Posts by John Robson

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

No room to open it up and run the Pi internally?

UK's largest water company investigates datacenters' use as drought hits

Re: Hosepipe bans

"I think a lot of people are concerned that their actual metered water bill is going to be a *lot* more than the standing charge, but if that's what they feel, that pretty much would indicate to me that they *know* they are likely wasting water and don't really care... unless of course it hits their pocket."

Or that they know that their medical needs consume significantly more water than the average person.

Re: Hosepipe bans

The issue isn't that it's lost - it's that the effort that went into making it drinkable is lost.

A quarter?

Bloody hell...

The raw numbers are usually presented without context - the proportion is frightening though.

"Thames Water has itself faced criticism for wasting water due to leaks from ageing pipes, with its network losing almost a quarter of the water it supplies, said to be more than 600 million liters per day by some estimates."

Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban

Re: "Green" Idiocy: Wind, Solar, Batteries...

Oh noes... we can't use renewables because my calculator doesn't work if I lock it in a coal cellar.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/

Yes, I know australia is not Japan, the UK, or the US.

But it's the best detailed study I am aware of, looking at what would happen if we scaled up wind and solar generation using real world data, doing it week at a time, in real time...

Re: Wind and solar

Windmills kill birds?

Well yes, some birds... but when the RSPB come out in support of them, you have to question whether you are cherry picking data.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/bird-death-and-wind-turbines-a-look-at-the-evidence/

"Overall, the RSPB says it scrutinises “hundreds” of windfarm applications every year in order to assess their possible impact on wildlife and bird populations and ultimately objects to six per cent of them."

And many of those will be "set the turbines back a bit" style objections.

Or we could look at other generation methods:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148112000857

"The research concludes that taken together, fossil-fueled facilities are about 17 times more dangerous per gigawatt hour of electricity produced to birds than wind and nuclear power stations."

And that’s without getting into other human activities and structures – including buildings, roads and domestic cats.

Re: Wind and solar

To be fair the quakes did damage the primary external power sources... just not the reactors or backup generators, or backup batteries, or control electronics. Those were all flooded and killed by the tsunami which was nearly three times the design limit for the site.

Re: Wind and solar

There is probably a good reason to scram a reactor when the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan strikes just 100 miles away.

The acceleration of the ground at those sites exceeded half a g, which is 20% more than the design spec called for. Note that they are built on rock, sedimentary acceleration a few miles north was over 2g.

This alone destroyed the 6 primary external generators.

The tsunami that earthquake generated was 15m high at the plant.

The design of defenses was protecting against a 3m tsumami (based on the 1960 Chile tsumani), though that was revised to ~6m in 2002. They were in discussions about potentially higher tsunami, but little action had been taken.

Yes, they should have done more to protect against seawater ingress into the building (which killed the batteries and the backup generators). Either by moving the generators up the hill, or upstairs in the buildings.

But that's all the generators, batteries and switch gear that would have needed moving. Not exactly an overnight job.

The evacuation was ordered based on a level a little under 3 times the background in cornwall.

The background level before the tsunami was about 10% of that in cornwall.

The numbers were, and are, pretty small, and the risks are also fairly small - the biggest risk was always the massive bloody earthquake and tsunami. The Iodine and Caesium (particularly 137) is not something we want to be releasing... but the alternative is the last decade of burning fossil fuels - since they have ~25% coal still we can reasonably assume that the coal is what hasn't been displaced by nuclear generation.

Before the tsunami a third of it's electricity came from nuclear plants, it's now just 5%.

So... Japan uses ~1 PWh/year, so 250TWh of coal per year, for a decade... that's 2.5PWh, at a reasonable estimate of 25 deaths/TWh... that's 60+ thousand deaths as a result of using coal rather than nuclear generation.

Was the initial evacuation overkill?

I'd rather evacuate safely and unnecessarily occasionally than not.

But the evacuation itself caused serious issues as well.

The limits places on background doses were pretty strict - again I'd rather start strict and loosen after consideration.

Was the decision to cut back on all new builds and all existing nuclear generation for a decade overkill - absolutely.

Re: Wind and solar

I know Australia isn't Japan...

