Posts by cyberdemon

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Smart Home

All of this bollocks reminds me of the old joke about the Smart Home..

A bloke visits a showhome for the new Microsoft House.

The salesman explains to him that everything in the house is automated by voice command. More than just the lights and music etc. This house can do anything. If he wants a coffee, the house makes it. If he wants to sleep, it will make his bed.

So he asks

"Find me a seat" and a robot arrives with a chair.

"Cook me some dinner" and a robot arrives a while later with a steaming dish.

So he looks around, gobsmacked at this house that will do anything on command, and says

"Well, bugger me."

Norway court upholds miniscule fine against Meta for flouting privacy rules

Miniscule

Miniscule??? It's about 1000% of their profits, according to their tax return...

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: Cost of refining oil

Interesting point about the leaky roofs, I had not thought about that, but surely there must be some amount of good workmanship which can prevent that.

Who says inverters have a 10 year life? They are solid-state power electronics, they should be able to last longer than that.

I'll take your word for it on the relative insulation performance of PV panels vs reflective film. I'd argue the former are more socially acceptable and value-adding to a house though.

Your figure of 200km2 is a bit bunk though - that equates to 40GW @ 200W/m2 assuming 100% land use i.e. one big panel. You only get 200W in good sun i.e. 6 hours per day if it's not cloudy. We couldn't "power the UK" off of that.

And no, we will never have enough storage. Unlike inverters, batteries DO have a fixed lifespan. Just to maintain 1TWh of storage (of the kind we'd need to keep the lights on when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow for a few days), you'd need to replace at least 100GWh of batteries per year. And we are already draining rainforest aquifers at a staggering rate to mine the current levels of Lithium production.

Perhaps, if the land were in the middle of nowhere, it would be somewhat acceptable. But due to grid constraints, we have to put these solar farms on land near cities where it is close to the point-of-load. So it would affect a large number of people who would see themselves being surrounded by solar panels where green fields used to be.

But my main point about rooftop solar is that it reduces the grid load. Any Watt that is generated on a roof is a Watt that doesn't have to be supplied by the grid. You can't say the same for solar farms.

Re: Shocked?

How is this possible? After all this 'investment' in power generation and the grid.

Because all the profits are 'invested' in dividends to shareholders, most of whom are offshore.

That's considered 'good' utility governance over here. The 'bad' ones take on huge debts and STILL pay shareholders before investing anything in infrastructure.

That's what John Redwood and Mrs T set us up for when they privatised and deregulated the utility sector.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Obviously, EVs could be taxed per mile or per Newton-second to hit the pricks who floor it at crossroads and tear up the tarmac

All that's needed is a meter in the car itself. And with EV firmware having secure-boot and their own telemetry link, that's eminently plausible.

We don't need a separate meter for a machine that's already so locked down.

Re: Cost of refining oil

+1 for rooftop solar. It takes a load off the grid, it gives you free energy, it doesn't take up agricultural land, and it helps keep your house cool in summer as an insulation layer over your roof.

I wasn't aware of the scale of energy needed to refine petroleum though, that's an interesting point. Is the same amount of energy needed for petrol/gasoline as it is for Diesel? How does it compare to the energy required to liquefy LNG?

Re: Someone is working at the 'skipping the infrastructure' problem

Er, PV panels produce only about 200W per square metre, in ideal conditions. The amount of car that can be facing the sun at any one time is little more than 2 square metres, and as Mach said it doesn't all face directly.

Now, imagine charging your car at 300W. If you thought a 3kW "slow charger" was slow, this would take a week of good sun for just one charge.

Now, imagine how well it would do in the UK.. Where we get about 10 sunny days a year, all of them when you are stuck in a multistorey car park or under a tree full of pigeons.

It's a non-starter, but like most UK green tech startups it's highly effective at parting rich idiots from their money, and for that I congratulate them.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

It was clear by 2011 that EV's actually use about 1/3 the energy of fossil fuelled vehicles, and so in the long term would displace them (even if you had to burn coal to make the electricity)

Citation on that, please.

As far as I am aware, a coal power plant is about 40% efficient at best. The grid transmission and distribution network is 85% efficient. The process of charging and discharging a lithium battery is 90% efficient, and an electric motor is 95% efficient.

