You’ve not accurately described how the UK covers mismatches between supply and demand in its energy market. What matters is not matching each GW of wind with a GW of dispatchable backup, because that focuses on matching suppy not demand. If we do a wind overbuild of 3x demand, we don’t need 3x of dispatchable backup.

What matters is to ensure there’s enough supply to meet demand even when wind output is low. The dispatchable element of that is achieved through gas peakers, pumped hydro, BESS (1GW in 2020, 7GW in 2025, 127 GW in pipeline with 77.9 GW / 162.5 GWh approved thus far), interconnectors, merchant sales of demand cuts (peak shifting, which consumers love when they are able to access it, as they can cut their bills substantially by just running washing machines overnight etc), and several other mechanisms.

'You're drawing a causal line that cannot be substantiated. Saying Christian values led to these changes is just not reasonable'

I suggest yo read a history of the period and see how what the church was teaching led to changes in public policy.

And read up about Saint Telemachus...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The UK has always had excellent availability all the way through the transition. It’s not surprising you focus on this, because the US does not. But that’s really just table stakes in the civilised world. We can and do focus on more than just that.

The UK has about three *billion* trees. Sit back down, you nobber.

I agree with most of that, but it's worth pointing out that this is really a time-limited blip.

Today, about 60% of renewables capacity (35GW) and a higher percentage of generation comes from renewables sites operating under pre-CfD support schemes or merchant projects. While later rounds of CfD include huge projects, those aren't yet fully online.

What the government should do, in my opinion, is buy those contracts out and shift them to some sort of capped mechanism, because this problem only goes away once all generation is switched. I think there's a place for spot pricing in the UK mix, eg to encourage investment in storage (which is what happens today, and working more or less as intended from 2020 to 2025 when deployed capacity increased five-fold and the pipeline of projects is huge). But even there, the projects would actually now benefit from switching away to PPAs or CfDs or some mechanism that has less volatility on both the upside and the downside. That would be in the interests of investors and consumers and the government. But it would take an adroit government to get it right. Sadly, we've not got one of those. I miss the days when we did. It's been sodding decades.

it's not the tax revenues. It's that marginal cost encourages investment in cheaper energy. However, that's not been true for a long time, because CfDs mean that most renewables producers don't see the benefits of high gas prices. It's only the operators of the oldest renewables projects (pre-CfDs) who make bank. I think that's stupid and we should just buy them out. It would be cheaper.

If you want to get into the nitty gritty, it's worth talking to ChatGPT about this. Energy markets have some unique characteristics that make pricing more complex. I really dislike the current system and I'm sure we can do better, but it's not easy.

We don't need mirrors, we just need a stroke of a pen to kill DST. It's nothing but some bureaucratic madness. Just eliminate it by law, simple fuckin as.

You are spot on about the original intent behind spot pricing for energy markets -- it's designed to encourage investment into the cheapest sources.

It is possible to construct a different system that would provide reasonable incentives for producers while also cutting prices for consumers, although it's tricky -- you'd need to buy out the existing older renewables contracts that were used prior to the CfDs being put in place, and replace them with PPAs, and then you'd need to maintain a spot market for dispatchable power that worked for both gas peakers and storage. So it's complex. TBH, I think a more competent government would have pushed hard on doing this and seen it as crucial for maintaining political support. Obviously the detail is sufficiently complex that there's no point trying to explain it all to the public; but it could reasonably be described as a fairer system that delivered lower costs for everyone.

When we have low wind nights (not "windless", that never happens):
1. We turn on fucking gas peakers and don't worry about it. These nights are a small proportion of the overall year
2. We do, in fact, use storage, and we can use much more of it in the future, as costs continue to drop rapidly

These things aren't all or nothing. If we turn on the gas peakers 100 times in year X and then 50 a decade later and then 10 a decade after that, that's a great improvement. If we can eventually get it down to zero, that's super, but that's a problem for the distant future, the main challenge for the moment is replacing the bulk of our use of high carbon sources, which is completely feasible if we can keep the political will.