But a detailed look at renewables in Aus shows... pretty promising results with very little storage:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

Re: The plan for the combustion fleet isn't to ban them from the roads

"I really would like to see your solution for an army in the wilds of Afghanistan or wherever dealing with electric vehicles, not to mention farmers in remote(ish) areas. There may be a solution for them in the future, but it certainly isn't here yet."

Sorry, you're trying to compare an invading army with a person moving around their town/country in peacetime? No wonder everyone thinks they need to drive a tank to take their kid the four hundred yards to primary school "because it's unsafe to walk with all the cars around".

Farmers don't have that big an issue. Even remote areas are generally pretty well supplied with electrons, and pretty much by definition farmers will have significant area available for renewables installation.

Can every piece of farm machinery be electrified tomorrow? Probably not

Does that mean that none if it can/should? Absolutely not

Does that mean that none of the rest ever will be? Absolutely not.

At what point have I said "works for me so must be perfect for everyone"?

The only vaguely contentious thing I have said is that we have far too many cars, and society is built around assuming that everyone and their dog has sole access to one.

If we actually planned to reduce our reliance on cars then we could do so easily. It won't happen overnight, but it would happen. You simply make the alternatives nicer, faster, cheaper than running a car. You don't build dormitory developments with no transport links to anywhere except the closest motorway junction. You build them with high quality pedestrian and cycle access to the local town, the local shopping centre, the local doctors, pubs, cinema, schools, industrial estate, office blocks.

You run, and enforce, default 20mph speed limits in built up areas, you charge for parking... not rocket science. But the carrot has to be put first, in many cases the stick is never needed.

Did I not explicitly note that not all buses are as good as the current generation, and that coaches/trains are a bit of a pain (trains less than coaches, since at least the platform staff are generally helpful)?

It's not an "it works for me so there is no problem", but an "it *can* be made to work" for everyone.

It's far easier to equip all buses to take wheelchairs than to make cars able to be driven by all people with disabilities. Yes, many people with disabilities can drive, but there are also a significant proportion who can't, and won't ever be able to (think visual impairments, seizures, vertigo, or any number of other conditions).

Re: The plan for the combustion fleet isn't to ban them from the roads

That's *because* of cars - the cars are the problem, not the solution.

No, it's because public transport has been privatised, so it is run "for profit". It's pure right-wing neoliberal economics, as is evidenced by the plentiful and affordable public transport in countries that haven't veered to the right, as opposed to those which have.

I agree, but I'd maintain that one of the main reasons the silver could be sold off so easily is that car ownership was pushed so hard.

Re: The plan for the combustion fleet isn't to ban them from the roads

"I don't think any parent wants to be trying to find a way to get their child to hospital in the middle of the night when the busses have stopped running. While that might never be necessary, it is a big fear."

Two options, one you have a public transport system that doesn't just stop overnight...

Or.. and this is a shocking thought, if you need to get to a hospital then there are these things called ambulances. One will collect your child, and you, and get you to an appropriate hospital at any time of day or night.

Re: you focus on EVs were you can

No - the main reason is that it takes about a third as much energy to move a BEV as it does to move an ICE vehicle.

Fuel duty has never brought £30bn to the treasury, it was ~22bn a decade ago, and grew to ~27bn just before the pandemic (I'm not cherry picking pandemic years here).

One of the main reasons for fuel duty is to encourage people to reduce emissions, so there is immediately less need to add it to EV fuel. We should, however, be increasing the duty on petrol/diesel further - and jet fuel (massively).

However let's ignore all that and do some more maths...

The cost per mile (just fuel) is:

38mpg@£1.90 = 22.7p (which includes just 6.3p fuel duty - RAC average cost page)

3.8m/kWh@7.5p = 1.9p (Charging overnight at home - Octopus Go, currently offered rate)

3.8m/kWh@50p = 13.2p (Public charging - Gridserve DC cost)

So... if you subtract the fuel duty (and the VAT on the fuel duty) then you get a cost per ICE mile that is 15.1p, still higher than the already elevated cost of public DC charging.

Assuming that ~90% of miles are charged from home... the typical cost per mile would be 2.4p, so add on the 7.6p of fuel duty and VAT for the treasury - that's now 10p/mile, same revenue for the treasury, but less than half the cost for the user.

