Posts by John Robson

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Re: Capacity

greenwashing is what you're doing to gas.

The weather is *always* good enough for a heat pump - you just have some grudge against the idea of preserving the planet in a state where we can carry on living.

This concept that heat pumps don't work when it's cold is only slightly less intelligent than flat earth...

Local control is an upgrade - because it *is* consumer control. The meters aren't what gives the control, but they allow for dynamic pricing - and that encourages consumer control (whether individual or using other services).

EVs, or their chargers, can time their usage, you can set the timer on your immersion heater, my storage heater is on a timer.

There are some "electron retailer" controlled devices - the Ohme EV chargers can be controlled by Octopus - and *all* the electricity you use whilst that happens is charged at off peak - that's far better than a radio clock signal - for both the consumer and the electricity retailer. You just set how much electricity you want by when, and it happens.

There are also other systems with external control - Mixergy tanks will stop heating at times of peak grid load, they'll still heat if they *need* to, but they'll delay if they can.

For all the "end up costing consumers more" bollocks you spout I pay far below the 27p you claim for electricity - it's been 9.5p over the last year. Gas over a similar timescale (309 days) has cost me 10.9p. Interestingly I've used similar amounts of each this year so far (8.3kWh electricity, 7.4kWh for gas) but I expect gas to overtake electricity as the year finishes off with colder weather, and since the price has recently dropped, and I expect higher usage, the overall cost of gas will drop somewhat. However since the price of electricity has also recently dropped, and the value of exported electricity has increased - that value is unlikely to rise much, despite the lower insolation as the year ends.

Yes - Vimes Boots - I appreciate that I was able to put some more environmentally friendly technologies in place last year, and I expect to continue doing that (when my current boiler fails for instance).

Re: Capacity

"Resistive heating is also 'un-green'."

Resistive heating is 100% efficient, which is substantially better than gas, but *way* worse than a heat pump.

"Plus in our infinite wisdom, the extremely simple radio signal that controls the meter is due to be turned off soon. And we've 'invested' billions in 'smart meters' that can't do the same thing."

Except that what we've done is move the logic. My storage heaters were never controlled by a radio signal, only by the clock on the meters - what I have now is a simple timer.

Turning on/off immersion heaters across the whole country at the same time is daft anyway.

The local control, which is actually better now that we have smart meters and other associated options, is an upgrade - not the downgrade you consider it to be.

If heat is "wasted" into a home *in winter* then it isn't wasted... it certainly is in summer, and might actually increase the cost of cooling (whether active AC or just fan based).

Distributed storage is, of course, less profitable than concentrated storage - that's why we don't see hundreds of tiny coal power plants in people's sheds - the economies of scale are obvious.

However home storage is still a valuable technology, with or without solar.

Re: Capacity

You seem to be under the impression that heat stops at a certain temperature. I mean you're right, it does... but that temperature is 273 degrees below zero.

Re: Capacity

GSHP are a great option... if you're converting a field into an estate.

You have access for the machinery, nothing to work around and avoid... just slam the holes in when you have all the access you'll ever need.

For retrofitting... ASHP are far easier, and nearly as good.

Re: Capacity

Besides which - a bearing replacement after five years... is hardly a big deal.

Re: Capacity

That was rather my point.

Re: Capacity

"Nope, i'm saying heat pumps are an economic insanity"

Well then you're spouting more crap than the back end of a bull with diarrhoea.

"outright requirements to do things we don't want people to do should be modified forthwith"

You mean like lying about how fossil fuels are brilliant and cheap and have no drawbacks, but electrons are the work of the devil?

Or do you mean that we should allow people to drive at 90mph through town as school ends because "they want to"?

Perverse incentives exist - and do need to be mitigated. For instance there is no way coal should ever be cheaper than gas, and gas prices shouldn't be subsidised by clean energy generators.

There should be an outright ban on hooking up new builds to gas - because better solutions exist - both individually and societally. But no - we can't do that because someone's ancient house might need a coat of sealant on the old chimney.

Re: Capacity

Ah yes - the conservation area friendly bright yellow paint.

See - the area is already changing... and will continue to do so. An unobtrusively located ASHP isn't going to cause the ground to swallow up the area in disgust.

