The solution is easy. You can't sell a house without it being EPC rating B or higher. Then introduce laws that allow banks to lend special mortgages that bring EPC ratings up to B that are partially government protected. Solution done and it will be 90% paid for by homeowners and not the taxpayer. Also massively stimulate the building trade as they reskin and insulate millions of Victorian houses.

Englishman here who works often in Scotland. I secretly stop at a burger van at the beginning of the A9 before driving up to Inverness for a bit of comfort food. They do an excellent Lorne and tattie sandwitch. Also never understood people making fun of deep friend mars bars, the are awesome if you have them a couple of times a year melted chocolate in batter with a bit of ice cream on the side.. heaven.

I have had the fortune of bringing a health conscious colleague up to Fort Augustus for some work and trying to order food late in the evening from a fishy. I ordered chinese and he was trying to be healthy so ordered a pizza and the look on his face when they took the pizza, dipped it in batter and threw it into the fryer as a Pizza crunch was priceless.

You need to upgrade the local power supplies to accommodate those chargers which requires new cabling to the site, plus new transformers. The expensive part is the equipment, cabling and civil works.

Seeming that 70% of the worlds oil comes from the Mesozoic age my guess is that even if they were intelligent they would have struggled to get past the building small cities phase and definitely wouldn't have been able to forge steel without oil, coal etc

I work in an industry that is mainly group #3, high salary and they want houses for 6 months to 2 years. The thing is that we just go through an agent, who contacts local estate agents and lines up a rental property on our behalf. This is how it has been done for 100 years, so other than adding the words "digital" this doesn't appear to be anything much different than a fancy airbnb.

Theoretically if too many people drop out of work it would cause inflation which would reduce the value of their UBI.

Basically UBI is a negative tax rate for people below a certain threshold, the only downside is that power is held by politicians who would most likely use it to win votes. I think you almost need to tie it in with the interest rates as a non-political decision. As interest rates rise you should cut the UBI to encourage more people back to work and higher productivity, and as interest rates fall you could raise it to kill productivity (I am not an economist so maybe am talking bollocks sorry!)

In my past did maintenance on electric motors, while they are an order of magnitude more reliable than combustion engines, there are still various failure modes depending on the type of electric motor. I also did a lot of work with power electronics and they are subject to quite rough conditions especially for small high energy devices. So i would expect any power electronics and the battery systems would be the two electrical components that are subject to the most stress. I assume they select and configure the topology of the devices so that the mean time to failure is higher than a certain threshold (e.g. several hundred thousand kilometres).

All in all, other than the moving parts for the car (bearings, wheels, suspension etc) electric is must more reliable, and not only that but the tolerances for failure are much more well known and easier to control at the design phase so easier to integrate into the design compared to combustion engines.

I am not sure how the system in the US works, but in the UK the different contractors bid for the connection rights based on a cap and floor mechanism. The regulator will underwrite the floor price based on the bids. This means it is an open process that can be bid on by any company. After construction they are required to put the asset up for sale to a utility with the floor price supporting the minimum capital value.

Often there is more profit to be made if you have the land and money to connect without a cap and floor, however if you don't have cash banks will only lend against the security the cap and floor provides.

I am assuming it is a very similar mechanism in the US?

It sounds like a great way to drive people away from buying your vehicles.

Yep i get this loads. I often wait a few weeks before sending someone photos from an event. They are always blown away by the quality and artistic possibilities. That computer simulated bokeh looks terrible when compared to what a kilogram of glass and 50mm sensor can produce. The best way i've found of getting my mates on side is showing them the model photo shoots i do. They quickly appreciate photography then... ;)

This is the biggest problem, most people envision free energy forever and forget to allocate the savings as future investment. I am a Power System engineer and over the past 20 years have regularly been asked to give advise to friends and family with regards to installing solar systems. The biggest reoccuring cost is battery replacement systems rapidly deteriorate after a certain amount of time, and also are very sensitive to temperature. This is all fine if you make sure you put assisde a few hundred dollars each year in preparation for the replacement but a lot of people fail to do this.

Really the best solution isn't a homeowner solution but a community implemented solution. That way they can pool resources, have a committee to manage expenditure and levy fees and organise regular inspections and maintenance.

The biggest downside to being an engineer is realising that everything is in a constant state of decay and it requires real effort on behalf of society to keep everything running smoothly. I wish i could go back to being innocent and thinking everything was great :). On a positive note I am very certain we have the technology to improve society for the future, and if you want to go down the rabbit hole try looking into virtual inertia.

We have the same thing in the UK, I've always worked remotely but recently have had an inrush of people moving out of London, Skipping the commuter belt and going straight into the countryside. Most are picking village locations that are within 30 minutes drive of a high speed train line so they can still pop into London a few days a week. So you can live 200-300 miles from London but still get 80% of your London Wage, its a 90-120 minute train journey twice a week and you just rent a bedsit for those days. Most are buying their houses outright or with very small mortgages. The upside of this lifestyle is being able to go out drinking on the nights your away from home. Literally play hard and work hard then retire to the countryside to finish off the week.

There is nothing wrong with deregulation except you need a strong energy regulator who enforces minimum standards on the system operator and generators, this way liability can be enforced for anyone not meeting their connection conditions.

ERCOT should have a system quality and supply standards (SCSS) and manage the grid to that standard. An example is ROCOF requirements (rate of change of frequency), if you are approaching the limit such as in an event like this, they should begin scaling back generators and bringing additional generators online if possible. That way when you have a large frequency swing your automatic load shedding kicks in, plus the generators that are still running can use their limited frequency mode settings (LFSM) to ramp up and meet the difference. All of these things require a competent system operator however.

The grid operator specifies their SQSS (Supply and quality standards). This sets out the worst case conditions they can deal with on the grid, as well as defining their fall back positions if the amount of power being generated is less than the load (e.g. load shedding), and how the manage overloads and voltage setpoints on the grid.

If the supply and quality standard is insufficient then it needs to be amended and money spent to bring the grid in line with todays requirements.

February 2020 I got it, and confirmed with antibody test. I was on a train to Paris and a guy opposite me was coughing his head off. Worst sickness i've had since i was a child.