So what happens when your hot water tank hits 100 and all your radiators are turned off?
This system cannot be used for load following - you can't pump unplanned amounts of heat into peoples houses, they have to decide how much heat they want, so they decide how much electricity goes into the grid - lots on cold days in winter, not so much in summer.
IMHO this is all about short-term load following: take the spikes out of supply/demand mismatch.
I don't have the full specs, but the system can only run like this: As soon as your plant recognizes that its heat tank goes below a certain temperature, it signals the control center that it is ready to generate a certain amount of electrical power anytime soon. The center notes it down, so when the time comes (may right now, maybe in a few hours) it tells the plant to do it, until the temperature reaches an upper limit. So it's your heat demand that determines the amount of power output, while the elcetricity demand determines the exact moment when it runs.
Concerning summer and winter: I looked up the heat consumption in our house (15 persons). We consume about 90 MWh diesel per year, of which are roughly 70 MWH heating and 20 MWh for warm water. The heating is on approx 6 months per year (Oct-Mar), while warm water is distributed evenly. In other words, we need on average [compute, compute...] 20 kW in winter and 2.5 kW in summer. In yet other words, the CHP engine runs 60% of the time in winter and 7% of the time in summer in order to produce the heat.
This means that the swarm generates approx. 10 times as much energy in the winter than in the summer (probably a good match for the higher need of artificial lighting and electrical heating elsewhere), but in both seasons it can even out the spikes in the grid's power curve whenever they occur.
So when we're all supposed to be scared to death of EVIL GLOBAL WARMING, the 'green' Germans want to replace two nuclear plants that emit no CO2 with... car engines... running on natural gas which will probably have to be purchased from the Commies?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
There is one thing that nucular plants can't do, namely ramp up in a minute. But that's is a prerequisite if you want to use wind and solar power when it's produced. AFAIK only water and gas plants can do that. So the CHP swarm is green because it enables the massive use of green energy. Nuclear plants take a few hours to get going, which is just not fast enough. Plus, I live close enough to Chernobyl to know that nuclear power is simply not acceptable. Unless you just love thyroid cancer.
I'll grant you that being dependent on Russia is dangerous. Germany currently buys 32% of their natural gas from Russia (who are not exactly commies any more BTW). The German government plans to replace 10% of the natural gas by biogas in 2030, so the amount of gas we need to buy from them decreases. And biogas is CO2 neutral, i.e. green.
I used to play the original tetris on a 386. It was incredibly relaxing: When you activated the turbo button while tetris started, it calibrated its delay loop for sizzling 40 MHz. Then push it again to clock it down to 4.77 MHz and enjoy. You could spend a whole day playing it and achieve miracle high scores, all the while doing things, like spending a couple of minutes in the bathroom, making coffee in the kitchen, doing homework etc.
How I miss the turbo button...
That's probably true for this particular law, but there may be cases where it isn't, and there may even be cases where the international implications are not easy to predict. So IMHO it is a good thing to publicise laws as a general rule. Do you think it is necessary to keep laws secret?
And, it's the rule. A law is not passed if the rules are not followed. Evidence is not admitted if it was obtained illegally. Etc. It may hurt sometimes, and even seem stupid, but rules should be followed. Especially by governments.
I also wonder why a national government accepts this so easily.
Um, perhaps because it is a union. Where countries cooperate.
But actually, I am quite surprised that the British government does not simply ignore this little mistake. Britain has not exactly been the model EU member with all its exceptions and vetos. At times I thought they only joined the EU because it'd be easier to sabotage it from the inside.
Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
You call that surrender of sovereignty? Think again. The government didn't have to ask for permission to pass this law, it was only supposed to inform the European Commission. In other words: make it public, so their European partner countries know what's happening in their neighborhood. That's just common sense.
One of our telescopes had computers named after German beers, since it was installed by German engineers. The main control computer was called kronen.
Interesting... This seems to be a recurring pattern in astronomy. (Or do you use your telescope to peek at your neighbors?)
The astrophysical institute at the Technical University Berlin uses beers to name their computers. They also baptize them with the correct brand (I mean, not pouring the beer over the them but down their own throats, of course).
BTW: We prefer the Simpsons as naming convention for our computers. We put nice self-made stickers on them, too.
my take is that imperial [...] is often better scaled for regular-life usage. (all the usual arguments--fahrenheit ranges over temperate weather, feet can be cut in thirds, liquid measure actually corresponds to cooking usage, etc.)
