By coincidence I re-watched that film this weekend (I like it a lot) and seeing this article immediately made me think of it. Yes, in the film he takes meds, but he stops doing it after a while because of the side effects (impotence amongst others). Then he learns to live with the voices.
Very interesting! The audio of Tom's Dinner rejected by the encoding sounds mesmerizing to me. I still find it to be musical - it reminds me of a record I bought a really long time ago, it was called modulation & transformation on mille plateaux, it's a collection of songs in the abstract and experimental genre.
It's nice to have solar panels, I have them too and while they do generate even more electricity than I need, they do so in around 6 to 7 months peaking in July. So in winter, it's grid power and in summer I might need to pay to feed in the surplus. This is in the Netherlands. It's kind of sad to see all that electricity unused in summer, and knowing I could have enough for all of the winter if only there was some way to store it, all of the 1MWh..
Sure. Of course. Not being allowed to disconnect them would be ridiculous. But do you want to keep an eye on the market every day, and run to the breaker to turn on an off your inverter? No. So you need a solution for that. Then a battery is much more interesting.
Completely agree. I mainly mention it to dispel any notions that solar panels can expose you to financial risk due to negative energy prices. This is trivial to address. Negative prices should only be a concern for plants that can not be quickly or easily shut down, like thermal plants (coal/gas/nuclear).
You could implement something pretty easily with a relay or contactor and an ESP32 and a way to monitor the spot price, or just buy a system with that feature already built in.
That's the entire point of Home Assistant, I'm currently writing an integration for my electric company. I'd argue the college junior programmer would try to do it from scratch instead of leveraging the solution that gets you 90 percent of the way there out of the box.
All modern inverters have control interfaces that allow them to fold back their power output on command, this can be set up to track feed-in rates going negative.
Wow,interesting. But， the idea of storing the surplus electricity, it does raise a question about the energy consumption of storage batteries. i has been researching European home energy management recently, especially with winter approaching. Just share information. enjoyelec HEMS (Home Energy Management System). Use AI optimize energy usage in households. With features like real-time monitoring and intelligent control, it aims to reduce energy waste and potentially lower costs. Maybe can get some money from grid to pay from winter electicity bills.
Why not have the panels disconnect themselves in this case? Is this too small an expense to justify the cost of additional hardware to manage switching on and off?
It all depends on the situation. Here in the Netherlands almost everybody has an PV installation with no way other than the breaker to turn it on and off. Some inverters do have an interface, and sometimes it's available. Even less people know anything about this at all, they just had panels installed. The technical solution is simple, bit implementing it will cost much more, I assume.
> This is in the Netherlands. It's kind of sad to see all that electricity unused in summer,
This is literally what local and state government is for; talk to others and get policy moving on excess energy being used to generate bulk stored energy at scale for winter months, be that gas, deep thermal storage, tradable goods to offset winter costs, etc.
Ammonia products are easier, particularly with excess peak energy.
Yes, we still have six active bauxite mines providing feedstock for six alumina refineries ... they're optimal as pipelined processing and not great at switching on|off with energy surges.
I wonder if ammonia might be doable at residential/DIY scale. Then you have to (a) store it safely, and (b) have a way to use it - not many people have a personal marine application.
Maybe .. but in an urban area with many houses, each with solar panels, it seems inefficient to have mini home chemical process factories, particularly with intermediate steps involving explosive gases.
I'm in favour of home PV and community batteries | larger area "peak" use industries - it's a sensible long term use of cyclic energy production.
To further follow up... outside of the cities, Finland has a LOT of lightly populated land, and since EU entry, farming is not exactly going great guns. Land is cleared.
So AFAICT mass PV is a distinct possibility, and if it can be leveraged to reduce the cost of wintertime energy usage, it will find a firm foothold.
The obvious (but often incorrect) thought is gravitational potential given mountains.
What are the challenges to incline rail lifting a lot of material up a mountain to roll down later?
Water freezes, slopes with snow can be unstable, cold weather is hard on gears, etc.
