I posted a comment at the weekend, but was rewarded by the browser eating it. Here goes again...

tomo,
The sheer number of inverters on the network, and the proportion of them that do the stair-step approximation of a sine wave, has surely introduced a lot of high frequency noise. Lots of commercial power boards now talk about filtering as well as surge suppression. Don't think that used to be a thing.

Kruger's speech was good, though I don't agree with him on the rightness of ONS changing the excess deaths calculation. Very happy for them to invent a new measure and advocate for it, but the old measure is intuitively reasonable. They should live side-by-side and to hell with the fraction of a cpu second it takes for the extra computation.

As for the Speaker chastising the gallery: when public attendees are a multiple of attending Members, some tongue biting on her part would have been wiser. Occurs to me that a simple rule change might encourage better attendance. If a simple majority of attending members were all that was required to carry a motion, a near-empty chamber would be an excellent opportunity for launching a motion of no confidence.

It doesn't add up...,
To be sure there's a hard limit, and there's also a safe limit. I think it comes down to a handover from the chemist to the engineer. Like the physicists and their friction-free, turbulence free world, the chemists have their perfectly mixed reagents world. Engineers have to work with the real cells with whatever contaminants, poor mixing, imprecise concentrations, etc., and map out how the things behave through their lifetimes in practice. I'm sure they're getting on with it but, as usual, the marketing types are pushing boldly ahead. I haven't heard quite as much lately about Moore's Law applying to batteries, so maybe someone who understands has a had a word...

Capacitors are good things, and it's mighty impressive how small a 10F supercapacitor is compared to the aqualung sized thing you once needed, but in actual stored energy per volume they have a *long* way to go to match an ordinary dry cell, let alone a lithium ion cell. Still, maybe Moore's Law ...

The reason I was trying to comment on Saturday was because I felt I had to look in after giving Joanne a bit of a razz on Friday. She had responded, and so did I.

Am I really that far off track in thinking that *all* these supposed temperature proxies are as iffy as could be?

I think charging batteries is constrained by the stoichometry of the electrodes. There is ultimately a hard lim8t driven by the numbers of molecules, though finding ones that are not converted to charged state becomes harder the fuller it gets. The result is that the charging current goes towards heating, which may not be a good thing...

Not the same as capacitors, which can be charged up by increasing the supply voltage - at least until the dielectric breakdown voltage, when it is liable to go bang in a puff of smoke or even explode if it is big enough. The electric field allows the surplus electrons to be held on the negative plate, and the corresponding "holes" on the positive one.

tomo,
Yeah, it would be interesting to start with a nice solid rotating generator then hook up a bunch of inverters synchronised with it, then take away the generator and see how the inverters behave. If they were all particularly dumb, it'd probably fall to positive feedback with frequency going way off in one direction or the other. But since the inverters probably all have sanity checks and actions built-in, some subset might push back, another bunch might withdraw, etc. How would it settle out?

The DPF regen stuff as shipped certainly seems pretty agricultural: pump raw fuel into it and hope it burns it all away. Avoids city particulate emissions, but a big boost to billows of sooty smoke on the expressways.

It's ok to have loons in the wheelhouse as long as the wheel isn't connecting to anything.

The solar "crisis": meh, it's only a few factories. At least the climate crisis will be averted thanks to cheap solar panels in Europe (manufactured using lots of loverly coal-fired electricity in China).

A stuck accelerator is scary enough in an old boneshaker. Bet it's quite an experience in one of those Cybertruck things.

Good address by Bridgen to a near empty chamber. Truly is outrageous on several fronts. Probably the worst is the ONS changing the excess deaths calculation. I suppose there's a syllogism of sorts in play: The truth will set you free, therefore: We must hide the truth.

Was worthwhile listening to Brendan O'Neill talking with Martin Kulldorff on the consequences of pandemic folly. He's a Swede, and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Was pleasing to hear that Sweden's Prime Minister (in sharp contrast to all the sorry offerings in our two countries) was a welder. Good to have a steady hand at the tiller. If we can just schedule a bit more climate change I'll consider moving to Sweden.