Ah yes - the "but I can't afford something that will save me money"

I am well aware of vimes' boots. That's why grants for such things exist - because it's actually a societal benefit having them installed. As more are installed the price then comes down, and more people are trained in how to install them so the availability and price comes down further. For some reason our electrical consumption attracts ~12% "green levy" compared with ~3.4% for our gas consumption - despite about 40% of our electricity coming from renewable sources, and some from nuclear.

Imagine requiring people to spend much of their income of device to allow them to continue travelling...

The starting position should have been (ten years ago) to ban gas in new builds... Then to look at replacing failing "old" boilers, then more modern boilers as they age and fail... There simply isn't the capacity, the will, or the benefit to suggest that all boilers should be immediately ripped out and replaced with heat pumps.

I am very well aware that there will be people who aren't in a position to install a heat pump at the moment... many of those people should, at the time their existing boiler fails, have the equipment installed by their landlord (some proportion of which will be the council), rather than out of their own pocket.

In the same way in the early days of cars, telephones, televisions, mobile phones, computers.... any of the things you now think of as ubiquitous parts of society - they weren't immediately accessible to everyone. Why do you insist that heat pumps buck that trend?

Re: Capacity

Oh dear - someone clearly forgot about negative temperatures.

Air has a heat capacity of about 700J/kg/K - so at a mere 273 kelvin there is 191kJ of heat per kg of air (about 820 litres) [yes, I know it doesn't extrapolate all the way to absolute zero - it goes far enough that it doesn't matter for illustration]

They can produce 16kW if that's their sizing... in the same way that a mini can't put out 1000HP, but that doesn't mean that no car can.

Re: Capacity

If only you'd told the norwegians before they installed their heat pumps... oh wait - the engineers already resolved the icing issue (to paraphrase tony stark).... they simply run a defrost cycle.

That doesn't cool the house, but it does take some energy - hence the SCOP being the important figure, and 3.5 is readily achievable - that's around four times as efficient as a gas boiler.

Re: Capacity

Heat pump ratings are usually their output - the issue is that gas boilers are generally massively oversized - and therefore turn on and off repeatedly, so spend alot of their time in their least efficient phases (or just wasting heat up the flue as they cool).

36kW output is great if you feel the need to heat a house inside ten minutes... but that's not actually what's needed, you want a slow and steady flow of heat into the house, so that the heat source can operate continuously at a low output.

Re: Capacity

Don't bring facts into this discussion - people don't want facts, they already have their prejudice and ignorance.

Re: Capacity

Yes - we need to make changes to conservation areas in order to conserve the planet.

There are plenty of ways to make adjustments which you haven't mentioned, but the objection to having a car parked in front of the house has generally been overruled - having a heat pump around is far less of an obtrusive change to an area.

"even if" you car got 10mpg.... Getting a scop in excess of three shouldn't be aspirational, that would be the bare minimum you should be aiming for. Over 4 is good, 3.5 should be standard.

Taking your values of 7p and 27p, and assuming (optimistically) a 90% efficient boiler a SCOP of 3.5 would be about the breakeven point in terms of opex - You also omit the (small) saving from not having a gas standing charge.

Of course not everything has to be a financial "investment"... What's the ROI on that new kitchen?

Re: Capacity

You can get heat pumps which will output north of 16kW of heat... if you're losing more than that then you have a serious issue, or a *very* large house (at which point a pair of pumps might be a reasonably option) or you should actually install windows and doors rather than just leaving gaping holes in your property.

A flow temp of 50 degrees will require non microbore pipework to your radiators, but assuming a 20 degree room temperature then you've still got a better thermal gradient radiator-room than room-external with an outside temp of negative 10 - which is not at all common across the vast majority of the UK.

Re: Capacity

Ah yes - because the heat from a heat pump leaves the house faster than the heat from a boiler.

If you have leaky and/or poorly insulated buildings then you'll just need a larger heat pump, but the energy saving will actually be larger (since you would have thrown an enormous amount of gas at it).

Of course the better solution is to insulate and eliminate draughts, and then to install a smaller heat pump.

Boilers take up valuable space, usually *inside* space, which is at more of a premium than roof/alley/wall space for a heat pump.

They also make very annoying noises when running, because they are a machine... and that's what machines do.