Believe me, that's really only your POV. A meter can be equally nicely cut into thirds: 33.3 cm is not hard to locate on a meterstick (which is, funnily, called 'Zollstock' (inchstick) in German), and in everyday life you won't miss the remaining third of a mm. Eighth and quarter liter marks are found on every metric measuring cup. The Celsius scale is equally convenient for all kinds of climates, once you use it.
science is another matter, but there's no reason that a system designed for handling thirty orders of magnitude simultaneously should be forced on people who only need three.
The big advantage of the metric system is not only the wide range of magnitudes. The real advantage is the same maths everywhere, for every unit and in every usage: there is only the decimal system, not a mixture of base 3, base 12, base 16, base 20, base 30... Add k to multiply anything by 1000, c to divide by 100 etc. You don't need to memorize that a mile is 1760 yards, that there are 480 grains in an ounce, that a cubic foot has 1728 cubic inches etc. Of course, that's not very hard either, and it might even give you an advantage if someone asks you to compute the third root of 1729 (as happened to Dick Feynman), but metric units are IMHO much more convenient because of their uniformity.
Try quartering a cm - you end up with fractions of mm. Cm and m seem to be constantly odd numbers or funny fractions.
A question of POV. I have a couple of wrenches whose sizes are written in SI and imperial units, and I really find 5/16'' more odd than 8 mm.
Americans seem particularly resistant to change. It will take a government with a lot of will to make such a change. A good starting place would be if the government mandated everything it does is metric.
I think it worked in Germany by outlawing old units. You were forced to sell your stuff in kg instead of pounds etc.
It also helped a lot that Germany was a conglomerate of various kingdoms, each of which had different units. On markets near the border between, say, Prussia and Hanover people were sick of converting the Prussian ell (pound, mile etc) into their Hanoverian counterparts, which were usually not quite similar. There is no such pressure in the US. Canada and Mexico are probably too dependent on the US to have an influence.
I prefer imperial units for lots of everyday tasks like cooking. Imperial units are much closer to a binary-based system, which is very convenient for human beings. Two cups in a pint. Two pints in a quart. An ounce of water weighs about an ounce. A pint of water weighs about a pound. Human beings are very good at halving or doubling things by eyeball, but we're lousy at dividing into tenths.
Hmm.. I'm not convinced. German cooking recipes normally use units like 1/8 l, 1/4 l etc. and everyone knows that 1/8 l is 125 ml. And if you don't know it, every measuring cup shows both units alongside. A liter of water weighs a kilo. 30 ml (1 ounce) of water weigh 30 g. Twice that is 60, half of it is 15. Complicated, huh? I don't really see where imperial units are better.
I tried [Eclipse] as a C++ IDE for a while and found it quite nice, only to find out that C++ sucks compared to Java (from a developer's POV). I had to look at someone else's code and it was uber-hard to locate the places where all those macros and typedefs are. I haven't found an IDE that can help you here, so I ended up grepping a lot.
Ummm...
Highlight macro name or type name. Hit F3 for "Open Declaration." Or if you want the references to it, context menu->References->In Workspace. Or, use the language aware search dialog. Yep, difficult.
Disclaimer: I work on CDT.
The problem is that it works only if all includes are resolved.
Sorry, I was a bit sloppy in my original post. I forgot to mention that I had to examine a fairly large project, of which I only had the pure C++ code (some 3000 cpp files + 3000 h files) without a makefile, i.e. there was no information about the include paths (these 3000 header files had only 2000 unique names in 100 inc directories, plus a couple of third-party libraries that were not included). In case you wonder: I didn't have a makefile, because it was to be autogenerated on the build machine in an old, home-grown environment that I couldn't reproduce for various reasons.
In this (possibly unusual) case Eclipse was unable to help me because it needed all included files, including nested includes, repeat ad nauseam... (literally), before it could start locating the declarations of symbols used in a file. It took me a couple of days before I realized that it was virtually impossible to resolve all includes. Of course, this is a shortcoming of C, not Eclipse.
This problem simply doesn't exist with Java: All you need are the first-level imports which are well-defined, including package names, so finding them is a piece of cake even for obscure third-party libraries. And it doesn't even matter whether you have the sources or the compiled class files.
Aw yes, sorry, I forgot that it's customary in the younger generation to stop reading at the headline.