Re: The plan for the combustion fleet isn't to ban them from the roads

"In most of the country, public transport is either expensive and sparse, or simply non-existent. "

That's *because* of cars - the cars are the problem, not the solution.

I manage to get on and off buses with my wheelchair... many wheelchair users (particularly those who are full time users) don't have a folding wheelchair (they are heavier and less stable than folding chairs), and there are a significant proportion with electric chairs, which you aren't ever going to put on the roof of a car.

Access to a bus is relatively easy - many have adjustable suspension to match them to the kerb height. It's coaches that are challenging, and trains - despite the fact that train/platform heights have been standard for ages.

Many disabled people can drive - but many can't.

If we make transport (and that includes, and should prioritise, pedestrian/cycle/wheelchair/scooter routes) accessible to all then none of us would need to drive a car.

We might get electrical assistance on our mobility aids*, but cars are generally a poor choice of mobility aid, spending most of their energy moving themselves around, not the passengers.

* Personal example: the hill from my house to town is very hard work pushing up, though lever drive makes it merely hard work, an electrical boost for the steepest 100 metres (at 10%) would make a significant difference.

Coming back there is a slightly shallower climb from the bottom of that hill to my house (7% is still steep to push up for any distance) that a little helping hand would be good.

Re: you focus on EVs were you can

I did the calculations in 2019 based on 15 years of previous receipts and records for a variety of cars I had over that time.

At that time the lease of a new BEV cost me the same as running ICE vehicles from 80k-150k miles old.

The prices have shifted in my favour over the last couple of years. Diesel has gone from £1.10 to whatever it is now - £1.90 (https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/), electricity prices have moved a bit, but make up a very small portion of my costs - and off peak is still available cheaply.

I readily admit that the leases offered by motability are below market rates, but:

- Assuming a generous 38mpg in the ICE (reality was 36/37)

- Assuming a stingy 3.8kWh/m for the BEV (reality is 3.9-4.1)

- Assuming 10% BEV miles are on DC charging at 55p/kWh

Then at 2019 prices 12k/year was the point at which costs were even.

At 2022 prices (fuel £1.90 rather than £1.10 - ignoring inflation) that distance is just 5k miles.

If I do 10k a year, then the lease would have to be 25% more expensive to match the cost of an old ICE vehicle. If I do 12k/year (what my MOTs recorded for the decade leading up to the switch) then the lease could be 40% more expensive.

"Buying an older EV is taking a gamble with the battery life degradation curve"

As opposed to the gamble with ICE vehicles and all the things that go wrong with them?

Battery degradation is actually well characterised, gradual, and observable - you get a few miles less max range than you used to, you don't get stranded road side with no warning.

EV batteries generally will come with 8 year/100-150k mile warranty - double that of a typical ICE warranty. I'd be more worried about a cam belt failure, or a head gasket failure, or a gear box failure, or any of the other myriad of failures that can strand an ICE vehicle with little to no warning, not the battery pack.

Re: you focus on EVs were you can

The average age of a vehicle* in the UK is... 8 and a bit years.

Suggesting that there are very few vehicles older than 25 years isn't exactly a stretch.

Yes there will always be some vehicles which just keep trundling on with nothing more than a big hammer and a bit of string, but for the vast majority they become uneconomic long before then.

~40m on this report - 35m cars and 5m vans.

Re: The plan for the combustion fleet isn't to ban them from the roads

Any transport strategy that doesn't involve weaning people off cars is doomed to failure... EVs are one step on that path, they aren't the final destination.

Binance exec says scammers made a 'deep fake hologram' of him to fool victims

So in no way a hologram

It was a video fake...

SpaceX upgrades Starlink to reflect less light, can't launch without its Starship

Re: Starship is a problem

"So far there hasn't been any talk about how the second stage of the Starship stack is going to deploy a pile of Starlink satellites"

Really? Have you not been paying any attention?

They're using something based on an industrial pallet stacker to release the satellites - been referred to as a pez dispenser for a while now.

Re: Corporate Good Citizenship?

Listening and "doing exactly what one group of people says" are different things.

