SteamyTea

Not sure of the starting condition, but it will end up longer and thinner for a short time.

It worked so well. What is the saying 'be careful what you wish for'

You get a Darwin Award after trying it out.

I think part of the problem is that we talk of 'building houses', but we don't define what a house is. So why not have a population target. Like taxes, the arguement can be over the percentage increase i.e. 1, 3, 5% population grown in your local area. House builders could then do so market research and decide the most likely demographic to move to an area (partly influenced by local trade, commerce, manufacturing, service etc) and build houses that are most suitable. On the local services, as many may have found out, getting a local NHS dentist is just about out of the question. Bur down here, in one of the poorest parts of the old EU, even if we had 5,000 new dentists, a large part of the population cannot afford the basic fees. Not sure what to do with that one.

Apart from the reliability, and nuclear is very reliable, I cannot see a case for it in the energy mix anymore. In other countries with less developed national infrastructure, and greater distances between population centres, there may be an economic arguement for nuclear, but not in the UK. I think it is just used as a political tool. It was 2007 that Tony Blair started the ball rolling, and it still sounds good to the uneducated and disinterested that 'new, reliable, low carbon, nuclear generators' have been approved by 'this government'. I am sure if we took £2bn a year and invested it in domestic PV manufacturing, over the next 5 years, we could easily manufacture 10 GW of capacity each year, with prices going down and volumes going up after that. That is, if managed right, a subsidy of 20p/W initially. Pretty cheap considering the 7 mile stretch of the A30 down my end has just had £0.33bn spent on it (over 4 years). Saves 4 minutes on my journey up country.

If a developers land goes up in value, it shows as an improvement on their balance sheet. Forcing a developer to build on land would just mean large developers trade land between themselves. It would not get any more houses built.

At those revs my car is doing almost 100 MPH. What is to stop the old chap getting caught in the drive belt.

I live in a place where stolen cars get dumped, but that is the beauty of old industrial mining towns.

I am sure a self serving internet influencer will come along and show us how we have been doing it all wrong, and their simple hack will allow you to drill the perfect hole.

Ultimately, if the vast majority of the nation could take advantage of local/distributed storage, the we could run the grid on a fixed price, and a few, very large, nuclear plants. Now we know the that the 'strike price' for new nuclear is £95/MWh (adjust for inflation, with 2010 being the base year). So call that £120/MWh. If retailers double that, then it becomes 24p/kWh, or about what we currently pay. We would be taking in a lot of debt at around £10bn/GW for the installed capacity, and we will need a lot more than today if we truly decarbonise. We currently have about 80GW of capacity (not all of that is online at any one time). So say we triple that, and round up, 250GW. £2.5tn. That is about same as the current national debt. So instead of each person in the nation having £180,535 debt, that would become £361,070. That is ridiculous. The only real way out of both the climate and energy crisis is to drastically cut usage, so any scheme that pays people for over production is inherently wrong, we should really be rewarding medium and long term reduction.

There is a maximum 16 amp per phase limit that the DNOs have agreed on that does not need special permission (G98 as opposed G99, I think they are the low voltage part of the over arching G100 ENA regulations). You still have to notify them and used approved equipment, like burning timber, you are not allowed to do as you like, regardless of what you think. Technically you cannot export at your supply maximum capacity i.e. 80 or 100 amps per phase, as that would require the voltage to rise too high. This causes a lot of problems for the grid. UK voltage is not 240V, it is 230V -6% +10%. So at a maximum for a 16A system at 253V is 4.048 kW. Selling excess power to an energy company is generally better value than having the system disconnect when you have no use for it. If your system disconnects because you have no use for the power, your system is too large, and you have wasted your cash on it.

No way, you will forever been in my debt now.