Near miss. It is the privilege of us elder ones to glance only casually at something, then complain. Works better and better the older you get.
AFAICT the young ones stop reading even before the headline.
Thanks for calling me young, though.
But seriously, it is good style to convey the gist of a message in the headline. In this context the invention of Javadoc is IMHO one of the biggest advantages of Java.
I've used eclipse since version 2. I can't comment on it, I'm still waiting for it to open.
Huh? OK, Eclipse may start up slower than freecell, but I usually start it only once a day while I pour me a coffee. The real issue with Eclipse is that it's (almost) no use with less than 2GB memory, so it doesn't really run everywhere (yet).
I tried it as a C++ IDE for a while and found it quite nice, only to find out that C++ sucks compared to Java (from a developer's POV). I had to look at someone else's code and it was uber-hard to locate the places where all those macros and typedefs are. I haven't found an IDE that can help you here, so I ended up grepping a lot.
NB: As a Java developer I was mildly insulted by the fact that TFA never even bothered to mention that he's looking for an IDE for C++.
Why is no one mentioning coding itself as one of the trifecta???
Exactly. The journey is the reward. I get deeper and deeper into the zone as the code settles into place.
Though, to comment on the GP, I find a joint rather counterproductive to concentration. Stumpleupon and the fridge get in the way. It is more suited to physical work like bricklaying or motorcycle maintenance. Plus, I wouldn't want to shop up with a reefer in the not-so-private smoking area of my workplace.
That site about riding without a helmet being safer is the biggest load of crap ever. Their whole argument is that the only thing helmet does is reduce the impact by 14mph.
Not quite. IMHO the bulk of their argument is that
1. Statistical evidence suggests that driving without a helmet IS safer than with one, and
2. A helmet merely moves the weakest point from the skull to the neck. Like ski boots moved the weakest point from the ankle to the knee. Now everybody returns from their skiing holidays with a broken knee instead of broken ankle.
3. A driver without a helmet is more aware of the danger, and he can get a kick out of lower speeds, so he drives more slowly and more attentive. This lowers the fatality of an accidents just as much as a helmet.
I guess there are so many different thinkable kinds of accidents and injuries, that you can't really judge whether a helmet is better or not in the majority of accidents.
You want easy proof? stick a watermelon in a helmet and drop it out of the car while you're going 60 mph and then do the same again without the helmet this time.
Um, I guess I never saw a watermelon small enough to fit inside a helmet:-)
Seriously, I would never ride without a helmet anyway, because it is always cold and rainy here, and when it isn't I have a hay fever. And helmets are mandatory here in Europe anyway, and it will never change. And I usually smoke pot to prepare for a ride which makes me even more cautious. Just joking, really! No, I'd never...
Apparently, riding a motorcycle without a helmet is safer for the same reasons: With a helmet you lose contact to the environment, you overestimate your safety, and take higher risks.
Well, in Southern California we have these little things called Earthquakes that effectively prevent one from using brick as a construction material.
This shouldn't be a problem for Houston or Dallas, which are 1000 miles away.
And according to this wikipedia article reinforced masonry should work even for earthquake-prone areas.
But if brick doesn't work for your place or the type of building you want to build, there are many types of thermal insulation that you can stick into your walls. It may be more expensive to build, but it will save a lot of money and environmental impact as compared to AC in the long run.
I watched a TV discussion about windmills in the German state of Brandenburg the other day. (FYI: Brandenburg is practically devoid of people but full of windmills.)
The interesting thing was that someone spoke about prototypes of hybrid windmills with hydrogen storage, which were installed recently. He didn't elaborate further, but I guess they produce hydrogen through hydrolysis when the wind blows but the current is not being consumed, and convert it into electricity with a fuel cell when the current is needed, but there is no wind.
IMHO these things can be the solution to the principal problem of wind power, namely that it blows when it wants to, not when it is needed. They can probably even be used to provide a decent base load, instead of requiring a base load provided by oil or coal plants.
Slashdot Mirror
...the CHP engine runs...
Er, it would run; I don't have one (yet).
So what happens when your hot water tank hits 100 and all your radiators are turned off?
This system cannot be used for load following - you can't pump unplanned amounts of heat into peoples houses, they have to decide how much heat they want, so they decide how much electricity goes into the grid - lots on cold days in winter, not so much in summer.
