SteamyTea

First bud.

It is interesting this whole IP thing. I do understand that people want to keep control of their ideas and designs. But in the real world, this is almost impossible. Not as if you can hide a house from view. It may be worth getting the people to place the files in a secure folder that uses normal encryption, so that only you (or whoever you give the password to) can use it. There are a number of ways this can be done. There are also methods for tracking images and files on the internet, but I suspect that designers would not be bothered to enforce it.

Regular as clockwork, 7 every morning. Trouble is, don't get up till 7:30.

Interesting. I assume that tax is paid on that, so may be equal to just what domestic customers pay. Taking just EDF because I am with them, is that the UK side or the whole group, which is, in effect, a nationalised company.

Yes. All they are trying to do is minimise the risk of someone copying their designs. Probably because they cannot afford to enforce them. I do find it odd that IP can be applied to standard bricks, timbers and steels. There was a Sci-Fi story about a man that made film props. He was working on a film and the aliens came down and accused him of steeling their design, then took him away. Was MacArthur era.

Those were the days, sitting at your desk, full ashtray, while watching the 'properly dressed' young girls in the typing pool bend over to get stuff from the filing cabinet. Clean air and a PC is not the same. @pocster's hard drive is exempt from this, obviously.

I did a bit about this a few years ago on DriveTribe. We have (well had then) enough spare capacity, without doing anything at all i.e just plug those BEVs in when you feel like it, to charge 3.5 million vehicles. Switch that to night usage and it was 7.5 million. There is currently less that 0.5 million pure BEVs on the UK roads. So till plenty of headroom. The biggest problem is the governments fixation with nuclear power, which takes 25 years to build.

Interesting point. Say there are 30 million houses in the UK, and they each use around 3 MWh a year. With VAT at 5% on domestic energy, that is £42/house.year. So the treasury is taking £1.26 bn a year. Are the greedy shareholders getting this much?

When ICE cars started, one sent the Butler to the chemist to get a can of gasoline. It is really early days in this journey, and by highlighting the problems now, there is more chance that it will be done right.

Yes, one of the criticism of smart meters. I suspect, in reality, when we are all BEV, the vast majority of people will fast charge at public charging points.

I am sure there is one in there somewhere. (expletive deleted)ing autocorrect.

Yes, took me a while to find out what was gobbling power and what I could get rid of. It was a sudden increase in daily usage that made me realise that something was wrong. Fridge had gone faulty.

I always liked astable multi vibrator

So you drive from your flat to your workplace, and find that because demand is high, you cannot charge up at work. Won't this just drive (pun intended) an amateur to make their own.

"Fools and their money are easily parted" I am with @SuperJohnG on this.