Taken. I'll check in once a month or so to see how things are going but keep quiet. And watch for Invisible Sun, which I hope to see before entropy catches up with me. I really liked the Merchant Princes series.
]]>That's more or less right, though there are occasional excursions.
For those inclined to commit acts of spreadsheat, I highly recommend going to https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.php and downloading the CSV files available there. There's a lot of data on a variety of sources, the full range looking like this:
id, timestamp, demand, frequency, coal, nuclear, ccgt, wind, pumped, hydro, biomass, oil, solar, ocgt, frenchict, dutchict, irishict, ewict, nemo, other, northsouth, scotlandengland, ifa2 1038810, 2021-04-19 09:00:42,31678,50.088001,1426,4726,19159,1742,0,432,2464,0,3950,6,663,0,-18,-8,917,143,1835,444,0 1038811, 2021-04-19 09:05:41,31504,50.055,1459,4727,19333,1740,0,418,2460,0,4890,4,308,0,-20,0,912,143,1842,449,0 1038812, 2021-04-19 09:10:41,31303,50.046001,1476,4729,19584,1722,0,392,2467,0,4890,4,0,0,-20,0,772,143,2236,478,0
Fortunately, the site lets you select the ones you're interested in -- in my case they're demand, ccgt, wind and solar.
]]>I think the situation may be more extreme than that.
Motivated by the days of low wind the UK has been undergoing recently, I've started to look at the Gridwatch UK numbers to see how often that happens. So far, based on data from 1 December 2020 through 18 April 2021, there have been two periods of ~ 10 days, now and late February - early March, when the wind has been close to AWOL and CCGT has had to pick up the slack the entire time.
Today's entertainment will be to extend the analysis back through January 2020 and make it a little more rigorous.
]]>I think what we're seeing here are not so much nuclear enthusiasts as nuclear fatalists. (Nojay may wish to correct me.)
They don't love nuclear, they just don't see that alternatives will suffice without heroic engineering and its consequences that would much surpass a nuclear equivalent.
]]>As deals go, that strikes me as being not bad.
]]>I know little of this(*), but it seems to imply some very serious pre-selection and pre-training to get on the sub in the first place. Like do a year or two of shore training in realistic simulators before you get to go on the boat and show you really could do it.
(*) One of my former colleagues was formerly the XO of a Sturgeon-(637) class SSN. He had many interesting tales to tell.
]]>I remember those days lasting into the 1960s, then lost touch. Any idea when and why the situation changed?
]]>Also, for larger houses, more than one unit isn't out of the question. One for kitchen/laundry, one for bathrooms on one side of the house, another for the other side. Due attention would have to be paid to electrical and plumbing matters, but that shouldn't be too onerous. Among other things, this cuts down the length of piping hot water needs to pass through, losing heat all the way, before reaching the point of use.
]]>"Tankless" on-demand water heaters, both gas and electric, are common in at least parts of Latin America and are available in the US. We've had occasion to stay in places with them and they work well.
]]>Check out the Camp Stanley Storage Activity in Boerne, Texas. They're still hiring armorers with experience in used foreign weaponry.
]]>Me neither. It's going to be bloody and awful.
]]>One of my correspondents who has experience in Afghanistan yesterday expressed distress at what's going to happen to people the Taliban disapprove of for various reasons. Social workers, uppity women, politicians, intellectuals, etc. The usual.
I'd like to see some evacuation process set up to get out as many as possible of those who would like to leave in the seven months remaining. C-17s rather than helicopters.
]]>Clandestine gun-running has been a staple of US foreign policy since at least 1950. It would be interesting to find out what happened to all that hardware.
]]>It turns out that there's a major such facility in Virginia. Wikipedia has some numbers on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station [Lightly edited] The Bath County Pumped Storage Station is a pumped storage hydroelectric power plant, with a maximum generation capacity of 3,003 MW, an average of 2,772 MW,[2] and a total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh. The station consists of two reservoirs separated by about 1,260 feet (380 m) in elevation. Construction on the power station, with an original capacity of 2,100 megawatts began in March 1977 and was completed in December 1985 at a cost of $1.6 billion ($3.8 billion in 2019 dollars).
A database at Sandia National Labs,
https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GESDB_Projects_11_17_2020.xlsx
indicates the same 3 GW, but says it can run for 10 hours, so 30 GWh storage capacity.
$3.8e9/30 GWh = $127 million/GWh for construction. It would be interesting to get a number for O&M. Also to get construction figures for other pumped storage facilities to see how they scale with size.
]]>Heh. About a week before the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan, some colleagues and I were wondering what was going to happen. "Surely the Soviet General Staff knows what happens to empires that invade Afghanistan", we said.
And then they went in and it did happen.
And then the American empire did go in and it did happen.
I suppose it's only fair that China gets its turn. One might hope that they'd be smarter about it, not send in military units but Belt and Road development projects.
But we'll see.
]]>