IMHO this is all about short-term load following: take the spikes out of supply/demand mismatch.
I don't have the full specs, but the system can only run like this: As soon as your plant recognizes that its heat tank goes below a certain temperature, it signals the control center that it is ready to generate a certain amount of electrical power anytime soon. The center notes it down, so when the time comes (may right now, maybe in a few hours) it tells the plant to do it, until the temperature reaches an upper limit. So it's your heat demand that determines the amount of power output, while the elcetricity demand determines the exact moment when it runs.
Concerning summer and winter: I looked up the heat consumption in our house (15 persons). We consume about 90 MWh diesel per year, of which are roughly 70 MWH heating and 20 MWh for warm water. The heating is on approx 6 months per year (Oct-Mar), while warm water is distributed evenly. In other words, we need on average [compute, compute...] 20 kW in winter and 2.5 kW in summer. In yet other words, the CHP engine runs 60% of the time in winter and 7% of the time in summer in order to produce the heat.
This means that the swarm generates approx. 10 times as much energy in the winter than in the summer (probably a good match for the higher need of artificial lighting and electrical heating elsewhere), but in both seasons it can even out the spikes in the grid's power curve whenever they occur.
So when we're all supposed to be scared to death of EVIL GLOBAL WARMING, the 'green' Germans want to replace two nuclear plants that emit no CO2 with... car engines... running on natural gas which will probably have to be purchased from the Commies?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
There is one thing that nucular plants can't do, namely ramp up in a minute. But that's is a prerequisite if you want to use wind and solar power when it's produced. AFAIK only water and gas plants can do that. So the CHP swarm is green because it enables the massive use of green energy. Nuclear plants take a few hours to get going, which is just not fast enough. Plus, I live close enough to Chernobyl to know that nuclear power is simply not acceptable. Unless you just love thyroid cancer.
I'll grant you that being dependent on Russia is dangerous. Germany currently buys 32% of their natural gas from Russia (who are not exactly commies any more BTW). The German government plans to replace 10% of the natural gas by biogas in 2030, so the amount of gas we need to buy from them decreases. And biogas is CO2 neutral, i.e. green.
Wouldn't it read more like this?
p0wn'd by f1re plz help 0x7B cavndn rd kthxbye
I used to play the original tetris on a 386.
Really? I didn't know there were arcade emulators for the 386. Myself, I used to play the original Tetris in the campus game room.
Huh? It seems that the DOS version is the original, if you don't count the Elektronika 60 prototype.
I used to play the original tetris on a 386. It was incredibly relaxing: When you activated the turbo button while tetris started, it calibrated its delay loop for sizzling 40 MHz. Then push it again to clock it down to 4.77 MHz and enjoy. You could spend a whole day playing it and achieve miracle high scores, all the while doing things, like spending a couple of minutes in the bathroom, making coffee in the kitchen, doing homework etc.
How I miss the turbo button...
There are no important international implications
That's probably true for this particular law, but there may be cases where it isn't, and there may even be cases where the international implications are not easy to predict. So IMHO it is a good thing to publicise laws as a general rule. Do you think it is necessary to keep laws secret?
And, it's the rule. A law is not passed if the rules are not followed. Evidence is not admitted if it was obtained illegally. Etc. It may hurt sometimes, and even seem stupid, but rules should be followed. Especially by governments.
I also wonder why a national government accepts this so easily.
Um, perhaps because it is a union. Where countries cooperate.
But actually, I am quite surprised that the British government does not simply ignore this little mistake. Britain has not exactly been the model EU member with all its exceptions and vetos. At times I thought they only joined the EU because it'd be easier to sabotage it from the inside.
Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
You call that surrender of sovereignty? Think again. The government didn't have to ask for permission to pass this law, it was only supposed to inform the European Commission. In other words: make it public, so their European partner countries know what's happening in their neighborhood. That's just common sense.
One of our telescopes had computers named after German beers, since it was installed by German engineers. The main control computer was called kronen.
Interesting... This seems to be a recurring pattern in astronomy. (Or do you use your telescope to peek at your neighbors?)
The astrophysical institute at the Technical University Berlin uses beers to name their computers. They also baptize them with the correct brand (I mean, not pouring the beer over the them but down their own throats, of course).
BTW: We prefer the Simpsons as naming convention for our computers. We put nice self-made stickers on them, too.
Gentlemen, grab the closest hairdryer. The time has come to melt the plastic, and make our own nation!
