Unthreaded
tomo,
I agree that it needs to be under scrutiny. It's not that any one of us will achieve anything, but for a groundswell to happen, the gound has to swell a bit.
Those gashes on the land are awful. It'd be better if they took my treadmill employment scheme seriously.
I like a good Python reference, but don't understand the "variable-pitch" reference. Didn't find much with Google. Tried it with various domains. .co.uk didn't get anywhere. .com got a "site under development" response.
The climate harms that AI is doing are surely *more* than balanced by all the good it is doing in its fine advocacy. Large language models are just the thing for propaganda.
DaveS,
The Spaniards were contributing high quality "firmed" solar to the grid: solar + diesel by day, just diesel by night. Talk about green!
Enjoyed Brendan O'Neill talking with Lionel Shriver. She's always good value. This time she was discussing public manias (her latest book is called Mania, notionally fiction). As she enumerated them: transgender, metoo, lockdowns, BLM, climate, it struck me that climate is of a different kind.
In the late '80s I worked with various Unix workstations. One of the slowest was the Decstation. At the bottom of the graphics screen it had an animated rotating wireframe cube. This was the null task; if there was CPU going unused, it was dedicated to animating the cube, but when there was work to do, the cube slowed down, or stopped.
Climate seems to be the null task for activists. It might take a back seat to some fad, but has been there all along as a default cause. Like the rotating cube, you can be sure that solving bad weather is a task without end.
Her book sounds a hoot anyway. The new fad is "cognitive equality", where you have to treat everybody as equally intelligent (presumably that means stupid). Might splash out on it.
Robert Swan
DaveS
The rascally Spaniards got a bit bold there.... as I recall they had the needle / dial al 11 at 3am on solar generation export...
Some things you can't ignore
tomo
Apr 22, 2024 at 4:53 PM | tomo
I seem to recall in Spain they found some people had been claiming subsidies for output from solar 24 hours/day. Nothing is too obvious to go unnoticed.
DaveS
tomo
Robert
the variable-pitch site ran a pile of Python scripts driving the queries and scraping the results - it was quite neat - neat enough to require that the erroneous / insane query replies be sanity checked.
If they use that database for billing - it'll be a farce.
tomo
Robert
I did a spreadsheet
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/09/09/solar-subsidy-farming/
In my not so humble opinion the matter is deserving of some detail digging.
Infrastructure:
https://biasedbbc.tv/blog/2024/04/21/start-the-week-st-georges-day-23april-2024/comment-page-2/#comment-1288156
tomo
tomo,
Today, Jo Nova has given the UK the nod for the most expensive electricity on Earth. To be sure your wondrous 10% CF solar has made a sterling contribution. Unfortunately, it looks like Australia's going to make you work for it if you want to stay ahead.
That website was pretty cumbersome to use; bit of a chore for the guy tracking the output. If he's dedictated enough though, maybe he should go on gathering, but publish in bigger tranches, or maybe publish through GWPF, Judith Curry or whatever.
.,
I see they're trotting out the usual blurb that it'll "create hundreds of jobs". In that case, why bother with wind? Set up treadmills. At 50W per person, you'd get 20,000 jobs per megawatt; 60,000 with three shifts per day, and think what it'd do for bringing obesity under control.
Robert Swan
https://twitter.com/aDissentient/status/1782479657801011434
.
Robert
Those switching transients will obviously track with the quantity of domestic solar - but the electrical technical issues aside, solar PV has a capacity factor of ca. 10% in the UK - not exactly brilliant .... What irks me is the closed funding model and, as far as my digging has taken me - the proportion of UK solar that is operated from tax havens by financial SPVs was a surprise - the farmers get a regular cheque for the use of the land (undisclosed) but the quantity of power produced and the subsidy that attracts is well hidden - aggressively hidden even. I'd wager that ofgem don't check the subsidy bills they get from the subsidy junkies - their shambolic web presence hints that they don't have a clue.
I recall a hobby web site operator (variable-pitch.co.uk) getting small hours threatening phone calls for simply publishing stuff that hinted at more subsidy than power.... The web site operator was frightened into shutting down - he was simply harvesting PUBLIC data from here:
https://renewablesandchp.ofgem.gov.uk/Public/ReportViewer.aspx?ReportPath=/DatawarehouseReports/CertificatesExternalPublicDataWarehouse&ReportVisibility=1&ReportCategory=2
tomo
Robert
on the Python / variable pitch topic.
Threatening phone calls frightened the web site developer into shutting down the site - a hobby project doesn't need that sort of grief....
- he had a Github repository https://github.com/zathras777/pywind.
I tried addressing some of the topics llisted there but dealing with the admins at ofgem was erm.... frustrating as they didn't it seemed to me know much of anything about a project delivered by a contractor .....
Public transparency of blob spending looks to be being truncated too...
Edd Fyffe ex fraud investigator at ofgem might have an interesting tale to tell
https://web.archive.org/web/20181202093602/https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46196969