Erm, you should read what you link.
In terms of houses on planet earth: IT DOES NOT MATTER AT ALL.
There is no measurable difference FOR YOU if I either heat my house from 18 degrees C to 20 C or from 18 C to 22 (that is double the temperature increase ... the topic our parent raised :) )

If you are aware of the differences how can you claim a mere user does not need to 'hack' to get random software on an iOS device?

Sorry, don't really get what you are on.
All majour wind turnine companies are moving away from gear boxes and away from permanent magnets.

And your post here is pretty unclear what you WANT TO SAY and what is a quote from a web site.

The link you quoted clearly says: 'Wind turbines shed their gears' ... so what is your point?
First paragraph of your link: Wind turbine manufacturers are turning away from the industry-standard gearboxes and generators in a bid to boost the reliability and reduce the cost of wind power.
The following paragraphs clearly state that Siemens and GE are moving away from gear boxes toward 'direct drives'.

Further down you can read that the rotor now has the permanent magnets as opposed in older designs where the stator had them. Hence the amount of permanent magnets got reduced.

In future I hope you would argue a bit more in a: "REASON therefore EFECT" sense, as I'm pretty tired to figure the sense of your incoherent posts.

Random cut/pastes makes no argument ... hint: the page you linked (and I believe I linked it on /. a few days before myself) is from 2010, we have 2014 now.

So, what exactly do you want to claim? GE and Siemens put more gear boxes into turbines? No they don't!
GE and Siemens need more Neobdynum (which is not rare, so what would be the point claiming it? And what would be the point if it was true? Or if it was wrong? Is see none ... !) into their turbines? No they don't!

Any more claims I missed?

I guess the problem arises that the word abundance in english is bivalent ...
In german we would never call that abundance.
The total amount of something available is completely irrelevant if it is buried in million or billion times of the amount of 'ore' or water.

What counts is: how easy you can retrieve it. Actually it is easy to retrieve all those minerals from sea water. But you can not 'select' for one, so you have to refine the result. Right now it is easier to rip off african or south american people, so no industrialized nation is doing it.

Or as in true 'abundancy' ... how high is the percentage of what you want in a certain ore.

But again you made a point without a point. What do you want to say ... point out?

Repeating the same post several times makes it not more true nor does it give credit to what your mind is remembering ...

All the modes you mention count as hacking, as an ordinary user can not do that.
Perhaps you forgot are not even aware what 'hacking' actually means.

Pfft ... why should I not understand that?

Again: for house hold customers this metering is not used. It will be used in smart grids though.

While rest of your post makes sense/is correct, situations in which businesses buy hour ahead on the spot market are still rare.

I know how the grid works.
If you knew how a grid workes you would not write nonsense like this:
Ok, so pumped hydro is over a century old. But it is most heavily used in France
France has less pumped storage than Germany, capacity wise and power wise.
Infortunately only big plants and no summary about countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Mice read: http://setis.ec.europa.eu/seti...

due to Nuclear power being more cost effective operating at maximum capacity full time.
Simple comment: that is wrong.
Unfortunately explaining what all is wrong and nonsense (starting with the fact that the france nuclear plants don't run full power all the time, *facepalm* )

Germany is at the edge of having too much solar and wind installed on its grid,
Wrong. Germany has four grids. Plus endless transportation grids. The problem regarding wind is that most wind is in the north and most industry is in the south. Feeding wind into the northern grid makes no sense, as there is not enough demand. What we lack are transportation grids from north to south.

HAS dialed back on incentives for new solar and wind installations.
Completely wrong. Germany reduced the feed in tarrifs for future plants, We reduced the governmmet subsidicing for solar. Beyond that is no "dialing back on incentives".

The reality is that if the rest of Europe had even a third as much solar and wind as Germany, the European grid would crash due to massive electrical overloads and underloads.
As I mentioned several posts back. You should read how a power grid works. A power grid can not crash due to your magic 'overload'. There is no overload. The grid operators would disconnect any offending facility, might be plant or even a big inductivity or capacity disturbing the grid frequency.
Your assumptions lack any physical or technical base.

