If you're employing people then the money you make is not purely your own doing, is it? And if you don't, the restriction doesn't apply. So no problem.
Yes, but software failures like this are a very rare cause of accidents. Vastly more common is human error, which your classic car won't help with. However when some human cockup results in a crash you'll be more likely to be injured or killed thanks to the much poorer crash safety of old cars. This will easily outweigh the tiny reduction in risk from having no software.
Imagine if you could tell your car that it only needed 30% charge during the week because you were only going back and forth to work, so the other 70% could be sold back to the grid for a profit. The car and the smart grid automatically negotiate. On Friday the car makes sure it gets up to 100% so you can take that long weekend drive.
Sell back to the grid? If I had an electric car, I wouldn't be inclined to wear out the batteries (which have a finite life in terms of number of charge cycles) doing this.I once did a back of the envelope calculation using typical lifespan data for Li-ion batteries - I'd have to sell back at a ridiculously high price to justify the loss of battery life. And even practical storage schemes like pumped storage hydro need to sell at a higher price than they buy - a cost that typically isn't included in the cost of electricity estimates of wind and solar (which is fair enough as it's too dependent on other factors, but something that needs to be considered). Moot point though, as electric cars will stay uneconomic unless there's an huge and unexpected drop in battery costs or oil prices skyrocket.
We can only predict demand for large regions, not locally.
That's all we need, thanks to the grid averaging out demand fluctuations over space. The high reliability of the current grid is evidence for that.
Thing is that is never, every does die down for hours or days. At least, not everywhere.
Really? I've seen it happen on UK grid monitoring webpages (e.g. here)- wind generation under 10% of total installed capacity for hours at a time is quite common. In fact output varies quite savagely, presumably due to the cube-law dependence of output on wind speed. People often claim that "the wind is always blowing somewhere", but the data suggests "not enough it isn't".
With something like wind and individual turbine failing will drop maybe 20MW. Wind speed changes slowly, so if it is 20 knts now it won't be less than 18 or 19 knts in 20 minutes time, giving plenty of opportunity to spool up other sources.
Which other sources though? Renewables (except hydro and biomass, which are limited) can't be spooled up, they either generate or not depending on the availability of the resource. You can predict that you won't have power, but then you need to do something about it. Turning fridges off will only help on a much shorter timescale.
In contrast, handling a power station failure is a solved problem with the existing grid, as are demand surges. Solving problems that have already been solved isn't a compelling reason for something.
Any average, ordinary person would be put to sleep if you started describing what you do for a living. If a programmer has even an once of social skills, they learn to not talk about their job with the average Joe.
That's true of most jobs. How many people want to hear about the details of accountancy, plumbing, corporate law or secretarial work, for example?
Plumbers and mechanics generally work on things other people have designed. Repair/technician work needs far less thought and understanding than engineering & design does. You can learn how to do mechanic work in fairly little time - I went from not knowing anything about cars to being able to do all my maintenance and repairs (so far) in hardly any time at all. Can I do it as quickly and effectively as a professional mechanic? No. But I can do it, whereas I doubt anyone could learn to design and build a complicated piece of software in such a short time.
You are right that we try to balance load, but we are not very good at it. For example electricity is cheap at night but most people's hot water heaters come on during the day just before they need to use it. A well insulated storage tank can easily use cheap off-peak electricity and store that energy for later, especially if the grid itself can tell it when it is best to turn the heater on. At 2AM there might be a little drop in the local wind capacity, but we know it will pick up by 4AM, so the heater can just wait.
OK, but this isn't much "smarter" than the current off-peak system, and I very much doubt that anyone with an off peak tariff and an electric storage heater will run the heater at peak times unless the stored water runs out. That defeats the whole point of storage heating. Not to mention that using electric heating instead of gas just so you have somewhere to dump excess production is quite spectacularly inefficient and costly.
Water heaters will be partially replaced by solar anyway. Solar thermal heating is incredibly efficient and works even on heavily overcast days. Even when the sky is cloudy about 80% of the sun's energy still reaches the surface of the earth, and solar thermal can be 75% efficient.
Forgot to mention - according to this link, a typical solar water heating system will cost £4800 and save £60 per year. In other words, uneconomic - you'd never pay back the costs given typical interest rates. The system can't replace a conventional heater, only supplement it, so you don't even save on the capital costs of your gas or electric heater.
This is what I mean - stuff that sounds good superficially but just doesn't add up under closer scrutiny.
