BUT, they still need the full complement of diesel generators for those times when the sun doesn't shine enough to keep the batteries charged.
I'm not sure that you've got much of a grasp on the idea of what a tropical island is. Even 70% cloud cover during a day of tropical sunlight would probably deliver far more power than the same panels where you are. Plus, monocultures suck - even those diesel generators currently used have other diesel generators to fall back on - maybe it's better for you if you think of the solar as the backup for the diesel since that is vunerable to anything that holds up fuel shipping to the islands no matter how many backups it has.
Of course, if you don't mind going back to the stone age from time to time
A bit of Freudian slip there I think - opposing the advance of technology just because "The Party" says Komrades like you should strive against the dread spirit of innovation. It's really funny, in the 1970s conservatives would have been right behind this sort of thing as a shining example of American greatness - but now you just want to drag everything down only because it looks like it could match the policy of another party. It's shit like that which is on the trajectory to the stone age.
There is a kernel of seriousness to this: the problem with Hawaiian solar is that there just isn't enough acreage on Kauai, Maui, Molokai and Oahu that you can pave over with solar collectors without it ruining the environmental esthetics
They do not need 200GW of power for the less than one and a half million people on those islands - thus there is plenty of acreage without even getting past the urban fringe with solar. Presumably that will not be the only method of electricity generation in those islands as well due to monocultures delivering single points of failure.
The only question here is if the above poster made a mistake of a few orders of magnitude or is deliberately insulting the intelligence of everyone here by suggesting things at such an utterly ridiculous scale. There has been a lot of that latter around here lately, I wonder if it's "social media workers" earning a buck attacking anything that looks as if challenges current energy infrastructure.
Considering you are arguing against reality there's got to be some strong motive such as politics in such madness - plus it's all out of a worn party playbook, you're something like the 20th partisan prick that's attempted this misinformation here this year and it's only March. How about thinking for yourself instead of following some bullshit "talking points" dreamed up by a political intern much dumber and younger than you?
Only if you think the current administration would see it in their best interest to pursue that litigation
The chance to jail a hated political rival who is likely to cause trouble in the future? Of course it's in their best interest and if they actually had a case they would jump at the chance. That's why the conspiracy theory is so fucking dumb.
I suppose I can disconnect it from my wifi like you said and then get a Chromecast stick or some such plug-in device
Or you could just use it as a monitor for a PC and watch shows that way (I do that but it is a very cheap TV not a "smart" one), but cabling hassles etc get in the way for most people (plus MS Windows sucks with multiple screens that are not on at all times). What about finding out where the microphone is and just block it's ability to pick anything up?
Also not sure how much scaling benefit there is past 64 cores (128 threads) in one chasis
There is a massive benefit in situations such as a lot of parallel tasks using the same dataset shared in memory. I/O only matters with getting things in and out and a lot of tasks are CPU bound instead of I/O bound. The demo task they used, processing of seismic data, is a good example of that sort of task. Think of things like applying the exact same filter to a few million audio tracks for an idea of how parallel the tasks can be, and think of mixing based on location and time of millions of audio tracks to get an idea of how good it is to do it all on the same machine with shared memory.
I mentioned gas as well (not as a backup but as it's actually used, as a peaking power source) to avoid smug little rants like yours. What's with all the charging at windmills?
What we need is something like the liquid metal battery
You have a fucking enormous grid spread over a lot of timezones with HVDC links all over the place reducing the losses to the point where storage looks incredibly stupid unless there is some other way around it. Storage is very lossy, even liquid metal batteries. Compressed air is indeed about as lossy as it gets but all storage methods suck in comparison to just bringing another small generator on line as needed.
ionospheric capacitor
Tinfoil hat time! Tesla had the excuse that tiny fragments of very weird information were all that was available about the ionosphere, so he thought he'd give a few things a go and see if they worked or not. You don't.
I will not go into my qualifications to discuss the issue
I actually don't know a lot about pumped hydro I was just giving an example, besides, this discussion is at the high school level anyway.
You deliberately equated capacity factor with unavoidable downtime. You are obviously doing it to manipulate for partisan political reasons. It's annoying as fuck that power generation has been chosen as a point of difference between parties and that I get exposed to people like you. It's even more annoying that you cannot work that out from a more polite post.