That multiplies out at 29%, which is no better than a not very good internal combustion engine.

Then when you factor that due to the weight of its battery an EV has to be much heavier than a fossil powered car, I struggle to see how it would need one third as much in terms of at-the-road energy. If anything it should need more.

Perhaps you are assuming a large amount of regen braking, or you are assuming that the EV travels at its most efficient speed of 20mph? Well I can tell you: EV drivers don't drive like that...

As regards upgrade vs build-out, sadly it is more complicated to upgrade than to build-out from scratch, because upgrade usually implies that all the land in the area is occupied and so you have to use all your old service ducts and pylons which don't have the capacity to be upgraded, new substation locations are difficult/expensive, and you can't interrupt service by ripping out the old before installing the new.

All of the streets where I live have ancient paper-insulated cable buried naked under the road i.e. not in a duct, which frequently overloads and explodes. All they do is patch the exploded section, it would be too expensive obviously to dig up all of the roads in the town, and all similar towns across the country.

Re: Evolutionary dead end

That's what you get with modern democracy...

We used to have this department called the 'civil service' which would very deftly tell the minister what he wanted to hear, while quietly getting on with running the country.

Now, populist politicians are polarised and each new government will purge the civil service of anyone with anything resembling a clue, so big infrastructure projects spanning more than a couple of political terms are impossible.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

And don't forget, that is massively subsidised. EVs don't pay fuel duty, road tax, etc. (despite being a much greater contributor to potholes due to their increased weight and torque..)

But the worst part is, as I have said many times before, the local distribution grids really are 'trembling' because there is no way that they will be able to cope with a large proportion of EV and Heat Pump owners.

A 10kW charger is about 40 amps on single-phase. The cable under the road can usually carry 400A before it becomes inefficient and starts to overheat and fail. At ~5-10% adoption of EVs, there are already too many for a lot of neighbourhoods.

If the government thought RAAC was expensive to upgrade, they should consider how much it will cost to quadruple the capacity of our electric distribution grids in order to be able to phase out gas and petroleum.

Some people propose the "smart grid" as a solution - but this will just make the grid unequal in terms of cost, more expensive in general, and even more inefficient (as it would spend all of its time at maximum load where it is most inefficient)

We are far too hasty to decommission two out of three energy distribution networks (the gas grid and road-hauled petroleum) and place their load onto the one most expensive, most overloaded, most unreliable and most vulnerable to attack by our enemies. It's quite mad.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Re: Let us replace "Back Door" with "Fire Door"

This already exists and works very well. E.g. whatsapp's "report conversation" feature, and CEOP's Panic Button

Decades-old Home Office asylum system misses EOL deadline, no new timetable in place

Double keying..

> caseworkers were expected to use CID and its replacement, dubbed Atlas, and had to “double key” information between them.

If you want your "caseworkers" to quit en-masse, get them to do all of their work in duplicate..

Attackers accessed UK military data through high-security fencing firm's Windows 7 rig

I often find that software designed for ancient versions of Windows runs better on Wine than it ever did on 'Blows.

Try it, it could possibly save you choosing between 500k and the risk of a ransom attack.

OpenAI urges court to throw out authors' claims in AI copyright battle

Re: Piss off

Yes, and all of the derivatives of your work that their randomiser machine spits out, will have copyright assigned to them, not you.

That's how broken the copyright system is. That's why big business is salivating at the implications.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

If i thought there was any likelihood that they could win the next election then I hope they make him leader, to eliminate that possibility.

Sadly though he would still do a lot of damage as leader of the opposition

We're doomed

They put Shapps in charge of the railways.. Now look at the state of HS2

Then they put him in charge of Energy markets, and look what happened to that..

Now who better to be in charge of Defence while the prospect of WWIII looms over us..

One thing is guaranteed: He'll line his own pockets before it all goes to Hell

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Re: truffles

More for me then

I also look forward to a drop in the price of Sushi thanks to China's political hyperbole

Another thing AI is better at than you: First-person drone racing

Robot Wars

I would love to see a reincarnation of "robot wars" without the human pilots. It could easily be done inexpensively if the majority of the sensing is done by the arena, with APIs for pointcloud data etc. and the control would be done off board in a rack with radio control to the robots.

