I'm not a fan of the BBC. But its coverage of this Olympics has been stellar, and I can watch any - and all events. No coverage has ever been this vast or all encompassing.
Are you an expat? I just struggle to see why anyone that lives in America (I am guessing that you do seeing as you've criticised NBC's coverage), and who criticises networks that advertise heavily over the coverage, would have a negative opinion of the BBC.
This sounds like an interesting energy storage system. Storage is exactly what is needed to make solar energy generation practical for use when the sun is not shining at night. That idea gets me excited. Generating the energy to fill the storage with compressed air by burning Natural Gas (NG) seems stupid to me. It is more efficient to just leave the energy stored as NG. Converting that to compressed air and then again to electricity adds a middle step that adds inefficiency.
You're right. That's why gas power plants are also silly*. Gas is burned to produce electricity (at efficiencies of no more than about 20-30%), which could then conceivably be used in an electric fire to heat up someone's house. In this situation, the energy storage mechanism has along the line switched from chemical to electrical to thermal, with heavy losses at each stage. Would have been far more efficient to pipe the gas into the same person's house to burn for heat.
The spirit of using compressed air as a storage mechanism is surely in the theoretically high efficiencies that can be achieved. Using gas, as you say, sounds silly, especially when it's Texas, with its vast untapped solar potential.
*ASIDE: Silly, though currently necessary as a fast response mechanism to electricity grid supply/demand mismatches. In the UK, we have three pumped storage facilities of about 50MW each (or thereabouts). Considering the post-EastEnders surge (when 5 million kettles are switched on following the nation's favourite daily TV soap) regularly tops 500MW of demand, you can see why pumped storage alone is not the answer. Interestingly, we have to borrow power from Europe for 5 minutes during this time to cover demand.
Yeah, because if nobody wants to pay for news voluntarily, we'll just force (almost) everybody to pay!
No one is forced to pay the licence fee. It is in fact remarkably easy to avoid paying. Besides, you don't need to be a licence fee payer to use the BBC News website. I know you get ads outside of the UK, and perhaps eventually non-UK users will face a paywall, but while the licence fee exists in the UK, UK-based users will not have to pay for their news.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan