Happens in the UK at retail level for electricity, gas, and POTS (phones), and works reasonably well.

Water is on the way too.

Rgds

Damon

Why the pointless homophobic slur?

The "world is going to hell, everything's getting worse" trope is beloved of mass newspapers and always has been, and sells, but is almost always wrong.

I've been seeing more (safely) opened doors and minds and stores of data and of late, indeed people going out of their way to be nice to one another in hot conditions, and so on, so please don't assume that the worst is true.

Life generally gets better in all sorts of ways, even if lots of it could be better!

Rgds

Damon

In the UK only one of our nukes (Sizewell B) is capable of load following AFAIK, but it never has.

In the French fleet the limit the things can be turned down without unpleasant effects ("Xenon poisoning" IIRC) is about 50% for a new load of fuel, 0% when near expired, thus ~25% overall. Which limits nukes to serving ~75% of peak load since they would not be able to dial back far enough at minimum load.

Other designs may be different, but less good for civilian use, for example.

Rgds

Damon

If you can't crank things down on demand then you can't crank them up either (and/or have to throw away lots of energy).

In that respect nukes and solar/wind are similar: that is my point. You need something else in the mix to make a functioning grid with them.

Rgds

Damon

With nukes, you generally can't turn them down much (not at all in GB, and only an average of ~25% in France which is pretty sophisticated). And coal can be fairly slow load following.

GB's last major outage (500k users load shed) was caused by a nuke and then a coal plant tripping out. I'm not aware of any load shedding caused by renewables intermittency in the GB grid. Operators know about it and plan for it. Nukes are definitely useful but NOT a panacea.

Yes, storage makes and will make a huge difference, but enough of the conspiracy theories over smart meter cutoffs and drooling over nukes please.

Rgds

Damon

I may have misunderstood, but please show me any stats supporting your apparent claim that UK-based wind turbines are lasting only 5 years.

See here:

https://www.renewableuk.com/pa...

or from the appropriate UK authorities (BEIS and the Crown Estate),

or from one of the operators:

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/o...

Indeed I have visited some of these turbines more than 5 years ago and they are still there!

Some from another operator near one of the sites I visited have been upgraded; far from being abandoned.

So I don't understand your claim.

Rgds

Damon

Yep, industrial is very different.

Anyhow, thanks for the reminder on low-power lighting.

Damon

OK, I'll check up on that, thanks. 0.9 is quite decent given that as you say an uncorrected device can be ~0.3, which caused a friend of mine some head-scratching:

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-o...

But still point (2) still stands: are domestic customers charged for anything other than real power?

Rgds

Damon

Schematics were available and I think that I still have mine!

Rgds

Damon

1) In the EU (to pass CE) I think that the pf has to be very close to 1 by law.

2) Again, I'd be amazed if any significant fraction of (EU) domestic users pay for anything other than real power, so pf is irrelevant to them.

But tell me why I'm wrong...

Rgds

Damon

My current RPi2 is serving several sites, other primary services such as DNS, and is indeed also doing some monitoring over MODBUS.

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-o...

I'm just embarking on an upgrade to RP3(B+) mainly to give me easy access to newer OS images that support HTTPS in Apache.

I think that I'm going to hold fire on the 4 since the idle consumption is creeping up (the 4 is around 3W idle it seems; I'm on 1W with the 2 and the planned upgrade to the 3 will already take me to 2W) above what I'm comfortable with off-grid.

I'm neither memory nor speed limited significantly, even with the 2.

Rgds

Damon

https://www.raspberrypi.org/do... ... is a good start and answered my questions.

Rgds

Damon

Being rude does not bend facts in your favour, please just stop being unpleasant. It does not add to the debate.

As for costing, and depending on your metric and which subsidies and externalities to each energy industry you include or not, and how much of costs to date you include as a forward payment for tech development to bring future prices down, it is quite clear that even in the UK the effect of wind has already been a downward pressure on costs. And wind is getting rapidly cheaper.

And that's ignoring that great big externality called climate change. Killing billions of people over the next decades by not stopping using fossil fuels is not exactly free either.

Not helpful, not true, and not the point either. Lots of 'cheap' coal-fired would kill us.