Human pilots would become operators, and could give high level instructions such as designating strike points on the enemy bots.

Perhaps the human audience would find it less enthralling and more terrifying though..

Official: Microsoft unbundles Teams in Europe

Edge of the wedge

Now let's see them unbundle Edge too.. And stop spamming users who refuse it with obtrusive popups in Windows

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Re: Limiting choice is anticompetitive

> There is NO reason governments should allow this.

But who elects the governments?

These days, ordinary people have little say in the matter. The candidates are put forward along party interests. Lords, Representatives and Senators get their seats through service to Business, not the common people, and even individual votes are easily manipulated for the highest bidder by Google, Facebook and TikTok..

There was a great documentary a couple of days ago by BBC storyville of how AI is being used for evil, although it was a bit too slow and heavy on the arty cinematics, could have been 60 mins instead of 90. I would have preferred that they spent the extra half hour going into more technical detail. But it was a good prequel to The Matrix or Deus Ex..

I think the real reason that Right to Repair does not exist is because the big corps want to use "your" devices for surveiling and manipulating you. Ok perhaps not so much for ice cream machines and tractors, but phones doorbell cameras, cars, telescreens, PCs, anything that refuses to work without regular OTA updates could one day be used against you.

A right to repair would imply a right to reveal and remove hidden antifeatures.

AI-powered monitors to defend Washington DC against aerial threats

Re: Can the AI do this?

Let's play a nice game of chess.

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: Expertise

A passenger manifest including Little Bobby Tables, perhaps?

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Re: more nationwide outages incoming

In theory yes, but sadly in practice, not so much. :(

It's a tiny molecule that leaks easily, it's very light so has low storage density unless you liquefy it, and to liquefy it is much, much harder than for LNG.

Hydrogen is also pretty inefficient to produce, and very expensive - it usually requires Platinum electrodes, which means lots of Platinum per MW - (the efficiency of electrolysis is not much better than 50% and it has an electrochemical potential below 1.5 volts, so you'd need over a thousand cells at a thousand amps each for just 1MW - that's a lot of Platinum, even if the surface thickness is very small - and a lot of copper. Multiply by 1000 again for 1GW. The UK has around 15GW of excess Wind capacity that it plans to store... It's just not feasible at utility scale, sadly)

I have heard of a few researchers using "AI" to design special non-platinum electrocatalyst materials, but as far as I am aware, none are very promising.

What was needed was Nuclear power. I say "was", because we no longer have the time, expertise, or the political appetite to build enough new nuclear.

And don't get me started on Fusion. :( It's another pipe-dream that is great in theory but when you think of the practicalities, it's not very feasible to transfer large amounts of power across a vacuum in the form of fast neutrons which destroy and make radioactive almost all materials known to man.

Re: more nationwide outages incoming

I've been thinking this for a while, sadly. And in far more critical areas of infrastructure than the ability of middle-class families to fly back from the maldives on the last day of the summer holidays..

When utility companies take on debts to pay dividends to overseas shareholders instead of upgrading critical infrastructure, is that incompetence, or malice?

The electric grid in particular needs not just to be maintained, it needs to triple its capacity if we are to phase out gas and petroleum, but it can barely sustain current demands.

But while it's relatively easy to build new 400kv pylons, it's much harder to upgrade the thousands of "low voltage" networks that are buried under our towns and cities.

And while it's easy to build more wind turbines, it's fundamentally impossible to have enough storage for more than a few hours of low wind. Batteries are becoming more and more expensive as the world demand goes up, meanwhile we are draining rainforest aquifers to mine lithium.. Renewables just can't keep the lights on without dispatchable gas turbines. And many people don't realise that a CCGT takes a while for the combined steam cycle to warm up. So as they ramp up and down with the wind, a lot of energy is wasted. They are initially as inefficient as OCGTs.

We talk about carbon capture yet we are chopping down trees and burning them for power, producing more CO2 and particulate matter per MWh than the dirtiest coal plants ever did! It's madness

So far no evil person has attacked the UK grid, but with it teetering on the edge, it needs to be at the front of minister's minds how to fix it when it does all go dark. If I were in charge, i'd organise a test of that scenario. The privatised utilities can pay for the losses caused if it turns out that they have been lying to us about the resilience of their networks. If they can't or won't pay, they get taken public. But all ministers seem to care about these days is lining their own pockets, before they make for the lifeboats as the ship sinks.