From the start I thought you were an evil piece of shit attempting to corrupt the youth here with your rancid luddite political agenda but I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in case you could convince me otherwise. That's the thing with you pricks, you take someone giving you the benefit of the doubt as agreement. That last attempted move of the goalposts must have been time consuming so I'm somewhat offended that you thought for so long that I would fall for such a pathetic weasel trick. I didn't think I could think any less of you. I was wrong.
My point unfortunately is that you were not playing at being dumb. Best comment on something you know about if you do not wish to be laughed at. Most hydro around the world uses something close to the normal flow of whatever body of water they are located on. Most hydro around the world is base load power.
Not quite but close with lvm snapshotting. On linux you get better performance now, and probably for the next year, on ext4 plus lvm2 but ZFS on *bsd and solaris is a bit of a step up from that again. That stupidly old IDE box I mentioned can still saturate gigabit, which I'm certain is better performing than whatever you tried to set up that disappointed you. Quick questions - was your failed ZFS setup on linux? Was it a couple of years ago?
Cool - so with that Niagara plant running all the time that means you'll be able to walk from Cleveland to Canada across the bed of Lake Erie? Or does it mean you are incorrect? Hoover would have thought? How about those Canadians running hydro all the time - dam nation!
How convenient it is that you overlooked wind, gas, thermal co-generation and other non-solar generating sources with low capacity factor.
Most of the time the stuff is offline because the are not needed at that moment FFS - hence the low capacity factor that manipulative folks pretend means the generating source is no good.
GP's comment had nothing to do with human choices
The GP's comment was really just pushing a political party line and was somewhat orthogonal to reality. I didn't point it out because is should have been obvious.
You THINK you set it up properly. Sometimes you don't get to find out if you did or didn't on your first attempt with things. For example, deduplication is a trap for new players - don't do it unless you have a LOT of memory. There are a few others, such as incorrect block sizes on recent drives that can really kill performance on both ZFS and RAID. Also ZFS on linux still kind of sucks in terms of performance and was even worse a year ago - it has a long way to go to catch up with the *bsd versions or on even Solaris10.
How about a free computer out of dumpster? All I'm referring to is a poster above getting insulting over the obvious that a new Xeon is not the cheapest CPU available. For some reason it annoyed me so I posted out of boredom or something instead of letting it go.
Why not just come out and say you don't believe me or don't want others to believe me?
People who honestly doubt what I've written should just look it up.
they generate when THEY want to generate, not when you want them to
I really can't understand why some people today have such a naive idea about capitalism and also state run generators. In the former, they have to generate when wanted or they don't make money, in the latter they have to do what they are told or people get fired. There's no magic independence from the rest of the world that comes with owning a windmill.
I've got a 32 bit Pentium 4 thing with 16 IDE disks and only 2GB of memory dusted off and used as a test box every now and again (good for teaching people how to replace drives, configuring pools etc). Your hardware is not the problem and neither is ZFS, the problem is more likely to be that ZFS is not trivial to set up so I'd say something went wrong on what seems to be your one and only attempt. The tool isn't bad but not learning how to use it can lead to bad results.
That said, if ext4 and hardware RAID works for you go for it.
Currently performance sucks compared with ZFS on other platforms. That is changing but for now "works just fine" means doing file operations eventually instead of running smoothly. For a single user on a desktop PC it kind of works. For a file server used for staging backups, kind of gets there in the end. For a multi-user fileserver with even low usage, it can't keep up, switch to *bsd and try again after the linux port is more mature.
commercialize the technology to store large amounts of electricity
I did some work at one of those places you appear to think don't exist in 1996, and that pump storage plant was not new at the time. We certainly have the technology but you are looking at things the wrong way around. Since all storage methods are lossy the answer that has already happened is having a lot of little distributed generators (since gas is currently cheap that's where that huge percentage of gas has come from) that can be switched in as required by demand. The problem you are going on about has really already been solved at both ends.
What I see in a lot of posts here is one dimensional thinking of single windmills (what do you do if there is no wind people cry - the blatantly obvious answer, already done, is build in more than one place!) or similar that ignore the existence of grids and interconnections between grids so assume that their single generator from their 1D thinking should have it's stuff stored when there is no demand for it. That's a very limited way of looking at things and it's almost always going to lead to very unrealistic conclusions. For a start, the low hydro number ignores the vast amount of power coming into the grid from Canada.
