Like to reproduce? So do we at reproduciagen.

Tge spin up times are irrelevant.

Relevant is: the coal plants that only can adapt in steps and can not like a gas plant adjusted arbitrarily: they already exist.

Hence you have costs in running them, especially in overproducing.

There Re two kinds of peaks, the daily high demand on the grid, and the continuous variation around the last minutes average.

Your plants have to adapt to that variation in seconds, not minutes. That is what pumped storage is doing. And that is what batteries can do, too.

You are right about the price but not about the 1 in a 100 year chance.

Between 2003 and 2011 we already had seven!

Regarding efficiency there is not much to expect from new solar panels anymore.

The only thing you can do is combine several technologies, to gather light in several wave lengths.

A typical mono crystalline PV cell might improve by 1% ... perhaps ... however the future gains will likely be in cheaper production, not in efficiency gains.

Other gains are paint based solar cells, that can be painted on houses. So far they have low efficiencies, around 1% to 5% ... but they don't look like PC modules and can be painted everywhere.

Actually you only need one reservoir. The lower one can be a river, and usually is.

Or in your Hawaii example, it could be the sea ... use a salt water pumped storage system :D

You can add a smart meter.

Then you constantly either load or discharge the battery during peak time and balance the grid.

Actually you would sell this "option" so that a balancing power provider can put you and your neighbours who do the same into a virtual balancing power plant.

Now if the grid needs an excess 5MW you and your 49 neighbours in the same virtual balancing power plant will each provide 100kW power.

Supposed your battery has like 1MWh storage (just for easy calculating, likely you only have half of it)

As you likely will provide something like 25% of the day time either loading capacity or discharging capacity, you provide 6h every day where your battery is either loading with up to 100kW or discharging with up to 100kW. Lets assume it is on average only loading/discharging with 50% of its peak. So we have 6h with 50kW "load", that translates into 300kWh of balancing energy.

For that you would charge the grid operator a fixed fee something like 2 EURO per day to provide the option to use the battery as balancing power plant. Option means: he pays you minimum that fee regardless if the grid operator actually needs the balancing power or not. On top of that you charge the grid operator depending on how your "virtual power plant" is marketed by the "balancing power provider" up to 40 cents per kWh.

That means on a good day (won't be many like that) your battery makes you 120 Euro, per day.

See: you look at it from the complete wrong perspective, oops, forgot the extra 2 Euro base income.

As I said, the 1MWh storage might be exaggerated, so size the earnings down accordingly. Also balancing power usually costs in the 10 to 15 cent range, and not the 40 cents proclaimed above. However if you can participate in a virtual balancing power plant with a mere 1MWh installation (10kW - 100kW power) you easy make a few thousand Euro money per year!

Actually the money you earn if you provide "balancing energy" is usually much higher than the money you get for feed in tariffs.

And keep in mind: balancing goes in both directions: sucking up surplus production balances as much as providing extra energy when demand is increasing.

PV can only provide power into one direction and as it is not dispatch able it can not really balance the grid.

However bigger PV installations have a notice able electric capacity, and can be used to stabilize the grid frequency to a small extend.

The energy is not generated cheaply at night. It basically costs the same. (The idea when to charge batteries is a misconception on /. You charge during peak times, see below.)

That peak energy is expensive has not much to do with generation pries, but with grid logistics.

Consider you have a load following coal plant running at lets say 75% during a peak period, does not really matter, lets say a random time between 10:00 and 17:00 (5PM for the americans).

Now for some reason you get an extra load on the grid, which you can not fulfill, so you have to increase yield of the above plant. Unfortunately you can not adapt your plant to the exact demand, the coal plant can only change its yield in lets say 2.5% steps.

So after you have increased the yield you are producing to much energy. So actually you burn more coal than you need to fulfill the demand.

Either you have to sell the extra energy, store it in a pumped storage or let it go to waste in a resistor at the power plant.