Yeah, but not Sealand again. It should be something along the lines of The Raft (Neal Stephenson) or Stateless (Greg Egan).
*My* question, though, is this:
Why do Visa's systems have the bandwitdh to *allow* 23 quadrillion dollars to make it to a credit card bill.
Is there anyone, at all, anywhere, who's gonna carry a balance of even a megabuck?
6.2, really. That's all they needed.
Full ack, 6.2 digits will be enough for all purposes eternally.
Just like no computer will ever need more than 64k RAM, and 32 bits will always be enough for time_t.
my take is that imperial [...] is often better scaled for regular-life usage. (all the usual arguments--fahrenheit ranges over temperate weather, feet can be cut in thirds, liquid measure actually corresponds to cooking usage, etc.)
Believe me, that's really only your POV. A meter can be equally nicely cut into thirds: 33.3 cm is not hard to locate on a meterstick (which is, funnily, called 'Zollstock' (inchstick) in German), and in everyday life you won't miss the remaining third of a mm. Eighth and quarter liter marks are found on every metric measuring cup. The Celsius scale is equally convenient for all kinds of climates, once you use it.
science is another matter, but there's no reason that a system designed for handling thirty orders of magnitude simultaneously should be forced on people who only need three.
The big advantage of the metric system is not only the wide range of magnitudes. The real advantage is the same maths everywhere, for every unit and in every usage: there is only the decimal system, not a mixture of base 3, base 12, base 16, base 20, base 30... Add k to multiply anything by 1000, c to divide by 100 etc. You don't need to memorize that a mile is 1760 yards, that there are 480 grains in an ounce, that a cubic foot has 1728 cubic inches etc. Of course, that's not very hard either, and it might even give you an advantage if someone asks you to compute the third root of 1729 (as happened to Dick Feynman), but metric units are IMHO much more convenient because of their uniformity.
Try quartering a cm - you end up with fractions of mm. Cm and m seem to be constantly odd numbers or funny fractions.
A question of POV. I have a couple of wrenches whose sizes are written in SI and imperial units, and I really find 5/16'' more odd than 8 mm.
Americans seem particularly resistant to change. It will take a government with a lot of will to make such a change. A good starting place would be if the government mandated everything it does is metric.
I think it worked in Germany by outlawing old units. You were forced to sell your stuff in kg instead of pounds etc.
It also helped a lot that Germany was a conglomerate of various kingdoms, each of which had different units. On markets near the border between, say, Prussia and Hanover people were sick of converting the Prussian ell (pound, mile etc) into their Hanoverian counterparts, which were usually not quite similar. There is no such pressure in the US. Canada and Mexico are probably too dependent on the US to have an influence.
I prefer imperial units for lots of everyday tasks like cooking. Imperial units are much closer to a binary-based system, which is very convenient for human beings. Two cups in a pint. Two pints in a quart. An ounce of water weighs about an ounce. A pint of water weighs about a pound. Human beings are very good at halving or doubling things by eyeball, but we're lousy at dividing into tenths.
Hmm.. I'm not convinced. German cooking recipes normally use units like 1/8 l, 1/4 l etc. and everyone knows that 1/8 l is 125 ml. And if you don't know it, every measuring cup shows both units alongside. A liter of water weighs a kilo. 30 ml (1 ounce) of water weigh 30 g. Twice that is 60, half of it is 15. Complicated, huh? I don't really see where imperial units are better.
Ummm... Highlight macro name or type name. Hit F3 for "Open Declaration." Or if you want the references to it, context menu->References->In Workspace. Or, use the language aware search dialog. Yep, difficult. Disclaimer: I work on CDT.
The problem is that it works only if all includes are resolved.
Sorry, I was a bit sloppy in my original post. I forgot to mention that I had to examine a fairly large project, of which I only had the pure C++ code (some 3000 cpp files + 3000 h files) without a makefile, i.e. there was no information about the include paths (these 3000 header files had only 2000 unique names in 100 inc directories, plus a couple of third-party libraries that were not included). In case you wonder: I didn't have a makefile, because it was to be autogenerated on the build machine in an old, home-grown environment that I couldn't reproduce for various reasons.
In this (possibly unusual) case Eclipse was unable to help me because it needed all included files, including nested includes, repeat ad nauseam... (literally), before it could start locating the declarations of symbols used in a file. It took me a couple of days before I realized that it was virtually impossible to resolve all includes. Of course, this is a shortcoming of C, not Eclipse.