Considering solar is used in summer at the Dome A camp a long way south in Antarctica it's not such a silly idea to use solar cut down on fuel usage for power generation in Alaska which gets far more sunlight. Apparently the panels were incredibly easy to install at Dome A - mounted vertically on poles!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that you've got much of a grasp on the idea of what a tropical island is. Even 70% cloud cover during a day of tropical sunlight would probably deliver far more power than the same panels where you are. Plus, monocultures suck - even those diesel generators currently used have other diesel generators to fall back on - maybe it's better for you if you think of the solar as the backup for the diesel since that is vunerable to anything that holds up fuel shipping to the islands no matter how many backups it has.
A bit of Freudian slip there I think - opposing the advance of technology just because "The Party" says Komrades like you should strive against the dread spirit of innovation.
It's really funny, in the 1970s conservatives would have been right behind this sort of thing as a shining example of American greatness - but now you just want to drag everything down only because it looks like it could match the policy of another party.
It's shit like that which is on the trajectory to the stone age.
They do not need 200GW of power for the less than one and a half million people on those islands - thus there is plenty of acreage without even getting past the urban fringe with solar. Presumably that will not be the only method of electricity generation in those islands as well due to monocultures delivering single points of failure.
The only question here is if the above poster made a mistake of a few orders of magnitude or is deliberately insulting the intelligence of everyone here by suggesting things at such an utterly ridiculous scale. There has been a lot of that latter around here lately, I wonder if it's "social media workers" earning a buck attacking anything that looks as if challenges current energy infrastructure.
Considering you are arguing against reality there's got to be some strong motive such as politics in such madness - plus it's all out of a worn party playbook, you're something like the 20th partisan prick that's attempted this misinformation here this year and it's only March. How about thinking for yourself instead of following some bullshit "talking points" dreamed up by a political intern much dumber and younger than you?
The chance to jail a hated political rival who is likely to cause trouble in the future? Of course it's in their best interest and if they actually had a case they would jump at the chance.
That's why the conspiracy theory is so fucking dumb.
Or you could just use it as a monitor for a PC and watch shows that way (I do that but it is a very cheap TV not a "smart" one), but cabling hassles etc get in the way for most people (plus MS Windows sucks with multiple screens that are not on at all times). What about finding out where the microphone is and just block it's ability to pick anything up?
That conspiracy theory no longer works because now Hillary is not in power. You need a new one.
There is a massive benefit in situations such as a lot of parallel tasks using the same dataset shared in memory. I/O only matters with getting things in and out and a lot of tasks are CPU bound instead of I/O bound. The demo task they used, processing of seismic data, is a good example of that sort of task. Think of things like applying the exact same filter to a few million audio tracks for an idea of how parallel the tasks can be, and think of mixing based on location and time of millions of audio tracks to get an idea of how good it is to do it all on the same machine with shared memory.
I mentioned gas as well (not as a backup but as it's actually used, as a peaking power source) to avoid smug little rants like yours. What's with all the charging at windmills?
You have a fucking enormous grid spread over a lot of timezones with HVDC links all over the place reducing the losses to the point where storage looks incredibly stupid unless there is some other way around it. Storage is very lossy, even liquid metal batteries. Compressed air is indeed about as lossy as it gets but all storage methods suck in comparison to just bringing another small generator on line as needed.
Tinfoil hat time! Tesla had the excuse that tiny fragments of very weird information were all that was available about the ionosphere, so he thought he'd give a few things a go and see if they worked or not. You don't.
I actually don't know a lot about pumped hydro I was just giving an example, besides, this discussion is at the high school level anyway.
You deliberately equated capacity factor with unavoidable downtime. You are obviously doing it to manipulate for partisan political reasons. It's annoying as fuck that power generation has been chosen as a point of difference between parties and that I get exposed to people like you.
It's even more annoying that you cannot work that out from a more polite post.
Many do.
It's best not to just make things up on a site like this where others actually know something about the topic.
From the start I thought you were an evil piece of shit attempting to corrupt the youth here with your rancid luddite political agenda but I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in case you could convince me otherwise.
That's the thing with you pricks, you take someone giving you the benefit of the doubt as agreement.
That last attempted move of the goalposts must have been time consuming so I'm somewhat offended that you thought for so long that I would fall for such a pathetic weasel trick. I didn't think I could think any less of you. I was wrong.