Something has to give. If it doesn't, the only outcome is WWIII.

/offtopicrant

Re: It's DNS

Would that be

Transport Information Technology Shitshow Upsets Planes

Southern Water to drink up tech deals worth up to £358M

Re: Leaks

You can't, but you COULD use it to catalogue every single turd going into and out of the pipes...

That would be one hell of a log file ..

Ok i'm going

More UK cops' names and photos exposed in supplier breach

Re: "Security measures have been taken by the MPS as a result of this report," the statement said

No doubt someone will be "Laser Focused" on security from here on in.

Next politician to say that gets fed to the sharks

Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies

The first casualty in War is the Truth

Archive.org ke[eeps|pt] people honest by providing an indelibleunadulterated record of history.

In future, if you want to hear an old song, or read an old book, or check the contents of an old website, you will have to ask The Ministry of Truth, aka Google / Microsoft, which will instantly provide you with a version that your memory cannot discern from the version you once heard, but which differs subtly from the original (for technical reasons, as much as political reasons, by way of prompt injection and training biases). How convenient for our lords and masters.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

Re: Isn't it seeing triple now?

I suspect that the police will tell you that they are no longer planning to respond to any FOI requests ever again, because they are obviously such a massive security issue.

Cynic? Moi?

Think International Space Station dust is obviously free of bad chemicals? Wrong

Re: Toxic Pollution..

Yes I have, and he/it is quite entertaining and not spammy, unlike the Midjourney/ChatGPT-generated stuff that ends up on the internet in infinite bucketfuls, and ends up being ingested by the same machines as if it were human-generated, causing a toxic positive-feedback loop. Meanwhile real artists with real talents are being replaced with "prompt engineers".

Also, there was a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek humour intended in my post that obviously wasn't detected by the downvoters..

Toxic Pollution..

I am more concerned that Web Junk from El Reg doesn't contain AI-generated content, which I believe is toxic to the environment.

I would guess that https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/08/10/issjanitor.jpg is not a real cartoon drawn by a real human, because of the lack of space-related PPE used by the "janitor" and because the unidentfiable mess that he is either vacuuming (in a vacuum) or prodding with a broom without a head, appears to be floating above a hole in the deck, while the rest of it seems to be stuck there as if held by non-existent gravity.

If I see any more AI-generated space junk polluting the internet from El Reg, I shall be cancelling my subscription forthwith!

FTX crypto-clown Sam Bankman-Fried couldn't even do house arrest. Now he's in jail

Re: Does this mean he now has to change his name to Sam Bankman-Jailed?

Unless of course he ends up in the electric chair. Then he can keep his name.

Nearly every AMD CPU since 2017 vulnerable to Inception data-leak attacks

Re: Epyc fail there

I do wonder how many of these bugs were discovered at initial testing phase, but then someone in a dark suit comes and says "Interesting bug you have found there.. Tell us how it works, but don't fix it, and don't ever talk about it."

Pope goes fire and brimstone on the dangers of AI

Re: "God was a dream of good government"

Well.. I think the key difference in our argument is what I'd call "Absolutism". The idea that some person or organisation can hold an un-challengeable idea and is beyond reproach.

In the Bad Old Days of religion, anyone who had a serious disagreement with a Priest was called a Heretic, and was burned at the stake for his or her views.

Nobody would ever be stupid enough to take the bullshit that is excreted out of a so-called AI and call it an Absolute Truth, would they? (?!)

"God was a dream of good government"

was the quote from my favourite PC Game. For a game produced in 2000 projecting a dystopian future based on 90's Usenet Conspiracy Theory boards, it has been eerily accurate. Suggesting perhaps, that some of those conspiracy theories that it was based on may have been true.

One of its predictions was that the principal use of AI in the future would be mass surveillance - a digital panopticon where every individual is watched by the system at all times. And that the people would not only accept this, but they would eventually worship it as a God. That hasn't happened quite yet, as the system doesn't really have a unified "consciousness" that it can portray. But as soon as we can all have a personal relationship with the same chatbot, then I think it could happen, and I think that will be a very scary future indeed.