The Germany plan has only gone so far cause they can dump their excess power on their neighbors and buy reserve power at a surplus latter. Lots of buying French (and other countries) nuclear power when wind is weak at night or in a winter's day.
That is wrong on all accounts again. France especially buys from Germany because their grid is at its limits, not because ours is. They mainly buy german power to pump up into their pumped storages. Germany very rarely buys power at all from neighbours. Bottom line we were nearly every month the previous years a net exporter to Europe, we export _ALWAYS_ more than we import. There were a few exceptions where we were importing a tiny bit more from France than we exported to France. Perhaps 4 or 5 months in total in the last decade.
Also please get a damn clue: especially in winter and at night, the wind is not weak but strong. That is an automatic dictation from our coastal climate and the typical european winter climate. (* facepalm *) Every child learns that in Europe in school in 3rd or 4th grade.

I spare me to comment on the other nonsense in the middle ... wind does not 'oscillate' much (* facepalm *)

Geothermal usually is baseload, which is much better for mating with pumped hydro than any other intermittent source.

Pumped storage works in both ways. If you have to much wind you pump water up hill.
Geothermal is usually used for heating, not to produce electric energy. Ofc you can. If you have the right place. Germany has not.
So: no, the typical base load plant mates pretty bad with pumped storage.

Germany is switching from nuclear to wind for its base load, and phasing out coal as well.

Again, learn how a grid works, so you understand why every country has _minimum_ roughly 10% of its daily _power_ production as pumped storage, and why some countries have up to 150% of the daily _energy_ production as capacity for their pumped storage.

All your phantasies what pumped storage is for, how and why it is used, how it combines with other technologies: are wrong.

And finally: base load does not mean what you think it means.

Does not change the fact that comments on /. that certain elements are rare, are simply false.
Also the question of economics is a nit overated. There plenty of mines for rare materials that are dormant. They got given up years ago and only suddenly get reopened when there is a shortage. The mines git closed not because the mining per se is expensive but because the overproducten in the last decades was so immense (an attempt to counter Chinas so called pseudo monopoly) that the prcies did not keep staying up.

Exactly :) and that is why we don't need _more_ Neobdynium. There is simply no space in the turbine to put more in, nor would it make sense, nor do modern generators even need static magnets, as all magnetic fields are generated by the current. There is only a very weak starter field to create the initial current ...

You want to tell me, and the audience, that an ordinary household in Denmark has the option to buy energy at the spot market for negative prices?

Yes, we are all wondering, because, YES: I have more experience with that stuff than most /. ers as I actually: WORKED for decades in that area. So much for your ad hominem, :D does not really touch me.

It has to pay people to take the power.
First: no they don't need to do that. They could let the energy go "to waste", wow, interesting?

Your answer makes no sense anyway regarding to my previous post. Did you click answer to the wrong post?
Or did you not get my reference to your claim: Essentially, not a single watt of non-renewable energy can be sold on exchange until all of renewable capacity has been sold.
You claimed that in a previous post: and it is simply wrong. Perhaps you want to rethink what you wanted to say and rephrase :D

Simple example. I only have a single coal plant, one single. How should I be affected on the energy market by your wind plant? Especially if I want to sell *my* power that I will be producing in December 2015 (yes, 2015 ... not 2014) Hint: I sell it just fine, no need to take any wind power into account. Point is: you are 30% right, and 70% wrong hence you don't even have enough understanding to express your 30% rightness correctly. And no: I won't do that for you, for your brain dead ad hominem attack.

If your background is so sophisticate you should perhaps try to stay up to date.
And perhaps you should learn to read.

I enver said: it's healthy to live off 1,500 calories a day.

I said it is the bare minimum you can live on as a woman, depending on size/weight and that for males it is about 1700. However I pointed out that I live since years on a roughly 1550 diet as a male of size 172 and 70kg.

You might also wish to educate yourself as to what BMR actually means.
No I wont. Because it supports my case :D already used 2 of those calculators in an other post and figure: I was perfectly right. According to those calculators my base rate is 1500 - 1560.
Don't know how they exactly suppose to calculate for every person, as I do sports and work and still are not exceeding 1700 kcal in ordinary day live.