Large (in old mine shafts and chambers?) thermal mass storage has potential, not dissimilar to "heavy" (not suitable for EV) recent battery technologies.
Are there any serious tidal races in Scandy lands that can be tapped?
If you're talking about seasonal storage I would have thought the natural fit would be power-to-gas or power-to-liquid syn-fuels? Absorb all those extra kWh from the sun in summer, store it for 4-8 months and then burn it during the cold, dark winter? Energy storage density higher than gravitational potential energy and less energy leakage than thermal-mass storage due to non-perfect thermal insulators etc?
FWiW I talk about storage liquid gas hydrogen byproducts a lot - I'm in Western Australia, we're putting up small country sized PV farms to power billion tonne per annum mining operations and with no actual "mountains" (although many mesa's) we look to ammonia | methanol and "infinity trains" rather than to hydro dams or gravity stacks, etc.
The GP comment mentioning "Scandanavia" seemed like a good excuse to spitball ideas with mountains - but as outlined they're no easy fix either - you can't just put a big dam anywhere without potential dangers and cold climates have issues with freezing, expansion, contraction, etc.
Where I'm at we're more concerned with overnight power for massive 24/7 continuous operation than with longer nights and less light in winter .. that's simply not a thing here.
When I said Scando I meant Finland. So, mountains are out of the question! Also tidal races.
OTOH there's mines, but oddly enough I've seen no discussion in the media of using them.
So.. there's no simple land/geographic features worth exploiting. OTOH some storable liquid/gas is more realistic. There's also sand batteries - Helsinki city has one - but they're maybe not so easy to do residentially/DIY, I would expect the neighbors to complain.
"pay to feed in the surplus"? In my U.S. context, this sounds surprising: are you saying that sometimes the energy utility CHARGES you money when you feed solar energy to the grid? That sounds... bizarre?
If I were to deliver you 1000 gallons of milk that expires in 10 minutes*, would you pay me or want to charge me for that priviledge. Assume you have enough milk already.
* (< 1 millisecond for electricity but hey for the milk analogy say 10 minutes).
I don't think this is an apt analogy. Electricity is pulled, not pushed. (Well, I realize it is actually a bit more complicated than that, but for the purposes of this conversation, I think the generalization is sufficient.)
If there is no grid-side demand for the energy from my solar panels, then they're not going to be force-feeding it to a grid that doesn't want it.
When you plug a light bulb that's rated to draw 20 watts into a power source capable of delivering 1000 watts, it doesn't blow up your light bulb, because the light bulb only takes what it needs from the source.
It is more complicated on grid level. Some inverters might be smart enough, but some are not. Thus there is both push and pull going on. And this can affect voltage and frequency.
This is the only reply I understand, so I’ll follow up here - in this case, is the end user paying to push the energy into batteries that the power company owns? Or is the extra energy just dissipated somewhere? Or does the power company stop producing their own energy once the grid is saturated? (I believe that electricity doesn’t actually flow like water, so it’s not the exact same electrons that the solar panel is producing which would be stored on batteries or dissipated somewhere)
[edit] if you don't produce the exact amount consumed at the exact same time, the current will loose its phase and the effective energy transported will be reduced, while producing surtensions at different grid points (don't quote me on that, but accumulator try to keep the phase, and too much divergence can cause their failure from what I understand. But I'm no physic major and I might be completely wrong). Grid coordination is vital.
The main issue with consumer solar connected to the grid is the lack of predictability. The reason why we charge if you put electricity on the grid when too much energy is produced is because we did not plan on offsetting this production, and the network people have to keep it balanced. Reducing the output of thermal fossil plants is usually free, but while we can module nuke plants, it's best and way cheaper when that is predicted (also, opportunity cost is high, so for privately owned nuke plants, it cost even more. EDF is the bitch of the European electricity market so they eat the opportunity costs, but they are the only plant owner who does it (and I won't talk about ARENH here, but again, EDF is the bitch of the EU).