Thousands of Teslas recalled over brake fluid bug

We really do need a new name

For these "required updates" as opposed to a "recall" because they aren't actually recalling anything.

In the same way M$ computers aren't "recalled" each patch Tuesday.

Intel's 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh turns turbos up to 6GHz, gives i7 an E-core bump

Re: Remember when a 200MHz clock increase was something worthwhile?

I remember when 15MHz was sufficient that it had to be turned *down* via a button on the front of the case in order for games to run at a reasonable speed.

iPhone 15 Pro Max users report seeing ghostly OLED apparitions

Re: the iDud ?

I'm considering buying a 13 to upgrade my current daily driver... it would displace an 8 from the youngest offspring.

The 8 has now dropped from "latest" OS to security updates only, the previous gen got their last updates in July, so I've got some months to consider the upgrade.

The bigger issue is that the 13/14 are basically the same phone - satellite SOS and crash detection aren't exactly deal breakers for many - that one additional GPU and "photonic engine" don't really feel like significant upgrades either. Oh, I just spotted the bluetooth upgrade from 5 to 5.3... be still my beating heart.

Going to the 15 we then have... one generation newer chip, updated cameras, and a (noticeably) brighter screen - more reasonable upgrades, but a 33% increase in base cost (over the 13).

So... the 15 will sell, but it will sell more when it's no longer the flagship, with pricing to hurtmatch.

Europe mulls open sourcing TETRA emergency services' encryption algorithms

Re: Problem?

Quite - that doesn't mean that all drugs should be legalised though (and obviously there is a wide category of what "legal" actually represents).

Re: Problem?

I rather suspect you want certain drugs legalised rather than all drugs.

There will always be something illegal available, and the dealers in that would benefit in the same way drug dealers would.

Apple and Lenovo are dropping the ball for visually impaired users

Re: Whateve

"So what disabilities did they consider?"

Telling a disabled person that you're offering a disability friendly service, when they have already tried (and often failed) to use it is.... well, I'll not go there.

Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?

Re: GB left the EU

What are you smoking?

NASA reschedules Boeing's first crewed Starliner flight for mid-April 2024

Re: Intriguing....

He's not blessed, he's a very naughty scientist.

Forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores isn't enough

Re: Nitpick...

Whilst technically true, it probably depends on how you count benefits.

The ONS publication "Effects of taxes and benefits on UK household income: financial year ending 2022" splits out direct and indirect (VAT and other duties) taxation.

"The proportion of people living in households receiving more in benefits than they paid in taxes decreased from 55.0% to 53.8% in FYE 2022."

If I look closely at figure 5 (which compares not deciles, but dodeciles (is that even a word?)) then it looks like the bottom two fifths of the population get more in *cash* benefits than they pay in indirect and direct taxation combined.

I can't find the raw data, but it looks like the third "fifth" get more in cash and indirect benefits than they pay in tax, it's not until the fourth and top "fifths" that the taxation significantly exceeds the cash & indirect benefits.

So I'm reasonably comfortable that the 40% is close enough for a discussion - not saying it's 40 rather than 39, but it's overwhelmingly likely more than 30...

Re: It's not whether the App Store is good or bad...

"You also don't have free medical care, there is no such thing."

Well actually - it's free at point of use. There is no correlation between what someone pays and the care they receive.

This means that, to all intents and purposes healthcare is absolutely free to the 40% of adults who don't pay tax, and to all those children who don't either.

Yes - it means that those who do pay tax are funding a civilised service for a civilised country.

The danger is that it is being controlled politically by people who think they can profit from selling it off, as they did other national infrastructure.

Elon Musk's ambitions for Starship soar high while reality waits on launchpad

Re: A brief look back

That was an article pre Falcon9

Nukes, schmukes – fuel cells could power future datacenters

Re: As AI use continues to grow, the race to find alternative ways to power datacenters accelerates

Oh dear - the cap was never on the bill, but on the unit rates.

Don't even need a pipeline - the sun does the conversion for us, and beams us that energy in a format we can already capture and use.

I strongly suspect most providers would rather be generating electricity to be used later than not generating at all...

