power plant schedules, thereby putting system reliability at risk. An example analysis of the load profiles of an individual photovoltaic installation shows:
How much the power fed in from renewable energies fluctuates
How energy production and consumption varies throughout the day and during the year
How the actual production of the installation deviates from the installed capacity
Here is a link to a study dealing with solar panels. http://www.swissgrid.ch/dam/swissgrid/future/renewable_energies/Analyse_Lastgaenge_Gaertnerei_mit_PV-Anlage_en.pdf
It si well known that DC is better suited, however whole europe is interconnected with AC lines, and that is far far longer and wider than mere 1200km.
There is a grid that is over 1200km long but energy is consumed much less than 1200km from where it is produced. Think of it like a huge piping system where water is injected and removed at many places along the pipe. The issue with AC electricity is when you inject power very far from where it is used. for example, If Western Europe is producing a lot of power and Eastern Europe is using a lot of power than the power has to be transmitted a very long way with high losses from AC lines.
You are looking at this in too small a scale. Country to country with AC is fine but long distances do not work.
You actually pointed me to an interesting paper about the variability of power input from solar panels. http://www.swissgrid.ch/dam/swissgrid/future/renewable_energies/Analyse_Lastgaenge_Gaertnerei_mit_PV-Anlage_en.pdf.
Notice how jagged those graph are? This causes switching systems to have to even out the load and can cause instability in the grid. Notice how the output in the winter is only 20% of that in summer?
For that we still use AC transfer lines.
The issue is that a large weather system can effect every wind turbine and solar plant in Germany. Many have touted sending power from areas outside of Germany to compensate for the weather issue. This requires a DC grid because AC loss is too high over long distances. According to this article the practical distance limit of AC lines is 1200km. For example if electricity needs to be transferred from Spain to Germany, at distance of 1600km, it would require DC.
The daily amount of wind power and solar power fed into the grid can be looked up on the companies web sites.
Care to post a reference?
If one can get to the command line you can execute "perl vurus.pl" and use the path to find the interpreter. That works wherever perl is installed as advised by most Perl packages.
I suspect that an office mono culture never develops, we go back to the situation in the 1980s when there was genuine diversity of productivity applications.
Monocultures in software are an effect of the necissesity of training or knowledge of software. A company can not reasonably expect a new employee to know a piece of esoteric office software that is only known by 5% of the people qualified for the job. Therefore the company would have to train the person on the the company's software and most new employees will waste time getting familiar with the local office suite. It is much simpler much more cost effective for a company to ask for experience with a standard software suite. Already Open Office is used on 22% of desktops. It is easy to see that Open Office will me the predominant office suite if Linux gains popularity.
Diversity is only possible if people choose divers options. Standardization is desirable to most people. They want to be able to go from job to job and not have to worry about what software they will be using to do basic things like writing a document. Even if multiple options are available most people will choose the popular one. Diversity is only possible if people choose divers options. Why does Open Office have so much market penetration? Where Microsoft office is the standard for office suites Open office is the standard for free office suites.
If one can get to the command line you can execute "perl vurus.pl" and use the path to find the interpreter. That works wherever perl is installed as advised by most Perl packages.
As for would they do it, both Microsoft and OSX have found nagging and easy one click to work well to get people to update. No reason not to follow their example.
Here is a quote from this article written in June 2011;
In the previous month alone, four of the Top 10 computer malware programs had been targeting Java security holes for which Oracle had been offering an update since March 2010. There's also been an increase in malware that installs adware or tries to lure users to install bogus antivirus programs.
Security vulnerabilities were still be exploited over a year after a patch came out. Many desktop users are loath to update anything as they fear breaking their installation. I do not see that Linux desktop users will be any different. If Linux gains business share there will be many more non-technical users which will be very different from today's geeky users.
As any OS penetration it will gain more and more of the issues the Windows has and will have very similar security issues.
If yo don't have noticed: germany is proving this right now.
It reminds me of a joke about an economist, an engineer and a mathematician traveling on a train to Glasgow Scotland.
The economist looks out the window at the pasture full of black sheep and says, "Wow, all the sheep in Scotland are black!"
The engineer looks out the window at the same scene, shakes his head and states "Some of the sheep in Scotland are black."
The mathematician out the window at the same scene, sighs and states "There exists in Scotland at least one field where there are sheep that are black on at least one side."
The mathematician statement is completely correct because all that they saw was one field and one side of each sheep. Therefore that is all they can prove. Any other statement is supposition. All we have seen from Germany is two days supply. So using the mathematician's vernacular; "Germany has supplied two days of high solar power output in the last year". It says nothing about what will happen during a winter storm.
Given enough space and diversity you easy get reliable minimum input into the grid. Regardless if it is solar or wind.
You are correct in that but the "given enough space and diversity" are very loose terms. How much space is needed? Do power plants need to be thousand of moles apart so that one area can compensate for shortages in other areas? Who pays for the DC grid to transfer power that far? That also means that there must be enough capacity in the production area to cover their needs plus anyone who is in low production. This means more power plants everywhere increasing the costs of electricity.
