Thanks that lead to an interesting read,

Pretty sad state of affairs to realise he had figured it out a 120 years ago.

Frequency response is all about spikes in demand or more often tripping generators. I can't talk too UK figures but for ireland peak demand is around 6000 MW and a large generator is arounf 420 MW and they do trip from time to time.

The Grid has genrators all in sync and the frequency is aimed to be at 50 Hz. When you lose a large generator the load is transfered to the other generators and they slow down , when they slow down this reduces the power on the grid increasing the load on the generators which slow down and unchecked spirals out of control and the grid crashes and then comes the long hard process of restarting the grid. This is extremely rare but the potential is there. The frequency is continually monitored and at a frequency of 49.8 hz approximately this will trigger automatic response This may include Battery sites releasing power to the grid, demand sites such as large frozen food distributors (basically removing demand is effectively the same as increasing generation but faster. This is the intially front line response and occurs within the second. Further power sources will kick in as needed. The short run generation can run for up to 3 hours usually which is enough time to being online long run generators (these can take up to 2 hours to ramp up from a warm start).

You can't really predict when a generator is going to trip out but the national grid is generally ready for it. Even texas is better prepared now.

There is flexibility you can over supply to a degree and if you turn on power and the demand is too high you may get another trip within a second of the power returning. Domestic consumers don't individually contribute that much and the grid has a pretty good idea of how much powers going to be needed to a particular sub-station. Grid operators are skilled and most of the time rarely have disruptions that reach the end consumer.
                   

People are going to recharge battery packs when the power returns but it will not create a peak as large as typical peak time demand which is when blackouts are liable to occur. So they will be recharging and at the same time generators will be ramping down just a bit slower than usual.

It's not going to be the same area's getting powercut either. So if you do lose power due to a shortage of energy in the grid it will likely be somewhere else that loses power the next time. For London, Birmingham Manchester Sheffield they will probably see more curtailment than other places but thats because they are the largest population centres using most power. It will be distributed around as there is a limit to how far you can shift supply around the grid.
   

Hi most of the day there shouldnt be a problem, peak demand is around double of the off peak so off peak there are generators either stopped or at minimum production (it's a lot easier to ramp up than start up). The UK and Ireland have a fair amount of wind generation available. For example in Ireland yesterday about 72.5% of the electricity generation was from renewable energy, still about 18% was from gas fired generators.

So the main problem time will be between 4 to 8pm with low wind generation. So if it looks like its going to be a miserable day chances are you won't be sitting in the dark with no electricity. The colder the day the more power will be needed at a rough guess a 1 degree drop in temperature will require an extra 750 MW of supply in the UK. A typical gas fired power station might be 420 MW.

There is a daily cycle of power usage with peak demand being about twice that of off peak. so off peak there are a lot of generators sitting idle that can be brought online and the wholesale price will be low at peak its the otherway round and there isn't much to spare. There is some reserve generation it's typically about the size of the 2 largest generators. so if the biggest two have say 1500MW between them there is usually backup of 1500MW this is standard practice in Australia but most grids will be similar.
Renewable energy is a great thing e.g in ireland yesterday i saw 72.5% of electricity production was renewable but on other days it can be as low as 1% (most typically in the summer when the weather is nice).

There are going to be days where the supply will be at risk, the industrial users are already looking at reducing usage during peak hours, In Ireland some industrial users will be subject to manditory demand reduction. Individual households can play thier part too by reducing their usage at peak times. Obviously one of the big uses of electricity at peak time is cooking but you could mitigate that by slow cooking during the day meaning you can have a hot meal ready when you walk in the door and avoiding peak electricity usage.

For computer users we can run laptops on battery over the peak time. Apples introduced smart charging to iPads in IOS 16 for USA initially so your iPad will try to charge when there is more renewable energy on the grid. Little things can help as there are a lot of us.

If you have a UPS have an Led lamp plugged in at around 6 watts it should easily run for the 3 hours of a black out. You might do the same for your router broadband companies will usually have backup power on thier networks.

Reductions in peak usage are going to be critical. When demand is high then the less gas fired generators running the better to avoid blackouts. The more we shift demand to off peak when renewable energy is available the better. E.g yesterday when we had that 72.5 % renewable energy on the grid as demand started to pickup so did the amount of Wind generation we were basically using the maximum amount of Wind on the grid that allows for grid stability, which implies there were some curtailments of Wind generation during the earlier hours as Wind generation moved closer to the expected availability. That was essentially energy going to waste.

It's basically going to be a learning experience for the general public, but the simple answer is reduce your peak hour electricity usage. It doesn't mean you have to wear a hair shirt and shiver but being a little smarter when you choose to use it.

Graphene It's an interesting OS for android with a focus on security. Google's apps are treated the same as third party apps.
 

