The issue is controlling/coordinating power output to match power demand, bearing in mind "the grid" has no storage capacity.
When there are thousands of uncontrollable sources the system rapidly becomes chaotic and no amount of throttling on the major generators will help, especially when you consider it takes minutes or hours for throttling changes to happen, not the second-by-second control needed to keep things stable at all levels.
Small "Green" systems need to be centrally controllable in the same way that big power plants are - but that's an expensive undertaking at nearly every step of the chain.
Fast forward 30 years and the grid will be a lot more dynamic/stable than it is now, but during the transition phase it's going to be a mess (in all countries), but it's equally likely that cottage solar/wind plants will be banned because they cause too much instability
" Imagine building a power plant and running it seven hours a year. Welcome to peaker plants."
A lot of smaller utilities (city size) use them - and in a lot of cases those peaker plants may be 80 years old.
It doesn't matter if they cost $1/kWh to run, as long as their running cost saves running into the next peak charging band from the supplier (wholesale power is priced as baseload, plus substantial premiums for peaks, so squashing the peak is worthwhile even if that means rolling blackouts in some cases)
"Without the feed-in of peak solar output and the credits that generates there is no reason not to install the batteries needed to go fully off grid where the homeowner won't be contributing anything to the grid."
You don't get subsidies if you stay offgrid, which means you get to pay the real price of all that solar kit.
A "best of both worlds" scenario would be a grid-augmented local storage system, but those are currently too expensive to consider unless you're a loooong way from the distribution lines.
Power prices are set to double in the UK over the next few years and at least half of that is down to "green" energy.
Actually, it'll more than double - because that's the guaranteed sale price of electricity produced by the (yet to be built) newest nuke power plant when it comes onstream in 10 years time.
Utilities are paying wind turbine owners NOT to hookup to the grid and to disconnect in high winds. It seems there's more money to be made not shipping out electricity than in actually doing so.
Rebuilding grids to handle multiple small inputs is a massive undertaking and the backing capacity cost is insane. The only way forward "correctly" is to mandate that "green" sources play nice with the grid or not connect at all - whilst the current setup is just turning the entire system into a blackout waiting to happen.
"Way back when", it wasn't uncommon to find all sort of voltages at varying frequency and DC, in use in the same city.
240/120V 60Hz and 220V 50Hz were standardised out of the mess, more or less by attrittion. It just so happens that the polyphase voltages are fairly close to each other too (400 vs 408V) and only the frequency changes - which is convenient for industrial systems (it also means that some countries such as the Philippines use 220V 60Hz and just to be confusing use "normal" ungrounded NEMA outlets.)
There were 250V DC distribution mains in use in Sydney Australia as recently as the 1980s.
Japan _still_ runs separate 50 and 60Hz distribution systems on the East and West sides of Honshu (the main island), at a nominal 100V, whilst down in South America at least one crossborder dam has different generation systems in the same powerhouse for the 2 diifferent countries involved.
The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Things like Colossus mostly used type 802 triodes, which were commonly used in radio transmitters too (and found themselves pressed into service in guitar amps)
During the late 1980s-early 1990s I spent a large amount of time keeping the last vestiges of a shortwave transmiting station running - and it _ate_ those valves at a prodigious rate - the average life of a 1950s-era 802 in service was about 2 weeks before emission got so low they were unusable (Yes, the 802s were 1950s-era devices. 100,000 of them acquired in 1982 at about 10c a pop)
What that meant was that 1950s era computers spent more time down for maintenance than actually running (this held true into the mid 1960s)
1960s era tubes were a lot more reliable, but germanium transistors even more reliable and so were reed relays.
Almost ALL of the major busts made in the UK so far have been purely by chance - police stumbling across the theft in action, rather than having been called out.
Whilst the UK requires that scrapyards only make electronic payments and undertake full identity verification, there's an exemption allowing cash payments to those "of no fixed abode" - the kind of exemption you can fly a squadron of aerobatic A380s through.
"A dirty bomb wouldn't kill very many people, not directly, anyways (or at least not in the short term, although it'd raise the cancer rate considerably)"
There's fairly good evidence that you'd be hard-pressed to see a cancer rater rise of more than 1-2% above background levels.