Well, it's not that hard to understand, and it's not really my fault if you can't be bothered to find out about it. A smart grid is able to react to changing power availability and demands quickly. Say there is a momentary spike in usage, the smart grid can ask devices with a lot of thermal mass to back off a little if it won't cause them any problems, e.g. a fridge gaining 0.1C over ten minutes.
Momentary spikes in usage aren't the problem though - the existing grid can cope with these already. The problem is variation in supply - e.g. if the wind dies down for hours or days, or solar being unavailable at night or in the winter months. How will it help with this?
There is also the ability to much more accurately predict demand and supply through monitoring and reporting.
We're already good at accurate demand prediction - it's important in order to plan & control the output of current power stations.
All that means you need less standby capacity
How? This hasn't been shown.Turning fridges off for 15 minutes isn't going to help with the timescales that solar/wind/etc. intermittency operates on.
This is what I mean by "hand wave" - just words, no numbers or data, and the words aren't convincing. No, I don't expect full detail in a Slashdot post but I haven't seen it anywhere and it's not for lack of looking.
It's about reducing energy consumption by making buildings more efficient and building a smart grid that can manage the load and store energy.
That would be fine if the smart grid advocates ever got beyond a hand-wave "smart grid magically fixes intermittency" statement. Exactly *how* is this supposed to happen? We already have mechanisms for spreading the load (off-peak tariffs and so forth). The only technology that is even vaguely economic for storage is pumped storage hydro, which is limited in where you can put it and costs money. And building insulation isn't going to help with electicity as electricity generally isn't used for building heating precisely because it's a lot more expensive than gas.
1) Hydrogen can't be piped through pipelines of any non-trivial length. Well, technically you can make hydrogen leak-proof pipeline but then you can burn dollar bills for heating.
Before natural gas became wideley used it was common to pipe "coal gas" into people's houses. That was typically ~ 50% hydrogen. Does piping pure hydrogen present that much more of a challenge?
A 25 euro per month premium is quite a lot though - it's about double the typical premium for FTTC over normal ADSL in the UK. The major ISPs here seem to view the market as very price sensitive, and are pretty cautious about taking risks. In fact I'm surprised that BT decided to go for any kind of faster-than-ADSL network rollout - they usually prefer to milk what they've got.
For new builds of course, FTTH makes perfect sense as you've got to lay cable anyway - but there aren't many new builds here despite a real need and silly housing prices. But that's a different issue.
Because that's what this is all about. It's yet another excuse not to make the investment we've all been waiting so long for.
You've been waiting for maybe - there's not much point in having a whizz-bang FTTH network if it's too expensive to afford. Better to have something that's a much lower cost and good enough for most people. How many people would even notice the difference between 40 Mbps FTTC and 1 Gbps FTTH?
Open plan has its problems too. My office is open plan, and I'm often badly distracted from work by colleagues' conversations, phone calls etc. The biggest problem is when doing mathematics (e.g. calculus based derivations), in which case there's often no option but to leave and find an empty meeting room. But even less mind-intense work is less efficient with all that background noise.
I watched many many episodes of doctor who in the early 1980's and loved them at the time, but recently I tried watching some of these classics and found that they are just too unbearably slow. However the new doctor who episodes from the past decade are completely awesome
Odd, I find the new ones unbearably fast. Same for a lot of new TV and film in general, like the latest Star Trek films. Granted, the very early Doctor Whos (e.g. Hartnell era) were extremely slow, but by the time you got to Pertwee & Baker they'd pretty much got it right. Now they just seem to be going for the "attention span of a goldfish" market.
You at least have a degree of choice as to what your radioactive waste is, unlike fission, and can avoid long-lived isotopes or ones which will be easily released in an accident. At Fukushima the public hazard came from iodine and caesium isotopes and little else, because they were the only ones that were particularly volatile. Activated structural steel is unlikely to go anywhere.
Reminds me of Terry Pratchett's anecdote about accidentally ordering Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant. The waitress brought him Thousand Island dressing and a bottle of chilli sauce.
Oh, also; why is it that no UK ISP is offering wires only service? All of them tie you into having a live phone line to make calls with even if you never use it. Telewest
used to offer that till they became NTL and then Virgin.
Virgin do a phone line free broadband service. But in the case of ADSL, you still need the physical line, the exchange buildings, the equipment at the end - it's going to cost them almost as much to supply a broadband only service as a broadband + phone service.