You're welcome to find a reputable source that says people in the mainstream of height/age/weight can survive on 1,500 (or even 1,700) calories a day indefinitely.
Why should I? You are the (self proclaimed) expert, if you missed them so far, in my book you are no expert.

hat's with 'inactive' selected for activity level, in reality I'm anything but. I actually have to consume ~3500 calories a day to maintain my weight with my metabolism and activity level. Sorry that is completely impossible. No idea how you come to that stupid idea. If a 'normal' person eats that much it will gain weight indefinitely. 3500 kcal are for workers who have really muscular challenging jobs.

"http://www.mayoclinic.org/calorie-calculator/itt-20084939" you forgot to enter your size and hight, or the link does not include it, so I can not comment. If you need more than 1700 kcal, you are already overweight and/or likely above average size.

That's a real number, FYI, from a fairly religiously kept food diary; not your nonsense "I had five beers and a pizza" calculation
That is not a nonsense calculation as that is what I ate that day and what is easy to google/calculate up to the total calories.

I hate to break it to you, but five beers and a pizza almost certainly totals up to more than 2,000 calories. My calculation came to something of 1600 if I recall correctly, rounding up ofc.
It may even be over 3,000 depending on the type of pizza in question. Sure, you can always find a super size me pizza with 3 times the calories an ordinary person 'needs'. Fortunately such pizzas in germany are advertized as : pizza for 2 or pizza for 3. I ate a Pizza for one.
An ordinary Pizza has a size of 350 grams. An ordinary pizza has about 200 kcal per 100g, rarely it approaches the maximum: 275kcal. So a pizza of the "worst case" is at 950 kcal.
You will be surprised that it does not surprise me that even your base estimate is more than 100% off and your worst case is 200% off.
And: I had not a worst case pizza, Mine was likely in the 650 kcal range.

Uh, if you ask about my background:
Actually I'm a martial arts teacher (besides that I'm a computer scientist) and help people to gain fitness and lose weight: so my background in nutrition is only 25 years of intensive work and perhaps only about 15 more years of random interest. It does not beat a professor or real nutrition scientist. But a random american repeating myths from magazines I'm beating by far.
As I mentioned before: I hope you have no nutrition problems, or obesity/weight problems. You will have it hard to get a clue about food without reading a real book about it or go to an university and really study it.
On the other hand: you only need to live a year in Italy, France, Japan, Thailand and there are plenty of other places, to figure how to eat healthy.

By that, you actually mean everything has to do with thermodynamics.
No it has not!

You're adding energy to disassociate a molecule.
No, I don't ... I _use_ energy. Like I use energy to lift a stone, and I get 100% of that energy back if the stone drops.
Thermodynamics dictates that you cannot recover that same amount of energy by letting the constituent elements recombine.
No it does not.
The second most basic law of physics is: the law of energy conservation. unless you are in a "special case" and can explain why the energy is not conserved (or more precisely: where the "missing one" has gone to): there is no funky thermodynamics involved at all.

I strongly suggest to open the relevant wikipedia page and read up about it as you obviously missed the basics of thermo dynamics in school.

Assuming realistic values for electrolysis and fuel cells, you're already well under 40%.
No you are not.
Realistic values can easy be googled and looked up on wikipedia.

Hint: thermodynamics is about three fundamental properties: pressure, volume, temperature. Everything with magnetism, gravity, electricity, transfer of electrons is either not at all tangled by thermodynamics or the connection is so remote that laymen like you simply should completely avoid that topic.

Next time you will tell me an electric engine is affected by thermodynamic, oh my gosh (* facepalm *)

Sigh ... can't be so hard to google if you know not much.
Pretty dumb to bring random links and make wild claims.
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://www.treehugger.com/rene...

Read a bit if you like ... will you?

Vestas is the largest manufacturer in the world Are they? Of what? Wind turbines? Or by what metric?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... Here they are number 2 in market share 2012, no idea how relevant that is.

You know: bringing one manufactor and then claiming because he is the biggest one ... that is not an argument. That is simply stupid. Sounds like the iOS versus Android war and claiming (rightly) that there are more Android sales than iOS sales when in fact Apple is the biggest smart phone vendor, or aren't theyÃY No idea, not important.

In what case? Care to show a formula and explain the relevance for heating a house?