yodelshady
Even parliament acknowledges the effect this has had: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/139767/pdf/
That is the most astoundingly smug and tone-deaf question I have ever heard.
After running for a decade without any spectacular performance to speak of and constant weight issues, one year of powerlifting 2x a week - not only is every single health metric better with less running, possibly the best they've ever been, at a point where they should be declining; my running is hitting PBs as well.
The downside, I'm a bore about it.
This is WHOLESALE BOM price, which is about as useful as the price of uranium.
That is horrifically expensive.
It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects.
Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap".
You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
But that's like trying to prevent cow rearing by outlawing mince. You don't rear a cow for mince, you rear it for steak. The customer will pay for steak pretty much whatever.
My country just had ~180 GWh of lost load from wind, in winter. That's not even a 1-in-5 event, that's a multiple-times-per-year event, and it's billions in cost to the economy. Industry is dead, I've personally seen steel orders go to China because even if renewables were free we could't handle delivery estimates of "lol idk", and nor can anyone else. I just can't comprehend the levels of denial around this, as if my and literally everyone with industrial experience is irrelevant. Data centres want SMRs and that's the easiest, most trivial task to time-shift around I can imagine. Electricity that is not reliable is not the same product, it is not even a comparable product, in no other field would it be treated as such, and if you can't provide an actual monetary estimate for turning it into a reliable product, not just "iT's gEtTiNg cHeApEr BRO", you should not be in this conversation.
Of course the pilots are the backstop, and the unions are theirs, so they can make necessary calls the money doesn't like.
This is systematic fraud by the renewables industry and should be called out.
Meanwhile multiple grids are now paying renewable to curtail, because guess what, the variability is correlated (it's the exact same damn mathematics we used to fuck up the entire global economy in 2008, which is why I'm so surprised people are handwaving that too, but whatever). If you want to minimise cost without relying on gas to save you on dark still days, you want a cheap use for the surplus, round-trip be damned.
As you say, a massive red flag indicating it's not using a lot of sources of entropy.
They may never have been amazing, but that's the point - they were a representative, middle-of-road brand and you could just assume their clothes would last. I've got a >10 year old shirt that's still fine and a new one that's holed after a single wash. It's not a QA fail, the loss of quality is very clearly deliberate.
In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago, France installed 34 GW of nuclear.
All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available.
Or to agree that we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating carbon-free energy.
Your renewable energy is worth 0 if it can't meet that need. No other power supply anywhere works on the principle of "yay maybe!". It's not a fucking game, it's our capacity to heat, to operate industrial processes that are equally worthless if interrupted. I've been involved in ordering steel. The UK-spec was uncompetitive if free, because of the unpredictability in delivery, directly downstream from the unpredictability in power. THERE IS A WAR ON.
Then again, maybe everyone being a 10 would level that out a bit?
They creep. Have you seen, for instance, Blu-tac or glue fail? It doesn't go at once, but slowly, over a period of time. At high temperatures most metals (others on this thread have mentioned single-crystal blades) behave a bit like that.
Although steel is also weaker at temperatures far below its melting point, yes. A simple observation of a blacksmith at work should tell you that. And a think some new jets may be running hotter than Tm for steel now?
> The lower power setting on shutdown does what? Spin it at a low RPM so it doesn't decrease in temp too quickly?
Yup, or more relevantly evenly, although those tend to be related. Given almost all materials expand as they get hotter and contract as they cool, different cooling rates between parts -> different contraction rates -> different relative shape -> Very Bad in precision machinery.
If you've really managed to generate trillions in profit without using any, including indirectly (mining, showrooms, etc), fair enough. If your economic model is quite literally rent seeking, you can fuck off and give all those proceeds to whatever government ensures that land is not overrun by whatever raiders are historically a problem in your area. If you work for a living, you should be able to spend your earnings on a fancy apartment if you wish, and if a landlord wishes to make one instead of just sitting on land, they keep the profits from that too.
If you're working for a grid operator tell me how many TWh you need to sustain a 1-in-20 - A 1-in-goddamn-20 - dunkelflaute in a single large European nation, multiplied by cost of storage. Not the "decline", the absolute cost, and what percentage of GDP it would be. Compare and contrast to military expenditure at a time of near-war.
I also know these numbers.
I won't ask you what impact you think that has on, say, steelmaking, because I've lived it. I've picked the tenders and the Euro steel was not competitive with Chinese steel if it was free, due to uncertainty in delivery date.