How can the sea form a waveguide? Even if the water bottom was perfectly reflecting (it's not), there's still the spreading in the horizontal directions. IIRC, the level typically drops to less than 170 dB at 1 km from the source. Blue whales can produce nearly 190 dB and sperm whales well over 200.
Do you have any idea how well sound travels through water? Because of the much higher density it travels much further, much faster than it does through air.
That is true, but doesn't change the inverse square law (or just inverse law if we're talking about amplitude). And the energy is mostly directed downwards due to interference with the reflection from the water surface and the design of the airgun array. It could travel a long way by repeatedly reflecting off the water bottom and the surface, but again this will weaken it considerably. The net result is that is only very loud close to the source.
They use "air guns" or something to map underwater oil deposits. Basically make an extremely loud noise and listen for it to bounce back from *beneath* the bottom of the ocean. That's got to deafen the shit out of whales and all the other creatures in the ocean.
Indeed they do, but it's standard practice to "soft start", i.e. start with low intensity pulses and gradually increase in order to give marine mammals chance to keep enough distance. Also there are observers on the ships to look out for any creatures that might be affected and stop if necessary.
You'd still be receiving the live broadcast, and it's receiving it (not watching it) that needs the licence. Similarly if you use an old fashioned VCR to record the TV signal but only put it on a screen later, you need a licence. They're not quite silly enough to leave such an obvious loophole.
but thought they should be allowed to get away with it. i.e. people like you.
If he doesn't watch live TV, he's not doing anything "get away with". It's perfectly legal to watch iPlayer without a licence (except the live streams).
Actually, my office has one of these NFC systems. It's acceptable givent there's never more than £10 in the account it's linked to, which is completely separate from my bank account. No way in hell would I trust my main bank account to a system like that.
Fibre as a replacement for the copper local loop doesn't need repeaters. The typical range of GPON is about 20 km, which is far longer than any copper loop. You can achieve blackout availability by the rather simple measure of having a battery at the user's premises to power the fibre terminating equipment.
So they'd just stick the equivalent charge for your voice service (which is really almost entirely paying for the physical infrastructure) on your DSL bill instead. Bundling is common in such situations, because it doesn't really cost them significantly more to provide line + voice service than line alone.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're employing people then the money you make is not purely your own doing, is it? And if you don't, the restriction doesn't apply. So no problem.
There's no fundamental right to a fat profit.
Energy lost in transmission is about 7%, not 50%.
Yes, but software failures like this are a very rare cause of accidents. Vastly more common is human error, which your classic car won't help with. However when some human cockup results in a crash you'll be more likely to be injured or killed thanks to the much poorer crash safety of old cars. This will easily outweigh the tiny reduction in risk from having no software.
Imagine if you could tell your car that it only needed 30% charge during the week because you were only going back and forth to work, so the other 70% could be sold back to the grid for a profit. The car and the smart grid automatically negotiate. On Friday the car makes sure it gets up to 100% so you can take that long weekend drive.
Sell back to the grid? If I had an electric car, I wouldn't be inclined to wear out the batteries (which have a finite life in terms of number of charge cycles) doing this.I once did a back of the envelope calculation using typical lifespan data for Li-ion batteries - I'd have to sell back at a ridiculously high price to justify the loss of battery life. And even practical storage schemes like pumped storage hydro need to sell at a higher price than they buy - a cost that typically isn't included in the cost of electricity estimates of wind and solar (which is fair enough as it's too dependent on other factors, but something that needs to be considered). Moot point though, as electric cars will stay uneconomic unless there's an huge and unexpected drop in battery costs or oil prices skyrocket.
We can only predict demand for large regions, not locally.
That's all we need, thanks to the grid averaging out demand fluctuations over space. The high reliability of the current grid is evidence for that.
Thing is that is never, every does die down for hours or days. At least, not everywhere.
Really? I've seen it happen on UK grid monitoring webpages (e.g. here)- wind generation under 10% of total installed capacity for hours at a time is quite common. In fact output varies quite savagely, presumably due to the cube-law dependence of output on wind speed. People often claim that "the wind is always blowing somewhere", but the data suggests "not enough it isn't".
With something like wind and individual turbine failing will drop maybe 20MW. Wind speed changes slowly, so if it is 20 knts now it won't be less than 18 or 19 knts in 20 minutes time, giving plenty of opportunity to spool up other sources.
Which other sources though? Renewables (except hydro and biomass, which are limited) can't be spooled up, they either generate or not depending on the availability of the resource. You can predict that you won't have power, but then you need to do something about it. Turning fridges off will only help on a much shorter timescale.