I am not saying that it can not be done but that the costs will be so high that the economy may crumble under the weight.
The reason that typical old base load nuclear plants run at 90% is simple: if one or two others have to go off grid, the rest can increase its output.
You have finally hit the crux of the issue with wind and solar generated electricity. In the case of conventional power generation when one needs more power one can increase output by just turning up the plant. This issue is taken into account when plant size is planned.
When using solar and wind one gets what one gets.If the output of solar drops one can not just turn up the wind turbines as they may also be having an issue (low or high winds). To compensate for this one must have a much bigger overhead than that with conventional generation. How much is needed is debatable. This additional overhead costs money to build and maintain and will be reflected in the cost of electricity.
Be careful about talking about averages when dealing with energy output. With conventional generation these averages are human controlled and can be adjusted to deal with issues. With wind and solar one has to look at lows and how will these lows be compensated for. If wind and solar make up for 50% of a country's electricity generation and a large winter storm passes through generation may drop to 10% of capacity for several days. Does one build 5 times the solar and wind? Does one build enough storage to deal with 40% of a country's energy needs for several days? Does one keep conventional plants at idle just in case they are needed? It will probably be a combination. One has to look at a worst case scenarios or we are inviting blackouts when these scenarios occur. To build all this redundancy will drive electricity prices up and will damage an already fragile economy.
Setting up a wind farm is soon on par with building a new coal plant, especially as coal plants become more and more expensive because of CO2 storing.
A coal plant can be scheduled to supply 90% to 100% of it's rated supply 90% of the year with short down times to deal with maintenance. It is completely predictable and controllable. A wind wind farm may produce from 0% to 100% of it electricity moment to moment based on the vagaries of the wind. It is unpredictable (it can be forecast but as all weather forecasts it may not be actualized) and can not be increased when needed. This requires much more storage to compensate for the fluctuations so the output can be controlled as needed.
The issue is not power generation it is power storage. Sure pumped hydro is an option but it can not be used everywhere.
The reasons there was only one injury are as follows;
1. Most spikers marked the trees that they spiked. The hopes were to make the trees so difficult to make safe that it was not worth cutting them down.
2. In response there was a huge increase in the sale and use of metal detectors to find and remove the spikes or sections of trees that had spikes.
3. Most times a mill blade hit spikes the blade did not shatter but just lost a few teeth making it unusable and costing the mill time and money to replace the blade. The blade that caused the injury probably shattered due to a weakness in the blade.
That only one person was injured is a testament to the procedures to find and remove the spikes and not the peaceful intentions of the protesters.
Actually it does. cross platform viruses require a common application that is they come from a situation of lack of diversity, like open office viruses.
So what software do you think companies will use on a linux platform to read and modify Office documents? I bet that will be OpenOffice. There is your common application.
So for example all desktop users use applications that assume Perl/Python scripting is available.
Here you just blow you own argument. If it is possible for a browser like Firefox (a common application) to download an execute a virus written in Perl or Python that virus will work on all flavours of Lunux. Commonality breeds venerability.
That's not what makes it effective. What is effective that a security layer or configuration can be added across the board. So for example when Microsoft wanted to move to divide user and system dll's they couldn't do anything drastic without breaking applications. Linux distributors can just change the configure step and recompile the applications.
All of that does not matter if the desktop users do not update their OS or software. Yes it is possible to keep systems updated but will people actually do it? The fact that applications can be recompiled is meaningless if people do not do it or download the updated binaries.
I'm saying the diversity and the role of distributions makes it impossible assuming a popular desktop Linux that looks like today's Linuxes.
You have pointed out a few very powerful commonalities that could leave all versions of Linux vulnerable to viruses.
Now that might be impossible and it might be that any popular Linux would look like Android and thus lose these advantages.
It looks like we almost agree. My point is that one can not guarantee that the Linux found on desktops in the future will be as secure as the Linux today.
The point is that production numbers when conditions are optimal are meaningless. This numbers make it seem that solar power is a viable alternative to the nuclear power plants that are being closed and that the cost of the electricity is comparable. The crunch comes when conditions are abysmal and there is not reliable replacement source. The only way to deal with this issue is to be able to build enough wind and solar plants to produce much more power that needed during optimal time so that during times when there are low production there would still be enough. That is what I mean by redundancy. This will cost money and will significantly increase the cost of electricity.
It is not lack of money but increased cost of the produced energy. That increase may cause increased stress on an already fragile economy.
Actually there are two parts to the program; EDWOSB and WOSB. Contracts that are open to EDWOSBs can be bid on only by EDWOSBs. Contracts that are set asside for WOSBs are open to both EDWOSBs and WOSBs. The EDWOSB program just restricts some contracts to economically disadvantaged businesses. Both WOSB end EDWOSB contracts are part of the 5%.
All EDWOSBs are also WOSBs. The only difference is that it is possible to designate certain contracts as directed at economically disadvantaged WOSBs instead or regular WOSBs. By removing the "disadvantages" part the bill makes EDWOSBs exactly the same a WOSBs.