China spent approx 2x Hinkley Point on nuclear. It has 30 GW of capacity in return. That works in winter. I would do nasty things to get that for my country.
(1) Naturally, French nuclear is literally not allowed to access this price, and must sell at 45. Because FREE MARKET.
GDP was a good war metric for an industrial economy, and fucking terrible for a services based one. There's never one metric that describes all. You know it, Goodhart knew it, anyone was worked with metrics ever knows it. This is rather important and frankly I don't get the glibness. Russia's not an unstoppable force but it's not a joke either.
Do you think anyone would be building mammoth turbines in the North of Scotland without access to the Southern markets? Oh yes please, I really want to invest several billion pounds in order to serve Ullapool and Wick, that makes my capitalist bones tingle.
But "nuclear expensive", and of cause that isn't to do with the planning process at all. Not if you have a competing product to sell.
The UK has the most expensive electricity in the developed world, and approximately 10 times the CO2 footprint per kWh of France, or of France since the 1980s. If the goal of the renewable energy policy was to be a world leader, it has dramatically failed.
They do work. My best analogy is it's like working at TSA except there are three terrorist attacks per week.
As far as privacy goes, by the same analogy, I can guarantee the operators don't care what porn you watch. Doing the job is more important. But still, treat your work machine as a work machine. It's not yours, it's a tool your company lent to you to work with.
That said, on HN your workers are likely to be developers - that does take some more skill, and I'd advise asking a potential provider frank questions about their experience with the sector, as well as your risk tolerance. Devs do dodgy stuff all the time, and they usually know what they're doing, but when they don't you're going to have real fun proving you've remediated.
Germany is exporting because it produces useless renewable power. It is useless because it does not satisfy the demand. The demand is on dark, cold days, it is for processes that are useless if they are interrupted.
Have you honestly tried buying steel for a project? I have, the vast majority of European suppliers are now borderline useless. Delivering early is as bad as delivering late, bad enough that if the product was free I'd think twice, and they do both.
And no, storage of energy is not cost-competitive. Not even with nuclear. Not even within two orders of magnitude at the scale required, which is not kWh, not MWh, not even GWh, but tens of TWh. The best I've seen gives you time to cold start a gas plant, and that's it. That is what the battery sector gives as achievement. It's not enough and it's not close.
Assuming they're at least a good a judge of what makes them happy as you are, how is this resource not being used for whatever "humanitarian" purposes are? Or are we only allowed resources as far as FEMA tents?
Sure, maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy, but I put it to you the burden of proof for that's on you.
I'd further put it that the resources used for these data centers, like Meta engineers, would in fact be pretty bloody useless at solving Sudanese famine, even if by some miracle they're actually good at the farming part, so can we please drop this weird argument that the cost of these things is automatically an opportunity cost in humanitarian purposes? Because it isn't.
For the benefit of readers not versed with UK regulation, an improvement notice is a formal instrument under the powers of the Health and Safety Executive. Whilst short of a prosecution notice, it definitely indicates that the powers that be are Officially Not Happy with, in this case, Network Rail.
I onboarded a new client recently, and within five minutes of guessing a Wi-Fi password I had sensitive financial data using stock tools. Anyone with physical access to the office could do the same. Contrast an existing client, after a month of trying and writing custom shellcode loaders, spear phishing campaigns, my entire team had... some graduate CVs.
Really, you're saying that because the NSA could probably do a better job with the latter than us by intercepting and hardware-hacking networking gear, that no value has been provided?
Though I also really don't want to be the one reviewing reports from housekeeping. "Yes, that's a laptop running hacky stuff, because it's a speaker rehearsing slides. Not a visually identical laptop running visually identical tools against slightly different numbers."
There does seem to be a subset of questions that are really just "have you repeatedly used this tool in the last few months?". If you have, you'll probably be fast.
You're down? Great, so are your competitors, your customers, and your suppliers. Head to the pub. Actually, you'll probably get more real value there, as your competitors, customers and suppliers are at that same pub. Insurance multinationals have been founded from less.
That didn't affect any OT though, so it was more just proof that 90% of work carried out via O365 adds no real value. Knowing where the planes are probably is important.
Or I guess they decided on a "mixture of experts" and put everyone through to multiple "final round" from different domain experts? All of whom are somehow adding value?
I don't think I've ever said this before, but that sounds like a job for a management consultancy.