Then, when really to much shit is on the grid, and you have reservoir space, you pump the water up the STEP (batteries, but better). Up to 4500€/mwh if unpredicted (it's never actually that, but it's the price seer in the SPOT command order). And lastly, if it's the only solution, wind/solar farms are shut down. Again, if predicted, good time to do the maintenance.
In the future consumer grade installations will probably come with a lot of stuff to help with the lack of predictability. I don't love it, but that's actually my current job (well, I actually love the actual job, really interesting shit, I'm not so sure about the moral implications of even more surveillance. Because we do have the geoloc of the newer installations. We don't link it with anything relevant yet, and it's anonymous for the moment, but will it stay that way?)
Is there a reason that consumer solar can’t be accounted for as smaller stable nodes in the system (sounds like they are still considered volatile and not a reliable source of inflow power)? For instance, maybe a rooftop solar array can easily be sucked up if the home decides to do a few loads of laundry that day, and therefore since there aren’t enough homes with solar arrays, it’s harder to predict an average influx per day from consumer solar to power the grid?
Are there any goals to shut down larger plants or not build larger solar fields by instead subsidizing distributed solar on peoples’ property?
Utilities are so interesting. The other afternoon I was looking out at the hills as the trees change, and said to my friend, “what a beautiful view… besides all these power lines! Although, I’d rather have the infrastructure than an unmolested view…”
> Is there a reason that consumer solar can’t be accounted for as smaller stable nodes in the system
It's not my subject (i mostly work on automation for the network and security teams), but when i consider some changes we did last year, i think the issue with consumer-grade solar is that we didn't know where installation number XXXX was set, not even which country it was from. That is changing, we will now know if it's near Paris, near Munich, near Barcelona... That will probably help with output prediction. I think at some point there were talk about using geoIP, but that was shut down for some reason (i think it was a mix of geoIP lying, and privacy/GDPR considerations we weren't ready to tackle on yet).
When there's too much energy available for the grid, and the price goes negative, producers are paying for someone to use that energy or paying another potential producer to reduce their output.
Some industrial users have variable demand, and a lower (or negative) price could encourage them to use more. A multi-region internet service might send more traffic to a datacenter with negative electricity prices, even if in increases latency for users.
Some producers need time to modulate output, and stopping and restarting can be expensive. Solar and Wind are at least technically easy to start/stop, but subsidies may make it economic to pay the grid to deliver electricity; either because of contracts/subsidies, or because the expense to deliver unwanted electricity is less than the expense to monitor pricing and reduce production.
What happens if no one takes the power (not one solar installation but lets assume lots of surplus power). Does it screw up the grid? Increase voltage/frequency?
Yes, if nobody removes the excess, grid frequency will increase. Running too high or too low frequency can damange equipment, on both the supply and demand sides.
When there is a lot of wind and sun simultaneously there is effectively too much electricity supply on the net, and day-ahead prices drop negative. This is partially fueled by flat subsidies per unit produced (has been fixed for a while for new installations), so producing when there's oversupply can still be profitable. Also most households have a flat energy rate and can amortize their energy usage over the year, so they will always keep their solar panels on even if the energy is less than worthless.
US pricing works very differently, especially in Texas.
Purchasers want to make margin on anything. So they charge this on the seller and then on buyer. Also with how markets work it is not like there isn't risks or need to at least some level forecast how much you will be buying and then selling. So their cut also covers this work.
And finally electricity is a spot market. So there is agreed price for certain period and in some cases market can be distorted and that price can be negative. It could be idiotic subsidies or production that can't be ramped as effectively. Or someone does massive mistakes with their bids, think of trading bots going wrong.
Isn't there a way to sell the unused solar power to the grid in summers and during winters the grid sends back the power needed to you at a discounted price?
Well, until '27, I'm allowed to use the grid as a free battery, basically, this is a kind of government subsidy. But that will end, and the contracts available will be fixed price with a feed in tariff or dynamic (realtime) market price, but then prices can and have been negative during peak solar hours. A battery can solve this only for a bit, and maybe with smart algorithms it can be trading on the electricity market full time, I'm not sure if that makes enough money for the grid power in winter.. it's nice to think about though.
or you get a battery. Is just great. I have 3.5kw solar power witha 9kwh battery. Very very seldom it switches to power line. And this is in south Germany, maybe a bit sunnier than north but still - it rains a lot/cloudy, sun is sparse.