I think it somewhat hypocritical that an owner of a business advocates designating contracts for WSOB but not EDWSOB. Why is it OK to discriminate based on gender but not gender and economic disadvantage? Perhaps because her company is not "economically disadvantaged"?
the diversity of Linux might raises the cost of malware.
This has no effect on cross platform viruses or web scripts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware
LAMP is a server package and not a desktop package.
Also the Linux distributions acting as distributors for 3rd party applications has already shown itself more abel to respond to security threats by coordinating directly between hundreds of applications for security increases
This is only effective if the desktops are updated when a new patch comes out. Servers are almost always updated because there are people to do that. Getting a desktop user to update may not happen as often.
It is possible that malware numbers may not increase but it is also possible that they may increase to some significant extent.
All I am trying to point out is that the article poster is making a huge assumption when looking at today's numbers and stating that malware on Linux is not and never will be an issue. The current numbers may change as penetration increases.
The issue that is actually brought up by quoted article is that there are many contracts to do not fall under WOSB because there are less than two women owned small businesses bidding on them. The writer and a senate bill want this restriction removed. The reason the restriction is there is that if a contract is designated WOSB by the procurement officer then all non WOSB bids are rejected and competition is between only the WSOB firms. If only one WOSB firm bids that there is no competition at all. A woman owned small business should not get a contract just because it is the only one bidding.
From the summary;
From the article: 'Wendy Frank, founder of Accell Security Inc. in Birdsboro, Pa., wishes she had more competitors.
That is not true. She wishes that the two WOSB bidder restriction was gone so that she could get contracts as a sole bidder.
It is human nature to go against government edicts. When minimum quotas are imposed resentment is created. The most effective way of protesting those edicts is to make the minimum a maximum. So when the law says that a minimum of 5% of contracts have to be awarded to women owned companies it is easy to see that eventually only 5% will be awarded. The law says it has to be at least 5% so we will make it exactly 5%.
Summer -> solar
Except on cloudy rainy days and at night
Winter -> wind
Except on calm or stormy days
I never said the growth in OSX malware was an issue today but as an indication of how a small growth in penetration will have a much larger increase in malware creation. As market penetration of Windows decreases and market penetration of Linux increases (if the poster's scenario comes true) the production of mallware for Linux will approach the production for Windows and the main reason to change to Linux will go away.
You seem to be assuming that demand will be constant throughout day and night,
That is completely untrue. I am well aware that demand is higher during the day. Many people tout solar as the fix for that issue. All I am trying to do is point out times when solar power will not be enough to deal with daytime demand.
You also seem to be assuming that solar-produced power is the only thing that will be transmitted. Here's a clue; the electrons don't care.
Where will these electrons come from? Nuclear power; not there because people are afraid of it. Wind power? May not be there due to low or high winds? Fossil fuel? Too much CO2. The point is that when people rely on power generation that is controlled by variable atmospheric conditions there will be times when not enough power is generated. Some people say that can be compensated for by more conventional plants. Since thay take days to come up to operating capacity from a cold start that would need to be maintained at idle. That costs a lot of money and would significantly increase electricity costs.
Oh no! We have to run a cable from Europe to North America! It's never been done before!!! Not even for telecommunications [wikipedia.org],
Telecommunication cables do not carry gigawatts of power. It is a very different engineering challenge to do so.
and we've never been able to create anything like the sort of cable [htstriax.com] that would be needed.
That is a superconducting cable that requires cooling to -200C with liquid nitrogen to work. Until room temperature superconductors are found this technology is not feasible for long underwater cables.
Next time you want to say something's impossible, please pick something that's actually impossible
How about this statement "It is impossible with today's technology or any technology in the foreseeable future. The OP seems to believe it can be built today and that is not true.
The 2 is due to redundancy. If one needs 1MW of power from a wind farm one mist install turbines that will produce at least twice as much under optimal conditions due to the following issues;
1. Some will be down for maintenance
2. some will be in areas where the wind is below optimal speed so the it is not generating the maximum amount of electricity
3. some will be in areas where wind speeds are above 25M/sec
4. During winter and cloudy times solar generation will be decreased therefore wind will be needed to compensate.
Solar has similar issues;
1. During winter solar panels do not operate at maximum efficiency
2. During cloudy days solar panels do not operate at maximum efficiency.
3. During times of very low or very high winds wind power generation will decrease and solar will be needed to compensate for it.
With all those factors taken into account can you see how one can not look at the rated ouput of a solar or wind generator and use that number in your supply calculations?
And you are aware that the cost of distribution is mainly covered already, as germany already has a power grid?
the European Super Grid. Someone has to pay for that grid.
The issue is that countries like Germany are already replacing reliable power with unreliable power. In doing this they are endangering the stability of the electrical grid. The difference between VOIP and electricity is that if there is a problem with the VOIP system there are still other phones that can be used. In the case of an electrical grid that relies on renewable energy, if there is a problem with the renewable energy then no one gets electricity.
That can me mitigated by keeping conventional power plants on standby but that costs money and will drive up electricity prices.