To be fair i agree.

It's worth considering the difference roughly on my M1 mini the internal drive is twice the speed of the one on the Air 256GB Model, However the Samsung 1 TB T7 drive which lives attached to my M1 mini is about 4x slower than the internal drive or about half the speed if attached to the Air. The speed of a Sata interface is slower than the Samsung which is way faster than any mechanical HDD.

So I don't think you can say the SSD in the Air sucks , it's just not as fast as it could be.
On a more practical side of things 256 GB is a pretty small drive. Just loaded with applications on my mini, i have about 82 GB free and thats with all my data moved to my T7 it's closer to 20GB free normally. Which is not enough. If I was buying again I would buy the 512GB model. The 1 TB model would allow me to keep more on it but that goes against the principle of keeping archived data off that machine I have nas storage for that. which is backed up.

The Ram difference between 8 and 16 GB isn't a huge difference in most circumstances.

The next stage up is an M1 pro and then the M1 ultra models which really means going to the Studio models. The M1 pro models are probably the best bang for the buck, the Ultra's are faster but not twice as fast.

For me an M1 pro makes sense as i am not paying myself to work on it. If I were say Disney then the Ultra works out better if it's making the operator more productive. Thats the real expense wages, not the machines.

You could also argue that a PC that outperforms the Ultra would be a better option for Disney if the operator would find it a better machine to work on.

Personally I find the Dell i use for work loud and obnoxious, my boss isn't going to buy me a mac even though there is nothing running on the Dell that I couldn't run on a Mac.

So yes it's a poor choice on the part of Apple to put a slower SSD on the 256GB models, it's also a poor choice to buy the 256GB models and it's also a pain that its much faster to be able to buy a 256GB version and takes a few weeks to get the higher capacity versions.
           

Well one thing they could do is export power. Which allows you to produce more safely. So it may have been they produced enough to power the UK's requirements with renewable and then exported the excess generated by conventional. I don't know the UK grid code so they may allow more on it's generally going up year on year.

Not yet i know there is one which is being built direct to spain which will increase the interconnector capacity. It's not unusual to have 3000MW coming into the UK from France and at the same time the UK can be exporting 1000MW via the 2 interconnectors to Ireland.

It is a European Grid Network so Electricity gets pushed to where it is wanted, it depends on price. It's not unusual for a generator to have a contract to supply a retail company X amount of power , now if there is a lot of wind on the grid. Eirgrid will pay them to reduce the output and then they buy in power to meet the contract. It's usually the case that this happens when buying is cheaper than producing.
         

50 GW is 50,000 MW. Your estimate of enough for 10 million people is way off. Ireland as an Island uses around 6000 MW peak with a population of around 5- 6 million in total. So as a back of a cigarette packet calculation maybe a million people per GW i am not saying my figure is accurate but it's closer than yours

The UK is part of the European Grid already. There is a 1000MW pair of interconnectors between the UK and Ireland about 3000MW interconnector between France and the UK. The direction of flow depends on the price and the amount of Wind makes quite a big difference.
I don't know how the figures for the UK (their Electricity demands are at least 10x that of Ireland) but i can tell you that the maximum amount of renewable energy allowed on the grid is around 75%

The daily cycle for Ireland runs between 3000MW off peak to 6000MW at peak. The current record for wind generation in Ireland is about 4,500 MW.

So that 4,500 figure would have been produced around the time of Peak demand (about 75%) Perhaps more interesting is when there is high Wind and low demand. When demand is low about 3000MW there is at least 4,500 MW of potential Wind generation available. it depends on weather and time of year. It can be as low as 100MW. more typical would be above 1000MW.

Anyway lets take a scenario where its the middle of the night demand is around 3000MW and there is an excess of Wind in Ireland . As you need grid stability you are limited to around 75% wind so around 2250MW but you have the interconnectors which can take around 1000MW so if the price is right which it usually is with wind Ireland would be exporting so now the demand is 4000MW and now you can use 3000 MW of wind and 1000MW of that goes to the UK. If there is less wind available than upto a 1000MW flows into Ireland. So you could have a situation where 60 percent of generation is from Irish Wind farms and most of the rest is via the inter connectors between UK and Ireland.

It's also worth bearing in mind that fuel for conventional generation is mostly imported so using Wind when its available is a good thing. Ireland also has battery sites as well which can dump a lot of Electricity onto the grid in a fraction of a second and then maintain that output if needed for 2 or 3 hours, This covers the period needed to bring up more conventional generation.

The future is quite interesting, there is already ongoing construction of an interconnector between Ireland and Spain (which is a great location for Solar) There are a couple of interesting projects for storage.