Re: bigger

Well, it's bigger if the numbers are written in angry all caps...

NASA builds for keeps: Voyager mission still going after 45 years

Re: NASA and other acronyms are all upper case, you illiterate artiste morons.

I'm sorry - small caps are always read aloud in a leaden voice...

I can' be having Death be the voice of all acronyms.

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Re: Incredibly delicate technology

Make it with a weak seam and it would get torn right off... Just hope it can't then get ingested by the engines...

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Presumably they’re investigating abs, airbags and seatbelts…

“ In early June, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration upgraded a probe of Tesla Autopilot after it found reasons to look into whether "Autopilot and associated Tesla systems may exacerbate human factors or behavioral safety risks." The investigation is ongoing.”

On the basis that it is well known that motorists take more risks with any safety feature on a vehicle.

It’s pretty easy to demonstrate that seatbelts, for example, had negligible impact on traffic fatalities.

Their undeniable safety benefit was simply eaten up by drivers taking more risks, at the expense of those outside the vehicle.

There is nothing new under the sun.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

Re: For which the sane answer is

Right, so let's hold the fossil fuel industry to the same standard... Oh, wait they're the ones suggesting that transport is difficult.

Even back in the early 1980s we were testing transport flasks by running trains into them at 100 miles an hour, and there was no loss in pressure at all.

Re: the real facts about small vs large reactors

How many people does it take to look after a small (ship sized) reactor?

My instinct tells me that they aren't exactly designed for lots of servicing to be done at sea - i.e. they're not exactly black boxes, but they shouldn't need a huge staff.

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

B- must try harder.

The "rated output" is *never* what has been suggested to be the output of wind/solar plants.

It's always been the peak, and the load factor is very well known in advance of construction, though it varies by location and generation technology.

Energy storage has always been a challenge, and until recently we have generally used the renewables to reduce the usage of fossil fuel plants when we can. We are on the brink of the capacity to implement true distributed grid scale storage - BEVs, and home/workplace chargers, need to be mandated to support V2G.

Micro nuclear plants are, imho, an excellent component in the diversification of energy supply, both in terms of materials and in terms of supply points. If we put two of these at each motorway services (chosen because there are ~100 of them, they are generally a little way outside populated areas, and they have very good grid connections with the capacity to expand) - then we could be replacing one unit each week (that assumes a 4 year life, scale as appropriate) and have 100MW (plus some local heating) available at each services (excellent for all those EV fast chargers), with a grid connection capable of handling surplus output onto the grid... that's 10GW of distributed production - dropping 50MW for a couple of days each week as each unit is swapped out.

That's ~third of our current demand (bit more in summer, bit less in winter), and way more than the estimated electricity requirements for the entire UK car fleet to switch to BEV.

Combine a distributed solid baseload with a distributed grid scale storage and we are alot closer to being able to turn off the fossil fuels entirely.

It's a shame that new builds aren't required to be well insulated, or to have PV installed (cheaper at build, because the PV can be the roof), or to use heat pumps, or...

Because all of those things should be the bare minimum for new buildings.

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

Well it makes a significant difference to how radioactive the ash is, since stuff that doesn't burn is highly concentrated by the act of burning the rest of the stuff away.

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

35 times sod all... it's still several orders of magnitude less waste than a coal plant produces (much of which is far more radioactive than you'd expect, the heavier radioactive elements don't burn well).

US-funded breakthrough battery tech just simply handed over to China

Re: Sounds familar

"At least in the space arena, we have Elon Musk, who might not be that competent, but he's got a lot more done than any one else."

I would suggest that in terms of space flight Musk has demonstrated more competence than basically anyone else in recent history.

He has been pretty ruthlessly focussed on a single long term aim, and SpaceX has developed (almost as sideline technology en route to his vision) an incredibly successful launch vehicle, which is much more reusable than any previous vehicle (oh how people laughed when they started trying to land F9 boosters), and now has multiple orbital class boosters which have flown 10 times or more, and they are launching more flights per year than everyone else combined.

Post-quantum crypto cracked in an hour with one core of an ancient Xeon

Re: Ancient?

So how many times do you need to run the arithmetic to cost more than the replacement ;)

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

False equivalence as well...