> …says head of one of the most abhorrent organisations that has ever existed.

Agreed, to a point. Religion has brought us inquisitions, crusades, wars, torture, and massacres. And it's all based on a load of bollocks. But without it, I believe civilisation would never have come to exist. We would still be the apes at the start of 2001: A space odyssey. So I kind of thank the Pope and his chums for that, actually. Plus, Christianity has (mostly) cleaned up its act in the past few decades. There was some very nasty abuse of children by some of its senior members, but I do believe them when they say they are doing their best to root it out. They don't do crusades, massacres and witch-burnings anymore at least.

The abhorrent organisations are the shady ones in the back-rooms of governments, who will use any means necessary to ensure that the rich and powerful stay that way. One of those means is AI.

(and yes, the Catholic Church used to be one such organisation. But I don't think it has quite so much influence as it once did. Maybe i'm wrong though)

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Re: Necrotelecomnicon

> Storing hydrogen is not too difficult (bring back the old gas holders !)

Actually, it is a bit difficult. Because Hydrogen is so light at atmospheric pressure, it has extremely low energy density at that pressure. It is also a tiny molecule, and is able to leak through thick rubber gaskets that other gases can't permeate. So I think the old gasometers would be leaking like sieves if they were filled with Hydrogen. And if you try to increase the pressure, you increase the leak rate.

The usual way to store it is as a cryofluid, but unfortunately that also has its drawbacks. LNG liquefies at a relatively balmy 120 K (-153 celsius) whereas Hydrogen liquefies at 13-20 K i.e. almost 1/10 of the absolute temperature of LNG. Liquid Hydrogen also has some really weird quantum-mechanical behaviours. I suppose that a Hydrogen molecule in its liquid state has so little thermal energy that the universe isn't quite sure if that energy really exists.

So, the devil is in the details. I think that's why most of the Hydrogen Economy plans which showed such promise in the early days of the Net Zero idea, have now fallen flat on their faces when it comes to implementation time..

Frankly, it reads as out of touch and with a sickening disdain for the future.

Sadly yes, I agree, my post does read with a sickening disdain for the future. That doesn't mean it's not true. Call me a Cassandra, I call you a Pollyanna.

As an Engineer, I can tell you that the only way that the UK is ever going to get to "Net Zero" is with a hell of a lot of poverty, turmoil and hurt. The country is unprepared for it, and it is kidding itself if it thinks it is going to be possible.

I predict, that the Grid will have to become unequal. Only the rich will be able to drive cars, have hot showers, and heat their homes in winter. And even the rich will not have 100% available electricity - not unless they want to pay even more for an unequal system, where people who can afford to pay extra will be less likely to be switched off when the wind stops blowing. The rest of us will have to lump it, i.e. not drive, not heat or cool our houses, put on jumpers in the cold, and curl up and die in the extreme heat. But on bad days even the rich won't get 100% service. Just like in current South Africa, there will be intermittent service of the electric grid as a whole.

But in this situation, the Grid is weak and vulnerable - if it goes down entirely then we will have difficulty re-starting it. That's summarised in a government feasibility study called "Black Start", and many large operators have said that it might simply not be possible to re-start the grid in an acceptable timeframe if it does all go dark. Could you imagine the chaos if we lost the Internet for a week, never mind all power?

Meanwhile, we have geo-political enemies who would dearly love to see the UK and Europe fall into a pit of doom, and they themselves couldn't necessarily care a jot what happens to the planet. I'm thinking Russia here. So Global Warming means the Siberian permafrost melts.. Great, we can sell even more Gas and might even have some lovely new fertile land, while the rest of the world burns. Global Warming is a Global issue, so if we can't count on support from our enemies, it is dangerous to unilaterally commit to cutting emissions and suffering the local pain that this entails.

Ultimately I think that Humanity has reached the edge of the Petri-dish, and that the only thing that will prolong our survival is a devastating third world war which reduces our population back down to a level that the planet can sustain.

Necrotelecomnicon

I read that as Necroelectronomicon..

The amount of investment that the UK needs to replace Gas, Diesel and Petrol with Electric is madness on a scale I had never imagined before Grant Shapps was appointed Energy Secretary.

Yet even Grant sodding Shapps acknowledges that "Five times more power lines need to be built in the next seven years than in the past 30."