My point unfortunately is that you were not playing at being dumb. Best comment on something you know about if you do not wish to be laughed at. Most hydro around the world uses something close to the normal flow of whatever body of water they are located on. Most hydro around the world is base load power.
Not quite but close with lvm snapshotting. On linux you get better performance now, and probably for the next year, on ext4 plus lvm2 but ZFS on *bsd and solaris is a bit of a step up from that again. That stupidly old IDE box I mentioned can still saturate gigabit, which I'm certain is better performing than whatever you tried to set up that disappointed you.
Quick questions - was your failed ZFS setup on linux? Was it a couple of years ago?
The reservoir gets empty.
Cool - so with that Niagara plant running all the time that means you'll be able to walk from Cleveland to Canada across the bed of Lake Erie? Or does it mean you are incorrect?
Hoover would have thought?
How about those Canadians running hydro all the time - dam nation!
Most of the time the stuff is offline because the are not needed at that moment FFS - hence the low capacity factor that manipulative folks pretend means the generating source is no good.
The GP's comment was really just pushing a political party line and was somewhat orthogonal to reality. I didn't point it out because is should have been obvious.
You THINK you set it up properly. Sometimes you don't get to find out if you did or didn't on your first attempt with things.
For example, deduplication is a trap for new players - don't do it unless you have a LOT of memory. There are a few others, such as incorrect block sizes on recent drives that can really kill performance on both ZFS and RAID. Also ZFS on linux still kind of sucks in terms of performance and was even worse a year ago - it has a long way to go to catch up with the *bsd versions or on even Solaris10.
How about a free computer out of dumpster? All I'm referring to is a poster above getting insulting over the obvious that a new Xeon is not the cheapest CPU available. For some reason it annoyed me so I posted out of boredom or something instead of letting it go.
People who honestly doubt what I've written should just look it up.
I really can't understand why some people today have such a naive idea about capitalism and also state run generators. In the former, they have to generate when wanted or they don't make money, in the latter they have to do what they are told or people get fired. There's no magic independence from the rest of the world that comes with owning a windmill.
NONE of that is even related to your little luddite unanswerable doubt sowing comment of:
Why do you keep on trying to throw in all these distractions? None of it excuses the way you acted.
NP - those ground up birds are just part of making America grate again.
Not bullshit I'd say, just using "very expensive" in comparison with the bottom end desktop CPUs around the $50 mark.
I've got a 32 bit Pentium 4 thing with 16 IDE disks and only 2GB of memory dusted off and used as a test box every now and again (good for teaching people how to replace drives, configuring pools etc). Your hardware is not the problem and neither is ZFS, the problem is more likely to be that ZFS is not trivial to set up so I'd say something went wrong on what seems to be your one and only attempt.
The tool isn't bad but not learning how to use it can lead to bad results.
That said, if ext4 and hardware RAID works for you go for it.
Currently performance sucks compared with ZFS on other platforms. That is changing but for now "works just fine" means doing file operations eventually instead of running smoothly.
For a single user on a desktop PC it kind of works. For a file server used for staging backups, kind of gets there in the end. For a multi-user fileserver with even low usage, it can't keep up, switch to *bsd and try again after the linux port is more mature.
I did some work at one of those places you appear to think don't exist in 1996, and that pump storage plant was not new at the time. We certainly have the technology but you are looking at things the wrong way around. Since all storage methods are lossy the answer that has already happened is having a lot of little distributed generators (since gas is currently cheap that's where that huge percentage of gas has come from) that can be switched in as required by demand. The problem you are going on about has really already been solved at both ends.
What I see in a lot of posts here is one dimensional thinking of single windmills (what do you do if there is no wind people cry - the blatantly obvious answer, already done, is build in more than one place!) or similar that ignore the existence of grids and interconnections between grids so assume that their single generator from their 1D thinking should have it's stuff stored when there is no demand for it. That's a very limited way of looking at things and it's almost always going to lead to very unrealistic conclusions. For a start, the low hydro number ignores the vast amount of power coming into the grid from Canada.
Considering solar is used in summer at the Dome A camp a long way south in Antarctica it's not such a silly idea to use solar cut down on fuel usage for power generation in Alaska which gets far more sunlight. Apparently the panels were incredibly easy to install at Dome A - mounted vertically on poles!