In contrast, handling a power station failure is a solved problem with the existing grid, as are demand surges. Solving problems that have already been solved isn't a compelling reason for something.
Any average, ordinary person would be put to sleep if you started describing what you do for a living. If a programmer has even an once of social skills, they learn to not talk about their job with the average Joe.
That's true of most jobs. How many people want to hear about the details of accountancy, plumbing, corporate law or secretarial work, for example?
Plumbers and mechanics generally work on things other people have designed. Repair/technician work needs far less thought and understanding than engineering & design does. You can learn how to do mechanic work in fairly little time - I went from not knowing anything about cars to being able to do all my maintenance and repairs (so far) in hardly any time at all. Can I do it as quickly and effectively as a professional mechanic? No. But I can do it, whereas I doubt anyone could learn to design and build a complicated piece of software in such a short time.
You are right that we try to balance load, but we are not very good at it. For example electricity is cheap at night but most people's hot water heaters come on during the day just before they need to use it. A well insulated storage tank can easily use cheap off-peak electricity and store that energy for later, especially if the grid itself can tell it when it is best to turn the heater on. At 2AM there might be a little drop in the local wind capacity, but we know it will pick up by 4AM, so the heater can just wait.
OK, but this isn't much "smarter" than the current off-peak system, and I very much doubt that anyone with an off peak tariff and an electric storage heater will run the heater at peak times unless the stored water runs out. That defeats the whole point of storage heating. Not to mention that using electric heating instead of gas just so you have somewhere to dump excess production is quite spectacularly inefficient and costly.
Water heaters will be partially replaced by solar anyway. Solar thermal heating is incredibly efficient and works even on heavily overcast days. Even when the sky is cloudy about 80% of the sun's energy still reaches the surface of the earth, and solar thermal can be 75% efficient.
Forgot to mention - according to this link, a typical solar water heating system will cost £4800 and save £60 per year. In other words, uneconomic - you'd never pay back the costs given typical interest rates. The system can't replace a conventional heater, only supplement it, so you don't even save on the capital costs of your gas or electric heater.
This is what I mean - stuff that sounds good superficially but just doesn't add up under closer scrutiny.
Well, it's not that hard to understand, and it's not really my fault if you can't be bothered to find out about it. A smart grid is able to react to changing power availability and demands quickly. Say there is a momentary spike in usage, the smart grid can ask devices with a lot of thermal mass to back off a little if it won't cause them any problems, e.g. a fridge gaining 0.1C over ten minutes.
Momentary spikes in usage aren't the problem though - the existing grid can cope with these already. The problem is variation in supply - e.g. if the wind dies down for hours or days, or solar being unavailable at night or in the winter months. How will it help with this?
There is also the ability to much more accurately predict demand and supply through monitoring and reporting.
We're already good at accurate demand prediction - it's important in order to plan & control the output of current power stations.
All that means you need less standby capacity
How? This hasn't been shown.Turning fridges off for 15 minutes isn't going to help with the timescales that solar/wind/etc. intermittency operates on.
This is what I mean by "hand wave" - just words, no numbers or data, and the words aren't convincing. No, I don't expect full detail in a Slashdot post but I haven't seen it anywhere and it's not for lack of looking.
It's about reducing energy consumption by making buildings more efficient and building a smart grid that can manage the load and store energy.
That would be fine if the smart grid advocates ever got beyond a hand-wave "smart grid magically fixes intermittency" statement. Exactly *how* is this supposed to happen? We already have mechanisms for spreading the load (off-peak tariffs and so forth). The only technology that is even vaguely economic for storage is pumped storage hydro, which is limited in where you can put it and costs money. And building insulation isn't going to help with electicity as electricity generally isn't used for building heating precisely because it's a lot more expensive than gas.
1) Hydrogen can't be piped through pipelines of any non-trivial length. Well, technically you can make hydrogen leak-proof pipeline but then you can burn dollar bills for heating.
Before natural gas became wideley used it was common to pipe "coal gas" into people's houses. That was typically ~ 50% hydrogen. Does piping pure hydrogen present that much more of a challenge?
A 25 euro per month premium is quite a lot though - it's about double the typical premium for FTTC over normal ADSL in the UK. The major ISPs here seem to view the market as very price sensitive, and are pretty cautious about taking risks. In fact I'm surprised that BT decided to go for any kind of faster-than-ADSL network rollout - they usually prefer to milk what they've got.