So we need 150 years' worth of infrastructure investment in 7 years, in order to make it to Net Zero by forcing everyone onto EVs and Heat Pumps..

But while it's "easy" to put up a few pylons (provided we have enough steel and copper, and we can pay off greedy landowners HS2-style) it's really not so easy to build new substations and upgrade low-voltage local distribution (i.e. lay new cables in old towns and cities).

Declaring that we shall replace all gas and petroleum with Electric is about as daft as would be declaring that we will decommission all the UK's motorways and replace them with high speed railways. Sure, railways are more efficient and better for the environment. But they are no longer efficient to build in the UK, because we made the mistake of replacing them all with roads decades ago, we sold off the land, and we regulated them to death. Similarly, most of our energy infrastructure is Gas and Petroleum, and the Electric infrastructure is the most overloaded, expensive, unreliable and vulnerable of all the energy networks and couldn't possibly sustain the extra load from decommissioning the other two - much like our railways couldn't possibly support the majority of transport in the country as perhaps they once did.

More nukes near to towns would perhaps help. But with all of the toxic politics (more toxic than the radioactive waste) it will never happen.

Tesla hackers turn to voltage glitching to unlock paywalled features

Re: soft locks on optional, but installed, features

> It is instead about deterring the use of dirty diesels in built up areas because the emissions damage and kill the young.

It's somewhat ironic, actually, that the newer ULEZ-compliant "clean" diesels emit more nanoparticulate "pm2.5" pollution than the old "dirty" diesels did. Old diesel engines produced a lot of visible black soot - but this is easily filtered out by the nose. They did not produce so much of the PM2.5 pollution, which has been steadily increasing since modern emissions standards for engines, and which is far more damaging "to the young" as you put it, because it cannot be effectively filtered, and ends up in our bloodstreams.

Re: soft locks on optional, but installed, features

OP is confusing ULEZ with "15-minute cities". This is the idea most services should be a short walk away, so most people should be able to use their local amenities instead of driving across town to go to work or to use a GP or shop (which may be better than their local if they don't live in such an affluent area ...).

This is being trialled in Oxford, where the town is divided in to zones, and each resident gets a limited number of permits to drive directly between zones, after which they must either use the already-congested ring-road (driving further, releasing more CO2 and pollutants..) or pay a fine, which goes into the coffers of the area that they entered.. Oxford is notoriously unequal. In the north west of town, house prices are in the range of 1 to 3 million. On the opposite side in "The Leys", they have some of the roughest council estates. 15-minute cities amplifies that inequality and will make people feel trapped in their own neighbourhood, and unwelcome in others. It disproportionally affects the poor, who cannot afford to pay the charge nor the extra petrol to get round the ring road. It's a really awful system that only a Tory could have dreamt up.

Back in 2008 or whenever it was, I was moaning about the congestion charge system - Not because of the charge, but because of the "ANPR-and-more" cameras that have to be installed on every Nth lamppost around London.

Both ULEZ and 15-minute cities require the same infrastructure: A unified AI-powered surveillance system, like what they have in China and the West Bank.

Sadiq Khan has said that he might scrap some of the ULEZ but keep the cameras. That's because ULEZ is only the excuse, not the goal.

Re: soft locks on optional, but installed, features

I'm against DRM and Secure Boot in general. Do you own the thing you bought or not?

If Dell or Lenovo sold a computer that you were forbidden from changing the software on (i.e. running Linux..) then there would be uproar. Yet somehow Apple, Google and now Tesla are getting away with selling people something which is really not theirs, more like a perpetual rental.

Re: Not persistent, so not a problem

> then you have a bunch of battery cells sitting there unused

No, it would still use all of the cells. It would just change the max/min states of charge that it will charge/discharge the battery to.

TBH, if you don't unlock the extra capacity, the battery will probably last a bit longer before it ends up on the scrapheap.

(Just long enough not to be covered by Tesla's warranty when it does, no doubt...)

China bans export of drones some countries have already banned anyway

Never mind DJI

Ziyan UAS is the scary one.

Maybe China have decided that they want all of their autonomous killing machines to themselves, especially now that they have perfected image-based race profiling..