Base load is the wrong concept -- dispatchable backup is what's needed. Can be provided from gas peakers or storage.

The richest 1% burn through their entire annual carbon share in just 10 days.

Ok. yes. That helps a lot. I think almost all of the items you listed have a GUI on most desktop environments for *nix, GNOME and KDE certainly. And that's part of the challenges with Linux, we say Linux but really mean KDE, GNOME, etc. Because if you had GNOME on Linux and GNOME on FreeBSD, they are more alike from the end-user's perspective than a system with KDE on either OS. And we can do maddening things like have mostly-KDE system with bits of GNOME installed because maybe we like a few of their apps but don't like their panels and widgets.

On GNOME there is a very basic user account dialog, you can edit your name, icon, set password, enable automatic logins. If you want to move your home directory or something, you'll be hitting the command-line. And it's quite easy to screw up, so have a recovery USB stick setup before hand.

Printers I always setup graphically on Linux. It'd been 20 years since I touched printcap or other lpr guts. Apple really did us a huge favor when they upstreamed CUPS. Way easier to setup a Linux box than Windows 11 (my wife's compute never seems to find our old Brother printer)

X11 and Fcitx5 (Wayland) make IME bother powerful and a bit of a complicated set of choices for the end-user to make. Ultimately you can have your input method very customized and working in just about every app, certainly everything that is using GTK or QT. But even old school stuff like xterm does indeed work (I use IME for emoji shortcuts in xterm & hexchat)

For both GNOME and KDE, there is an accessibly settings menu. You can turn on the screen reader and get most apps to do TTS when you focus on a window or GUI element. Using either the mouse or tab key to change focus. More detailed settings were hidden by the GNOME team, there is a gnome-tweaks utility to get at them but it's annoying they dropped a lot of "advanced options" from the main settings window.
Slackware Linux from the mid-1990's had screen reader and braille terminal support at the installer (I think BRLTTY), so the hobbyist teletype OSes have long been winning at accessibility.

For restoring the system to an earlier configuration, there isn't a good out of the box experience. If you have the foresight, you can easily install a program like Timeshift and have a GUI and even automate your snapshots. But I don't know of any distro that have any of this setup for you in advance. I think in part because there isn't an agreement on which backup software is "best" or how to have sane defaults that work for most people. I think as Linux starts moving to using Btrfs by default on the main distros, the answer will be obvious and cheap. Until then people are going to be using rsync or Restic with some GUI or shell script wrapper. Powerful and flexible, but unlikely to ever see any kind of backups made by 99% of Linux users.

Ubuntu added the ability to update, install, or blacklist graphics drivers and other proprietary drivers. Giving you fine-grained control. If you want to install the latest NVIDIA driver before your distro vendor has pulled it in, that's going to be a command-line affair and not well supported. But if you wait for Ubuntu, Fedora, etc to packaged it, it should offer an automatic update option several weeks after the vendor released. (not ideal, but trying to be honest here)

Overall, Linux and *BSD can function as a desktop OS. Now would most people prefer the experience the *nix desktop GUIs over macOS or Windows? Probably not, more a matter of preference now though than any significant superiority. But I think most days on any modern OS can be done entirely in a GUI. And there's a few things on Windows you still have to do with cmd line, if you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in that situation.

Briefs are the first article of clothing I put on in the morning. Fortunately, my briefs aren't full of shit. Too bad the same can't be said of Meta's briefs - or of Meta itself, for that matter...

Why have we continued to feed all the "random companies" that got us into this mess in the first place? For example, the oil companies knew in the 50's that we would end up where we are now, and created models in the 60's that were still usably accurate into the twenty-teens. They gaslit the world - appropriate pun intended - and they continue to do so. But we still keep buying from them and they are still incredibly rich.

The weaknesses of corporatism are never examined too seriously by the people whose beyond-comfortable lifestyles that corporatism enables.

> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.