I've seen an anecdote that copper thieves around one Finnish airport left a sign on the "fiber" one saying "yeah, but we still had to dig it up to check"
1: tying a rope around the cable, attached to a quad bike. 2: 2 blokes stand at end end of the cable with sharpened spades. They stand on rubber mats. 3: At a signal (walkie talkies or mobile phone), they simultaneously chop through the cable bundle. 4: Someone on the quadbike revs up and rips the cable out of the duct.
The thieves then roll the cable up at their leisure, usually having about 25-30 minutes to finish the deed before the police show up.
It's standard practice to use vans painted up to look like genuine phone company items and for the theives themselves to dress as phone company workers
The phone company (BT OpenEeach) and UK police have implemented procedures to get faster response to cable breaks and for police to attend the area automatically - that is why the thieves have 25-30 minutes instead of the 2-4 hours they previously had. As a result several prolific gangs have been caught, but only 1 in 50 cable thefts results in anyone being apprehended.
SImilar tactics are also used to steal copper from the railway system - and that's despite cables carrying a few hundred volts.
Only the really desperate (and foolish) ones try to steal from HV switchyards. The tactic there is to throw heavy chains over incoming 250kV lines to short them out, but because power distribution systems use rebreakers, those chains generally only last a couple of minutes before they melt.
Penalties for being in a cable theft gang are esentially a slap on the wrist compared to the profits which can be made and even with recent tightening of laws, the penalties for handling stolen comms cables are laughable.
Given that railway cable thefts can (and often do) result in upwards of a half a million people being stranded (often in trains, stalled on lines), there's some traction on calls to make a specific class of offence such as "interference with transport network/endangering transport" (which also includes lasing aircraft) with non--parole terms of at least 10 years.
"The purpose of a president is not to wield power, but to distract attention from those who do"
When you realise that Dear Uncle was the guy who took down the general who started shelling South Korean islands last year (and a number of the general's body guards were killed in the takedown) and that the general in question was part of the (still powerful) Old Guard, then you realise that the figurehead supposition has legs.
It's also worth bearing in mind that Kim Jong Fatboy is only the corporeal leader. His grandfather is still officially in charge and we all know what happens when people in power claim to be channelling non-corporeal beings.
Assuming it passes, nailing patent _Trolls_ vs inventors will be the key point.
I haven't read the whole thing but I'd be _ecstatic_ if it prevents a repeat of the rambus fisasco and pretty damn happy if there are provisions to make patent submarining illegal (or at least prevents claims being made for usage prior to the patent breaking the surface and if if covers simething in widespread use, limits licensing fees to something sensible)
Trolling may be the "in" problem now, but submarining has always been an underhanded way of nobbliing the competition that needs stomping on.
Slashdot Mirror
"I wonder if he should ever have been in prison in the first place"
Yes, he should have been. The annoying thing is that he got such a light sentence for what he did. It reinforces the notion that spamming pays.
In general the courts are FAR too lenient on white collar criminals and go to the other extreme for blue collar and drug-related stuff.
The issue isn't "phasing" per se.
The issue is controlling/coordinating power output to match power demand, bearing in mind "the grid" has no storage capacity.
When there are thousands of uncontrollable sources the system rapidly becomes chaotic and no amount of throttling on the major generators will help, especially when you consider it takes minutes or hours for throttling changes to happen, not the second-by-second control needed to keep things stable at all levels.
Small "Green" systems need to be centrally controllable in the same way that big power plants are - but that's an expensive undertaking at nearly every step of the chain.
Fast forward 30 years and the grid will be a lot more dynamic/stable than it is now, but during the transition phase it's going to be a mess (in all countries), but it's equally likely that cottage solar/wind plants will be banned because they cause too much instability
" Imagine building a power plant and running it seven hours a year. Welcome to peaker plants."
A lot of smaller utilities (city size) use them - and in a lot of cases those peaker plants may be 80 years old.