This problem simply doesn't exist with Java: All you need are the first-level imports which are well-defined, including package names, so finding them is a piece of cake even for obscure third-party libraries. And it doesn't even matter whether you have the sources or the compiled class files.
Aw yes, sorry, I forgot that it's customary in the younger generation to stop reading at the headline.
Near miss. It is the privilege of us elder ones to glance only casually at something, then complain. Works better and better the older you get.
AFAICT the young ones stop reading even before the headline.
Thanks for calling me young, though.
But seriously, it is good style to convey the gist of a message in the headline. In this context the invention of Javadoc is IMHO one of the biggest advantages of Java.
never even bothered to mention that he's looking for an IDE for C++
Read more thoroughly.
I could be snide and say that's a symptom common to most Java programmers, but it would be too easy.
Aw yes, sorry, I forgot that it's customary in C/C++ to hide relevant information somewhere in the middle instead of the headline. (SCNR)
I've used eclipse since version 2. I can't comment on it, I'm still waiting for it to open.
Huh? OK, Eclipse may start up slower than freecell, but I usually start it only once a day while I pour me a coffee. The real issue with Eclipse is that it's (almost) no use with less than 2GB memory, so it doesn't really run everywhere (yet).
I tried it as a C++ IDE for a while and found it quite nice, only to find out that C++ sucks compared to Java (from a developer's POV). I had to look at someone else's code and it was uber-hard to locate the places where all those macros and typedefs are. I haven't found an IDE that can help you here, so I ended up grepping a lot.
NB: As a Java developer I was mildly insulted by the fact that TFA never even bothered to mention that he's looking for an IDE for C++.
Coding?
Why is no one mentioning coding itself as one of the trifecta???
Exactly. The journey is the reward. I get deeper and deeper into the zone as the code settles into place.
Though, to comment on the GP, I find a joint rather counterproductive to concentration. Stumpleupon and the fridge get in the way. It is more suited to physical work like bricklaying or motorcycle maintenance. Plus, I wouldn't want to shop up with a reefer in the not-so-private smoking area of my workplace.
That site about riding without a helmet being safer is the biggest load of crap ever. Their whole argument is that the only thing helmet does is reduce the impact by 14mph.
Not quite. IMHO the bulk of their argument is that
I guess there are so many different thinkable kinds of accidents and injuries, that you can't really judge whether a helmet is better or not in the majority of accidents.
You want easy proof? stick a watermelon in a helmet and drop it out of the car while you're going 60 mph and then do the same again without the helmet this time.
Um, I guess I never saw a watermelon small enough to fit inside a helmet :-)
Seriously, I would never ride without a helmet anyway, because it is always cold and rainy here, and when it isn't I have a hay fever. And helmets are mandatory here in Europe anyway, and it will never change. And I usually smoke pot to prepare for a ride which makes me even more cautious. Just joking, really! No, I'd never...
Apparently, riding a motorcycle without a helmet is safer for the same reasons: With a helmet you lose contact to the environment, you overestimate your safety, and take higher risks.
Well, in Southern California we have these little things called Earthquakes that effectively prevent one from using brick as a construction material.
This shouldn't be a problem for Houston or Dallas, which are 1000 miles away.
And according to this wikipedia article reinforced masonry should work even for earthquake-prone areas.
But if brick doesn't work for your place or the type of building you want to build, there are many types of thermal insulation that you can stick into your walls. It may be more expensive to build, but it will save a lot of money and environmental impact as compared to AC in the long run.
I watched a TV discussion about windmills in the German state of Brandenburg the other day. (FYI: Brandenburg is practically devoid of people but full of windmills.)
The interesting thing was that someone spoke about prototypes of hybrid windmills with hydrogen storage, which were installed recently. He didn't elaborate further, but I guess they produce hydrogen through hydrolysis when the wind blows but the current is not being consumed, and convert it into electricity with a fuel cell when the current is needed, but there is no wind.
IMHO these things can be the solution to the principal problem of wind power, namely that it blows when it wants to, not when it is needed. They can probably even be used to provide a decent base load, instead of requiring a base load provided by oil or coal plants.
No no no. The correct translation is:
"I vill not buy this record, it is scratched."
You certainly mean: "I vill not buy this tobacconists, it is scratched."