For new builds of course, FTTH makes perfect sense as you've got to lay cable anyway - but there aren't many new builds here despite a real need and silly housing prices. But that's a different issue.
Because that's what this is all about. It's yet another excuse not to make the investment we've all been waiting so long for.
You've been waiting for maybe - there's not much point in having a whizz-bang FTTH network if it's too expensive to afford. Better to have something that's a much lower cost and good enough for most people. How many people would even notice the difference between 40 Mbps FTTC and 1 Gbps FTTH?
If this design is a: open plan
Open plan has its problems too. My office is open plan, and I'm often badly distracted from work by colleagues' conversations, phone calls etc. The biggest problem is when doing mathematics (e.g. calculus based derivations), in which case there's often no option but to leave and find an empty meeting room. But even less mind-intense work is less efficient with all that background noise.
I watched many many episodes of doctor who in the early 1980's and loved them at the time, but recently I tried watching some of these classics and found that they are just too unbearably slow. However the new doctor who episodes from the past decade are completely awesome
Odd, I find the new ones unbearably fast. Same for a lot of new TV and film in general, like the latest Star Trek films. Granted, the very early Doctor Whos (e.g. Hartnell era) were extremely slow, but by the time you got to Pertwee & Baker they'd pretty much got it right. Now they just seem to be going for the "attention span of a goldfish" market.
You at least have a degree of choice as to what your radioactive waste is, unlike fission, and can avoid long-lived isotopes or ones which will be easily released in an accident. At Fukushima the public hazard came from iodine and caesium isotopes and little else, because they were the only ones that were particularly volatile. Activated structural steel is unlikely to go anywhere.
Reminds me of Terry Pratchett's anecdote about accidentally ordering Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant. The waitress brought him Thousand Island dressing and a bottle of chilli sauce.
Oh, also; why is it that no UK ISP is offering wires only service? All of them tie you into having a live phone line to make calls with even if you never use it. Telewest
used to offer that till they became NTL and then Virgin.
Virgin do a phone line free broadband service. But in the case of ADSL, you still need the physical line, the exchange buildings, the equipment at the end - it's going to cost them almost as much to supply a broadband only service as a broadband + phone service.
How can the sea form a waveguide? Even if the water bottom was perfectly reflecting (it's not), there's still the spreading in the horizontal directions. IIRC, the level typically drops to less than 170 dB at 1 km from the source. Blue whales can produce nearly 190 dB and sperm whales well over 200.
Do you have any idea how well sound travels through water? Because of the much higher density it travels much further, much faster than it does through air.
That is true, but doesn't change the inverse square law (or just inverse law if we're talking about amplitude). And the energy is mostly directed downwards due to interference with the reflection from the water surface and the design of the airgun array. It could travel a long way by repeatedly reflecting off the water bottom and the surface, but again this will weaken it considerably. The net result is that is only very loud close to the source.
They use "air guns" or something to map underwater oil deposits. Basically make an extremely loud noise and listen for it to bounce back from *beneath* the bottom of the ocean. That's got to deafen the shit out of whales and all the other creatures in the ocean.
Indeed they do, but it's standard practice to "soft start", i.e. start with low intensity pulses and gradually increase in order to give marine mammals chance to keep enough distance. Also there are observers on the ships to look out for any creatures that might be affected and stop if necessary.
You'd still be receiving the live broadcast, and it's receiving it (not watching it) that needs the licence. Similarly if you use an old fashioned VCR to record the TV signal but only put it on a screen later, you need a licence. They're not quite silly enough to leave such an obvious loophole.
but thought they should be allowed to get away with it. i.e. people like you.
If he doesn't watch live TV, he's not doing anything "get away with". It's perfectly legal to watch iPlayer without a licence (except the live streams).
£3-4? Isn't that what cash is for?
Actually, my office has one of these NFC systems. It's acceptable givent there's never more than £10 in the account it's linked to, which is completely separate from my bank account. No way in hell would I trust my main bank account to a system like that.
Fibre as a replacement for the copper local loop doesn't need repeaters. The typical range of GPON is about 20 km, which is far longer than any copper loop. You can achieve blackout availability by the rather simple measure of having a battery at the user's premises to power the fibre terminating equipment.
So they'd just stick the equivalent charge for your voice service (which is really almost entirely paying for the physical infrastructure) on your DSL bill instead. Bundling is common in such situations, because it doesn't really cost them significantly more to provide line + voice service than line alone.