It doesn't matter if they cost $1/kWh to run, as long as their running cost saves running into the next peak charging band from the supplier (wholesale power is priced as baseload, plus substantial premiums for peaks, so squashing the peak is worthwhile even if that means rolling blackouts in some cases)
"Without the feed-in of peak solar output and the credits that generates there is no reason not to install the batteries needed to go fully off grid where the homeowner won't be contributing anything to the grid."
You don't get subsidies if you stay offgrid, which means you get to pay the real price of all that solar kit.
A "best of both worlds" scenario would be a grid-augmented local storage system, but those are currently too expensive to consider unless you're a loooong way from the distribution lines.
Power prices are set to double in the UK over the next few years and at least half of that is down to "green" energy.
Actually, it'll more than double - because that's the guaranteed sale price of electricity produced by the (yet to be built) newest nuke power plant when it comes onstream in 10 years time.
Utilities are paying wind turbine owners NOT to hookup to the grid and to disconnect in high winds. It seems there's more money to be made not shipping out electricity than in actually doing so.
Rebuilding grids to handle multiple small inputs is a massive undertaking and the backing capacity cost is insane. The only way forward "correctly" is to mandate that "green" sources play nice with the grid or not connect at all - whilst the current setup is just turning the entire system into a blackout waiting to happen.
"UPS is THE worst package delivery service on the planet."
You have clearly never used Yodel (or the myriad other couriers in the UK, such as Citylink or Parcelforce)
"Way back when", it wasn't uncommon to find all sort of voltages at varying frequency and DC, in use in the same city.
240/120V 60Hz and 220V 50Hz were standardised out of the mess, more or less by attrittion. It just so happens that the polyphase voltages are fairly close to each other too (400 vs 408V) and only the frequency changes - which is convenient for industrial systems (it also means that some countries such as the Philippines use 220V 60Hz and just to be confusing use "normal" ungrounded NEMA outlets.)
There were 250V DC distribution mains in use in Sydney Australia as recently as the 1980s.
Japan _still_ runs separate 50 and 60Hz distribution systems on the East and West sides of Honshu (the main island), at a nominal 100V, whilst down in South America at least one crossborder dam has different generation systems in the same powerhouse for the 2 diifferent countries involved.
The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
I think the bigger surprise about the Mig25 was the cast iron chassis.
Things like Colossus mostly used type 802 triodes, which were commonly used in radio transmitters too (and found themselves pressed into service in guitar amps)
During the late 1980s-early 1990s I spent a large amount of time keeping the last vestiges of a shortwave transmiting station running - and it _ate_ those valves at a prodigious rate - the average life of a 1950s-era 802 in service was about 2 weeks before emission got so low they were unusable (Yes, the 802s were 1950s-era devices. 100,000 of them acquired in 1982 at about 10c a pop)
What that meant was that 1950s era computers spent more time down for maintenance than actually running (this held true into the mid 1960s)
1960s era tubes were a lot more reliable, but germanium transistors even more reliable and so were reed relays.
"That's pretty much the main danger behind it: The US are going to be seen as worse than China when it comes to security."
Funnily enough that's one of the reasons I'm advocating for NOT buying Cisco equipment in our next prchasing round.
Their recent congressional FUD campaign has had results outside of the USA, just not the ones they desire.
"Saying "sorry, won't happen again" isn't a good tactic when you are in front of the court against whom you committed the offence (;-))"
Judges tend to be overly credulous when facing members of the security and law enforcement services.
Try lifting the blades off the screen momentarily before you get into the car. Your blades will last _much_ longer.
Especially when it's freezing.
I'm nearly 50 and noisy CRT EHT transformers still drive me batshit.
Define a crime of interfering with public safety systems and use that to go after cable thieves and the twits who laze aircraft
Downed phone system = 911 not working
Downed railway signalling system = train crashes.
Blinded pilots = you get the idea.
Then you can go after the scrapyards as being accessory after the fact.
I forgot to mention.
Almost ALL of the major busts made in the UK so far have been purely by chance - police stumbling across the theft in action, rather than having been called out.
Whilst the UK requires that scrapyards only make electronic payments and undertake full identity verification, there's an exemption allowing cash payments to those "of no fixed abode" - the kind of exemption you can fly a squadron of aerobatic A380s through.