Stealing a car, and copying some ones and zeroes that they simply won't sell you in any other way are not equivalent.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Re: So?

Depends on how well the desk environment is put together...

I manage just fine fixing most cabling issues - though I predominantly try to avoid generating those issues in the first place.

Re: So?

"must have physical ability to get off arse to fix a problem"

Can I not fix a problem from my wheelchair?

General Motors goes electric with $2.5b US government loan for battery plants

Re: Nissan must feel hard done by...

It was such an obvious error that it was far better to laugh at it than complain.

It is astonishing how many people think that Tesla have been unfairly favoured though.

Nissan must feel hard done by...

$5.9 billion to Ford in 2009, $1.45 to Nissan in 2010, and $465 million to Tesla

Just one dollar 45!

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Re: What's the Orbit, Bob?

What tweet? I see no tweet (and no I'm not clicking on links to the cesspit)

Google, Oracle cloud servers wilt in UK heatwave, take down websites

Re: Last night a friend was grumbling that they couldn't get into either ocado or waitrose

Don't worry, the regulations preventing people from selling bottled water with a floating turd will also be gone in the name of profit.

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Whilst there is an increase in supply of various materials needed - the people who actually run the country's electrical infrastructure are very confident that the load is sustainable.

30M vehicles, 4mi/kWh, 20mi/day... that makes about 6GW of generation to find, on a grid that averages 30GW, and peaks at 47GW (with spare capacity even then).

With the notable additional factor that cars can easily act as load balancing batteries, particularly with newer evse and vehicles being v2g capable. And 30M EVs, even if you only "allocate" 10kWh of the ~50kWh pack as v2g available is still a 300GWh battery - 250 times the current largest operating grid scale battery - and enough to run the entire country for ten hours without *any* other generation at all.

So there will be some which can't be plugged in most of the time, and there will be a couple of "low" availability points during the day - but even so that's a colossal battery.

Re: @ExiledChris

How many of those vibrations are currently caused by the dirty great deisels in the equipment?

I wonder if they'd be happier with batteries and an on site fuel cell powered charging station?

Re: Two horses, not just one.

Lithium isn't the only available battery technology, it might be the best - but not all vehicles need the best possible battery technology.

I can see vehicles which are traditionally a "second car" being fitted with alternative battery technologies, or even the choice of technologies at different costs when a car is purchased (or the battery replaced - and given that warranties range between 100 and 150 thousand miles, that's about the time you'd normally replace an engine anyway)

The lower energy density of H will mean frequent top ups* ... *it would only need to go as far as battery can manage on a good day and cost the same, consumer

Well, I'm not sure - one of the advantages of the battery is that I can choose to never leave home with anything less than a full tank. H2 is back to the petrol station model, but with a harder to handle product.

Where do you come up with the 1% figure:

"The argument that we've started with electric so we should/must only carry on with that doesn’t carry much weight when the installed capacity is maybe 1% of requirements come the next decade."

BEVs are already more than 1% of the UK car fleet, and almost all of the remaining infra already exists, because it uses existing infrastructure. The national grid says "There is definitely enough energy and the grid can cope easily."

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars

There will need to be more high speed hubs, and more devices at each one... but we have twenty to thirty years to build that out as the demand increases. If you ban sales of ICE cars today that doesn't mean everything is electric tomorrow.

Re: Quick charging

Talk to the bean counters, maybe they'll do you a different lease, or a mileage expense instead of just reimbursing fuel expenses.

Re: Quick charging

No it isn't particularly relevant to that - but that wasn't the point of the post I replied to.

Of course you might ask why the hell that trip isn't being done by train, or even by using a closer port.

Serious fire hazard? As opposed to either hydrocarbon based cars (which catch fire so often it's not even local news), or hydrogen based vehicles?

Hydrogen takes about three times as much energy, since production, transport and usage is so inefficient.

Why should your transport be effortless but cost other's their life?

There is precious little adapting required to use an EV.

Trees may help power your next electric car

Re: And this is going to solve CO2 problems how?

Well since the carbon is captured into the lignodes... they simply plant more trees, which will therefore continue to absorb more carbon dioxide.