Regardless what you chose: it costs the energy company. Hence they demand a premium price for peak times.

The closer the plants are running at the exact demand of the grid, the more likely it is they mainly create costs instead of revenue when they increase their yield. Or when demand suddenly drops!

That is where smart meters and batteries or EVs come in
During peak time, when energy is supposedly expensive, charging batteries will prevent that problem. Hence smart meter owners with storage capacity will mainly charge during peak times, and not off peak, for a special low price, not for an expensive price.

Of course you are not simply charging constantly during peak times. The power plants or the grid operators will remote control your charging, so they can "balance" the grid with your batteries instead of using pumped storage or wasting the energy.

It obviously can be done, the question is whether it makes financial sense. It seems that, if it were cost-efficient to store electricity in LiIon batteries then the biggest buyers of them would be power companies, so maybe there's some market inefficiency that you can exploit by doing it in customers houses, but it even with that it sounds like it will have a very long ROI. I pay about £400/year for electricity (about $600). A $13K battery storage array would cost me the same as almost 22 years of electricity. Even if it reduced my electricity bills to zero, it would take 22 years for it to pay for itself. I think the overnight rate, if I switch to a tariff that has one, is about half of the normal rate, so it would actually take 44 years. Probably a bit less as electricity prices are likely to go up over the next few decades, but even with a 20 year ROI there are far better uses of my money.

Apparently a lot of the USA uses electricity for heating (and cooling). If you're using gas or oil for heating, then comparing your electricity usage to their energy usage is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

It depends on whether you're using electricity for heating. In the last quarter, we used about 7kWh/day of electricity, but about 23kWh/day of gas. If you're on electric heating (and live somewhere larger than me), then 48kWh doesn't sound too excessive.

Lawsuits don't have to be expensive, it depends on how much you're asking. If you claim, say, the cost of one year of Internet subscription then you're in the lowest bracket for small claims court filings (plus your time, which may be a lot more depending on how flexible your working hours are). The cost for the ISP to send someone is more than they're likely to lose, so you're very likely to get a default judgement against them. For added irony, you might ask for the ISP to be required to pay for you to transfer your subscription to A&A and pay the difference in the cost of Internet access for the next two years...

NO IT DOESN'T. I REALLY wish people would stop saying these things.

Using traditional methods of propulsion to accelerate in normal space-time causes time dilation.

The formula entirely falls apart when you hit the speed of light which according to the formulas in question require infinite energy.

FULL STOP.

Leaving one location and arriving at another faster than light traveling through normal space does not require that you do exactly as specified above.

If you can avoid the acceleration portion, its a whole new ball game.

If you can avoid traveling in normal space-time, then you've just potentially solved the problem entirely.

Neither of these two things have been proven impossible, although very improbably for the former.

A blackhole is already not normal-space time, the formula in fact breaks down inside a black hole. A wormhole (which can mean any number of things) connecting two black holes? Thats pretty far from normal-space time and certainly, in theory, allows for things such as leaving point A and arriving at point B before the light traveling between the two does.

Light does not travel in time at all from its perspective.

You can't fly a 747 by shooting a jet of water from the top of it up into the sky, you can make it fly using all the other normal aerodynamic principles that keep us as happy fliers. Just because you know it won't work one way doesn't mean their isn't a way we haven't discovered yet to accomplish the same thing from a practical perspect, and you really should stop implying that FTL == Time Travel. The equations that produce that 'theory' break down at the speed of light, so you can't use them to make assumptions about what happens after that.

> So what are all those users of Plex, Xbmc, and MediaPortal running on then?

They're such a small and geeky part of the PC market that Linux no longer seems obscure anymore.

Keeping the plebs from copying their own stuff doesn't do anything but make paid for content less useful than the pirated stuff that someone else went to the trouble to liberate. And it only takes one. Past that point, all of the rubes can make extra copies as easy as if the original media had no DRM to begin with.