"A dirty bomb wouldn't kill very many people, not directly, anyways (or at least not in the short term, although it'd raise the cancer rate considerably)"
There's fairly good evidence that you'd be hard-pressed to see a cancer rater rise of more than 1-2% above background levels.
Dirty bombs are ALL about terrorism.
Manhole cover theft is a bad enough problem in the UK that virtually all replacements are plastic.
Seriously - and those things are generally only cast iron or steel in the first place.
"In contrast, fibre cable is useless to anyone outside of the networking industry."
random lengths of fibre are pretty much usless to anyone INSIDE the industry too.
I've seen an anecdote that copper thieves around one Finnish airport left a sign on the "fiber" one saying "yeah, but we still had to dig it up to check"
1: tying a rope around the cable, attached to a quad bike.
2: 2 blokes stand at end end of the cable with sharpened spades. They stand on rubber mats.
3: At a signal (walkie talkies or mobile phone), they simultaneously chop through the cable bundle.
4: Someone on the quadbike revs up and rips the cable out of the duct.
The thieves then roll the cable up at their leisure, usually having about 25-30 minutes to finish the deed before the police show up.
It's standard practice to use vans painted up to look like genuine phone company items and for the theives themselves to dress as phone company workers
The phone company (BT OpenEeach) and UK police have implemented procedures to get faster response to cable breaks and for police to attend the area automatically - that is why the thieves have 25-30 minutes instead of the 2-4 hours they previously had. As a result several prolific gangs have been caught, but only 1 in 50 cable thefts results in anyone being apprehended.
SImilar tactics are also used to steal copper from the railway system - and that's despite cables carrying a few hundred volts.
Only the really desperate (and foolish) ones try to steal from HV switchyards. The tactic there is to throw heavy chains over incoming 250kV lines to short them out, but because power distribution systems use rebreakers, those chains generally only last a couple of minutes before they melt.
Penalties for being in a cable theft gang are esentially a slap on the wrist compared to the profits which can be made and even with recent tightening of laws, the penalties for handling stolen comms cables are laughable.
Given that railway cable thefts can (and often do) result in upwards of a half a million people being stranded (often in trains, stalled on lines), there's some traction on calls to make a specific class of offence such as "interference with transport network/endangering transport" (which also includes lasing aircraft) with non--parole terms of at least 10 years.
"The purpose of a president is not to wield power, but to distract attention from those who do"
When you realise that Dear Uncle was the guy who took down the general who started shelling South Korean islands last year (and a number of the general's body guards were killed in the takedown) and that the general in question was part of the (still powerful) Old Guard, then you realise that the figurehead supposition has legs.
It's also worth bearing in mind that Kim Jong Fatboy is only the corporeal leader. His grandfather is still officially in charge and we all know what happens when people in power claim to be channelling non-corporeal beings.
The pedantic will tell you that a meltdown stops when the fuel is no longer at criticality to provide heat.
In any case, that's what the large concrete tub under the reactor vessel is for. It's hard to melt through concrete.
" At some point it can come back in the form of shingles in adults. "
In my case, _repeatedly_ since I was 30 years old. (3 recurrances so far)
The worst part about shingles (apart frem the sheer hell of the itch) is the high probability of secondary infections if you start scratching.
That "pox" part refers to "pock marks"
I caught mumps when I was 9 years old. It's not just testicular pain. Every lymph node in my bodu hurt.
And to cap it off, the lymph nodes behind my jaw have NEVER stopped hurting - I'm 48 now.
"WD40 is not patented."
Even if it had been at some point,that would have long-expired, given it hit the market in 1953.
WIred got pretty close to analysing the stuff - http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/st_whatsinside
Assuming it passes, nailing patent _Trolls_ vs inventors will be the key point.
I haven't read the whole thing but I'd be _ecstatic_ if it prevents a repeat of the rambus fisasco and pretty damn happy if there are provisions to make patent submarining illegal (or at least prevents claims being made for usage prior to the patent breaking the surface and if if covers simething in widespread use, limits licensing fees to something sensible)
Trolling may be the "in" problem now, but submarining has always been an underhanded way of nobbliing the competition that needs stomping on.