The point is that the energy generated *which would otherwise be curtailed* is free (since although you're paying for it you're also saving money on both not paying for shutdown and for not having to buy energy later - since it's being returned from storage)

There is a cost of storage, and there are technical challenges with hydrogen, but those are at least technically resolvable in a large scale static setup, in a way that they aren't for millions of small scale installations, many of which would be mobile. The cost of paying for the energy and the storage has to be less than the cost of paying for curtailment *and* the cost of purchasing energy at times of high demand... but that's where the accountants come in.

"Efficiency of the whole process is ~40%, from electricity in to electricity out, so it has to be on the pretense that excess, otherwise-curtailed wind power is 'free'.

But at the moment, wind generators get lots of money in subsidies when they are told to shut down. So is the excess energy really 'free'?"

It's better than free... rather than paying people a premium to not generate electricity you pay them less than that to generate the electricity... you also then get to *not* pay someone else to burn crap later on.

Blockchain biz goes nuclear: Standard Power wants to use NuScale reactors for DCs

Re: Whose paying for waste disposal?

"The open dirty secret about Nuclear power is Nuclear waste. The US has literally thousands of tonnes of unsafely stored waste and super fund sites."

~90 thousand tons... which isn't "unsafely stored" it's stored in casks which are sufficiently shielded that radiation measured whilst leaning up against them is lower than the natural background (because half the background radiation is blocked by that same shielding). The amount of waste increases by ~2 thousand tons a year, from ~800TWh of generation.

That much (the annual production) fly ash is generated by coal power stations generating just 20GWh* of electricity - and I'm completely ignoring any waste that goes up the chimney - and fly ash is well known to be a concentrated source of radioactive material - and since it is completely unshielded it actually releases more radiation than a nuclear plant (MWh for MWh).

So for 2000 tons of fly ash, which releases more radioactivity to the environment you get 20GWh of electricity.

For the same amount of waste you get 40,000 times as much energy, and less release of radiation to the environment.

Of course there is also the minor inconvenience (TM) of climate change to consider.

*

2018 figures suggest that in the US:

1PWh of coal generation

102 million tons of fly ash

So that's ~ 51,000 times more fly ash than nuclear waste -> 1PWh/51,000 = 20GWh

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Re: Reduced battery life

"It is also a waste of energy compared with a Powerwall type solution. You can apportion some of the car battery's weight to V2G and it is not efficient to be lugging that around with you."

Or you look at it the other way around - you have a large battery because you wanted it to make 5 journeys a year easier... and for 23 hours a day 360 days a year it's just parked doing nothing.

Now you can use that battery as a whole house UPS, giving you several days of "normal" running, or a week or more "reduced load" running from an asset you are paying for anyway.

V2G is a different sum game from V2H, but the same applies - you're not committing that battery to "nothing but V2G", you're using it for driving long journeys and then running an induction stove whilst camping, or your house when you get home. Typical cars need ~5kW/day on average in the UK, so 360 days a year your 50kW EV battery has a 90% reserve - maybe assume that a car only moves 50% of days, then you still have an 80% reserve. Reserve that you might reasonably want to be there for a few days a year - but why not have the ability to use it for the rest of the year.

Re: So you have money to buy or replace your car more regularly

15k discharge cycles - that's conservatively 60kWh * 15,000 cycles = 900 MWh of arbitrage.

We drive an EV, and are fairly heavy domestic users, and we use a bit shy of 9MWh a year - so your theoretical vehicle has done *way more* than a century's worth of work (three centuries of an ofgem "typical" UK household).

A 9kWh battery sees us through basically every day (a small handful of days since February have had peak import here - we're approaching the point where increased use, though things like more oven cooked meals, and diminishing PV generation (a mere 2.5kWp) will take us back into peak usage for a small amount of each day. So we'd be looking at a week for each charge cycle in reality, the 15k cycles is then looking like three hundred years for a heavy domestic user.

That 900MWh of arbitrage is also going to have netted the user an amount of money over the years. Even at just 10p/kWh arbitrage rate (and mine is *far* higher than that on average) that's £90k.

If we assume that 2k cycles is more reasonable then divide all those numbers by 7.5 (13 years of heavy domestic or 40+years for a typical household and £12k in arbitrage costs).

And now your 300 mile Tesla "only" has a 240 mile range.

Just for giggles... your 5 year Tesla has had an *average* power flow of 41kW... or 180A at 230V AC.