In Berlin at one generating station they are building a large water tank which is mainly for district heating but is going to hold water at up to 90 degrees C (about 200 MW) it's intended that excess Wind generation will be used to generate the heat. However conventional generation needs to raise steam to run and if the water is at 90 degrees to start with rather than say 10 degrees. You don't need to burn so much fuel. The article I read said they can keep it hot for around 13 hours. Which would help shift wind generated power generated off peak to on peak. The German site looks to be ready for September just a few months really for the construction.

There is also another project I read about where the idea was to heat sand to 500 degrees C. Electric Cars are going to need charging and the time to do so is overnight when demand is low. We already have plenty of capacity since we have to be able to generate enough for peak times.

At the very least realise that national grids do not work in isolation and Electricity can be supplied where its needed. You still need infrastructure in place, and some of it needs to be beefed up to carry higher capacity loads. Even Brexit hasn't changed things much if it all about Electricity generation. In Ireland we have 2 countries but one grid sometimes control is in Dublin and at others it's in Belfast.

Electricity is Electricity, how it's generated is not a simple black and white issue.
                     

If you read the article you will see that it's being built on the site of an existing power station. A conventional generator starts by making steam from heating water. If the water is hot already it means less fuel needs to be burned to generate that steam, if that is normally generated by gas, you will burn a lot less gas.

The other thing that you need to look at is the daily cycle of power usage. At night its around half that of the peak, this tends to coincide with higher wind levels in general. Wind generation is generally higher in the winter too.

Another factor is grid stability, I can't say for Germany but here in Ireland around 75% is the maximum of renewable energy that is currently allowed on the grid. To give some context in Ireland peak demand is around 6000MW maximum wind used currently stands around 4,500 MW night time demand is around 3000MW. I can't say what the installed wind generation is but it's over 4,500 MW. Ireland has 2 interconnectors between Ireland and the UK with a capacity of 1000MW.

OK so the most amount of wind power that can be put on the grid is 75% of demand so as it happens 4500 is about 75% of peak demand 6000 MW now off peak being half that your maximum at 3000MW demand is 2,250 MW roughly. The interconnectors can boost demand by exporting to the UK another 1000MW but thats still around 3000MW of wind energy that can be used. There is still another 1,500 MW plus that can't be used if there is enough Wind energy available. So currently this has to be curtailed.

Now Germanys hot water tank is essentially a buffer. This helps balance the grid by helping to match supply with demand if there is more Wind than expected it takes in more energy and if the wind drops it takes in less and when there is available capacity on the grid it can give it back to the grid. It's kind of a massive smoothing capacitor. Incidentally a typical gas fired generator is around 400MW output.

Power generation is planned with 4 auctions a day and Wind forecasts are done hourly, obviously the Forecast for the next hour is a lot more accurate than the one for 24 hours time but each forecast goes out to around a week anyway. The price is set for the hour by the bids into the market the more generation capacity there is compared to demand the lower the cost for that hour. At peak demand the available supply can get pretty low and the price per megawatt can go through the roof. If there is enough wind generation the most expensive peaking plants will not need to be turned on and the cost is much lower.

A relatively small reduction in peak demand would have a large impact in the retail market.
your typical electricity retailer is selling at a profit most of the day between 5 and 7pm or 4-8pm they sell at a loss. So the day rate is set higher to cover the loss. recent times have caused the peak price to be higher and business plans to be destroyed as the amount built into the day rate.
                               

It's a bit more than that, having a port is a failure point, have you never had a port become loose or even detach from the board. It is pretty handy having wireless chargers e.g on a desk no wires needed to be dug out of a bag and untangled. lets say its a 5,000 maH battery to charge thats 25 watt/hours and a third is about 8 watt's. I think boiling a litre of water takes about 150 watt hours if its efficient and it usually isn't. practically speaking you would waste 2 or 3 KW of electricity a year charging daily. A typical electric shower uses 8.5 KW an hour or about 140 watts a minute which would you could save 8 watts by ending your shower 10 seconds sooner.

I'd agree with robustness to be fair and apple make some pretty bad devices. e.g they made a lightning charging stand with headset jack and basically balanced the phone on the lightning Port! and i don't think they have made any other splitter than that one. They don't seem to want to make lightning extension cables or right angled connectors. (handy on a gimbal).

Some of the third party hardware developers are pretty bad and well known :(

Lightning was introduced 2012 usb-c in 2014.
Apple doesn't get royalties on every lightning cable sold , they do on MFI certified cables that use the official chips and not the chinese knockoffs that just fake the handshake.
The royalties on mfi certified is around $5 though, so if you are paying less it obviously isn't certified.

What assurance do you have on a USB-C cable as to it being a good one or a poorly made one?

To be fair having the power connector on the mainboard isn't a great idea in the first place and Apple didn't put it on the mainboard even with magsafe.