It seems like that works for daily cycles, but isn't that very expensive storage for one cycle a year, which is what you need to save energy for winter?
Depends how close to the poles you are. A lot of the world can do this fine by sizing the PV for winter; too close to the poles and there's not going to work — you either need to diversify power generation by kind (wind, wave, hydro, geothermal all work too, but again geographically constrained) or by distance (the maths says we can build an adequate and literally global power grid for an affordable quantity of aluminium, shame about the politics).
If every household did this we would have massive problems. We would still need a base load amount in the winter, and in the summer there would be an over abundance. The price of electricity would swing between essentially free in the summer to higher than normal in the winter, because the cost of operating base grid power would be about same but they would need to cover all operating costs during the winter.
Utilities should charge a separate connection fee and per-kWh rate if that's what matches the economic reality of their business. I don't see the summer abundance as an issue. It means we get to shut off the fossil fuels 8 months out of the year. The remaining 4 months, everyone pays a little more per kWh, averaging out to the same cost over a full year. What's not to like?
The thing is though that even with array bounds checking built into the language, out of bounds access due to programming error can still be attempted. Only this time it's safer because an attacker can't use the bug (which still exists) to access memory outside of bounds. In any case, the program still doesn't work as intended (has bugs) because the programmer has attempted, or allowed the attempt, to access out of bounds memory.
Writing safe code is better than depending on safety features. Writing safe code is possible in any programming language, the only things required are good design principles and discipline (i.e. solid engineering).
Mine as well. Sucks that I just went through the required updating of the build (minimum sdk) of my only app on there, a 2016 Java string art app below 2MB with no data collection, advertising or monetization whatsoever.
Now they want to publish my full address too, because they believe I make money off of it, and I can't contest this in any way. Fine. I'll let them delete my account and I'll open source that app and put it on F-Droid then.
On my phone, turquoise is green for me, but on my laptop it's blue. I guess that's why it's called turquoise. The same thing happens with the purple spectrum. There's an unlimited amount of purple hues, ranging from red purple to blue purple. That's why there's pink.
The respect is of other researchers who have to consume the data at a later date. "Number 16" is far more valuable a label than "Brenda", since the former implies the specimen is one of at least 16 other data points - whereas the latter implies that the researcher involved is simply bored of their work and just wants to have fun.
Anyway, only humans use names. Is "Brenda" a human or a spider? Sure, you can answer this now - but can you answer it in another 10 years?
Humans use names for non human things as well and using a number doesn't imply spider anymore than anything else. Is #16 a spider or a sheep? Did anyone ever confuse Dolly for a human?
It also doesn't tell us that it's one of at least 16 data points. From the article we only know that it was the 16th spider they recorded as being present but we don't know that any of the other 15 made it into the study. The fact that you're reading something we don't know into it from the name #16 actually highlights a failing in this system for me. Surely if it matters to you then you'll be reading the study which will these details explicitly.
There are popular embedded platforms like STM32 that don't have hardware double support, but do have hardware float support. Using double will cause software double support to be linked and slow down your firmware significantly.
OK, but if you're writing for that kind of platform, you know it. Don't use double there? Sure. "Don't use double on non-embedded code just because such platforms exist" doesn't make sense to me.
Sure, my code could maybe run on an embedded platform someday. But the person importing it probably has an editor that can do a search and replace...
What a coincidence, I first saw this video in my YouTube recommends and now here. I used to have an MSX-2, a Philips. It had a double sided 720K 3.5" floppy drive, fhe file system is FAT12 and the disks were compatible with PC's. I learned Z80 assembler on the MSX and had a lot of fun with it both with playing games and making it do cool stuff. This computer was quite popular in the Netherlands as well as Spain.