One with 2k cycles has 5.5kW (24A) which is at least technically acheivable - if completely ridiculous.

Re: Battery sharing?

"Not to mention, finding the battery drained right when you want to go out because the power company decided to use your juice during the day."

So you still don't want to set a reserve level on your battery?

Nothing like holding up straw men as hard as you can because you know that you're asserting a pretty daft position.

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

>> Because they have the resources to actually overcome those challenges in the pursuit of cheap power to feed their habit.

> But they don't.

These companies have very deep pockets indeed Apple would be the eighth richest country in the world, MS the twelfth, Amazon the fourteenth....

They really do have the resources to develop something like this, not only to reduce their own power bill, but also to sell the technology to competitors and grids across the world.

They'd also see a significant boost in their corporate image.

I'm not holding my breath - but they're some of the few places where the desire and the funds could come together relatively easily.

"But nobody is interested in funding that properly or overcoming the engineering challenges, because you can't make bombs out of it at the end."

And that's the big hope of these massive consumers wanting to build their own SMR/micro reactors.

Because they have the resources to actually overcome those challenges in the pursuit of cheap power to feed their habit.

Because they have a peculiar load profile

Which is well suited to the concepts of SMRs or micro reactors.

It makes a good deal of sense for them to do this, and we can all reap the benefits.

Linux interop is maturing fast… thanks to a games console

Re: "Solution: new Linux features to fill in the missing gaps"

"But in Win11, doing this breaks the OS."

And yet this is somehow an improvement over versions which didn't need an internet connection to whore you out without your informed consent?

(I get that there is a difference between the OS and the specific UI you run on it - when I ran linux desktops the distinction is obvious - but the choice doesn't exist with M$, so the UI is part of the OS (since they can't be separated).

The same is true for MacOS, and there are some really crap UI decisions on show there, but the OS has a firmer foundation than M$...

Re: interesting Until....

"NB: "Flatpak". No C. Makes it much easier to Google."

Until the AlphaGoo decides to autocorrectscrewup and search for IKEA instead (other shops are available)

Re: "Solution: new Linux features to fill in the missing gaps"

"Windows, under all the marketing BS, is a very good OS."

Hmm - it would have to have improved a *long way* from when I last used it for that to be the case.

I'll be fair and point out that that's probably 15 years now - but I'll also point out that my daughter has a surface go for school (MS have almost always done good hardware) and the software is flakey when compared with the macs in the house (a bit unfair comparing it with the linux servers).

It's less flakey than I remember windows being, so there has been some improvement.

Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk's multiple messes

Re: Still need a copy editor...

In which case switch tense properly...

"we've added progress indicators to guide people through the multi-step sign-up process and [we] rewrote copy and labels to be more intuitive"

I still think having whole sentence in the same case by replacing 'rewrote' with 'rewritten' is the cleanest correction.

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

Re: Orbital inclination

The likelihood of much of it reaching the ground at the targetted location is infinitesimally small.

Launch a tungsten telephone pole and let's talk again.

Re: How much

The roadster was never meant to be anything other than a publicity stunt though - this is talking about useful deorbiting work.

Though given the oft quoted assertion that the exhaust gave useful thrust... we just need to feed the air intake (and ignore any of the other issues with working in a vacuum)

Re: How much

Erm the boosters can't make orbit, not even close. They are dropped because they are dead weight at that point, and if they weren't dropped none of it would make orbit.

Re: How much

The other thing I haven't bothered to calculate is an appropriate deltaV budget....

How much

fuel, and what engine, could you fit into a hollowed out dragon capsule?

You shouldn't be able to buy devices that tamper with diesel truck emissions on eBay, says DoJ

Re: This from a country

So you're saying it *is* your fault (personally) that school children across your daft country have to have "live shooter" drills, and get shot so often it barely makes the news any more.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Same Footprint

You can buy a compute module and a carrier if you like...

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Re: Too pessimistic

Soil pipe - so a pretty big hole.

Mind you my first house was a concrete construction - and the aggregate they used was flint... I was going to chain drill holes for a dryer vent... and by the time I was a couple of inches into the wall with the first hole... the hole was about 4" across and was well lit internally from the sparks off the flint at the tip of the drill.