Microsoft’s Dublin DC power plant gets the, er, green light

Re: Heat Engines - not CO2 are the climate problem

Errrr, what Myffy said.

Yes, all forms of power generation create excess heat. But this directly-released heat is a literal drop in the ocean. It is completely insignificant compared to the main source of heat on the planet - i.e. solar radiation (which is of the order of 2kW/m^2, i.e. ~5GW per square mile) which is being amplified by our CO2 emissions due to the greenhouse effect. If we amplify this enormous heat input by even a few fractions of a percent, it would cause us major problems. Whereas to output a few hundred GW by powering the entire UK from Nuclear power, for example, would only release around the amount that a hundred square miles of land would normally absorb from the sun at its peak (and for an average figure, conservatively multiply by a factor of 10, but no more).

In any case - all heat produced by Nuclear Power would eventually be released inside the Earth's core due to radioactive decay anyway. And we only need a tiny amount of Uranium ore to sustain ourselves without polluting our atmosphere at all, and it would have an utterly negligible effect on the warmth of the planet or the fuel available inside the earth. Such is the incredible amount of energy available from the nuclear transmutation of matter! :)

Re: more than 150 diesel generators

If the grid is down in the area then they can't supply power to anyone, because there is no 50Hz to synchronise with. It would be extremely dangerous to try to connect their generators upstream to supply their neighbours during an outage, because not only would the size of the load be unknown, but also when the grid does come back online it will be out of phase with their generators - that would result in a very loud bang and 150 borked generators.

So I agree I don't know what the point of the diesel generators is - unless they are just a second backup incase the OCGTs fail.

Does make me wonder what they plan to be doing with this datacentre..

Re: Potentially greener?

The trouble with CCGTs is that they take a much longer time to reach full power - not so good for a plant which is mainly for backup purposes, plus for making a bit of money on the "balancing market" (where corruption is rife, btw)

CCGTs are indeed much bigger, since they have extra heat exchangers and large low-pressure steam turbines, and they also need a big source of water. They essentially use the OCGT's "jet engine" exhaust as the fire for a steam engine.

I think Microsoft are as worried as I am (or perhaps, excited) that there is no way that the National Grid (or the smaller lower-voltage distribution grids) are going to cope with everyone having EVs and Heat Pumps - the demand for electricity is going to rocket - we are closing two out of three energy distribution systems (the gas grid and road-hauled petroleum) and placing their entire load on the one system which is is already the most expensive, overloaded and unreliable. (and, frankly, vulnerable)

They also stand to make a tidy profit if they can spin up their generator at the drop of a hat when it does all go Pete Tong.. Balancing market prices can be 100 times higher than normal wholesale prices, so it doesn't really matter how inefficient it is. It's high-power, it's long-duration and it's immediately dispatchable.

Re: Potentially greener?

Unlikely..

They are almost certainly using 22 of these things: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/offerings/power-generation/gas-turbines/sgt-300.html

The efficiency is 30% as stated by Siemens. Even if you used a 50/50 mix of Hydrogen, you'd be using 50% gas, of which 70% is wasted heat in the 530·C 30kg/s exhaust.. It's unlikely that they are doing anything useful with that heat such as CHP either, because they only want to run these things when its profitable to do so.

Why is there no source of green hydrogen at the moment? Well, because the only electrode material that is currently feasible is as I understand it still er.. Platinum. And we need thousands of Amps since each cell only produces/consumes 1.5 Volts, so that Platinum surface area has to be big...

There are only two things that I believe could help us to significantly reduce our carbon emissions to the level required: One is Nuclear power, the other is to stop using so much bloody energy. And I doubt Microsoft is going to like that second one, and even they don't have the resources to build a nuke in the UK/Europe, thanks to the climate of fear of the nuclear bogeyman.

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

Re: But why tho...

In the cases of the few people I know who have died of pancreatic cancer, a big factor in their lives was stress. Probably that's a common factor, whether you're CEO of Apple or on the run from big corps and the FBI.

Tesla board members to return $735M in compensation settlement

Re: Risky Business

There's something a bit fishy about Tesla launching a UK energy supplier, too..

I hear there's a lot of money to be had by collecting subsidies for printing dodgy carbon credits, and manipulating the Balancing Market

Re: Board Members

No, it's Big Bent!