Start with the physics. Power (W) = mass flow rate (kg/s) x head (m) x gravity (9.81 m/s²). While the flow rate may seem impressive, the head is only going to be a few millimeters (across a water wheel), so very little usable power. If you know the flow rate in m/s, then you can calculate the most efficient water wheel size as the perfect speed is half the flow rate. So say your flow rate is 3m/s, a 1m diameter water wheel which has a curcumfere of 3.14m, will spin at 30rpm. But, all is not lost. Do you know the height difference between the start and the end of the bywash? If you have over 2m then you could run a pipe from the start to the end, where it then drops the height down to a very small nano turbine (a central heating water pump). Will still be a fraction of a small amount. How about making a scale model of Niagara Falls? With some battery LED lights to make it interesting.

Turns into Cathedral if left long enough.

Not strictly true. One of our members has abandoned his project. There is lessons to be learnt about doing it all yourself, on a tight budget, and then falling when the end is almost in sight.

You think that is bad, I had to pay to get away from @Onoff

Welcome A lot of people live in an onsite caravan when they build their dream homes. If you can afford a plot with planning permission, you may be allowed to put a static on it, then you have until the planning runs out to learn how to build a house. There are some strange rules in some local authority areas regarding the Community Infrastructure Levy, which can be very costly if you breach them. But as said above, get some work with builders, then you learn a bit and get a decent contact list of who to use. If you want to go back to college, become an electrician (piss easy if you are numerate) or plumber (just piss everywhere).

That is quite an interesting idea as you cannot really cover 100% of the land. As you tilt the modules more to the vertical, you need a larger space between them to reduce shading issues. https://pvrowspacingcalculator.com/ If local councils fitted PV over carparks, they could offer free parking.

Do you mean 16 amps per phase?

I think class A farmland gives a better cash return than a solar farm, so only an idiot would swap farming for PV. (Caveat, most farmers lease the land to solar developers, they don't pay for the PV themselves). Hard to grow crops under a PV panel so any grazing is of low stock density, which is an uneconomic method if farming. As much as I like the idea of making it compulsory for new builds to have PV, many buildings will not be suitable (wrong angles and shading). There is the grid reinforcement costs to upgrade a lot of old buildings, which may also suffer the same problems as above. There is plenty to suitable land for farming, PV, Wind farms, housing and industry in the UK, just as there is plenty of land for golf courses and motor racing circuits, small air parks, military based and bus depots. We just need to allow people to develop sites and get grid connections in faster and cheaper (so don't force it to planning appeals all the time). How about open public voting, so we know who is for or against. If against the power companies can reduce your fuse size, say down to 30A, then 20A if you still vote against a development. It does seem odd that you can vote against a national infrastructure project which affects other people and not have any personally responsibility for the outcome.

Now thats a really good idea. Green burial probably releases less CO2e

From memory, and it is a fair few years since I was involved, and terminology changes, it is to do with the amount of overall capacity and the number of participants joining the auctions. So say on a typical day, in November, you have 500 people joining the action to either sell their generation, or buy a slot they hope to fill, and compare that to a really sunny June day when PV generation may be high, so there is capacity to dump (sell) but not many slots to fill (buy) as overall capacity needs to be lower, that day may have 1000 people entering the auction. Over the year, it therefore means that 50% of the buy, or sell, bids fail. Another way to think of it is as a sealed bid auction. some houses may get 100 bids, another 1 bid, with the overall average say being 30 bids per house. If there is lots of cheap money, the average number of bids per house may go up to 45 (50% higher). This would give a quirk that could be seen as excess demand (more bids at higher prices), but if you look at the supply side (and you have to with electrical generation), the number of houses for sale may be the same, or lower. That's is basically what Game Theory does in a public auction, it is not a case of the winner takes all, more a case of more people spreading the total load (I think in the movies, Beautiful Mind, the most desirable girl, that all the boys lusted after, did not get taken home, but everyone else were matched up, so one loser but many people still satisfied). So the most competitive may not always win, as the auctioneer needs to keep a number of players in the market, or a monopoly, duopoly, oligarchy or other limited number of suppliers can arise, and that is not good for reliability, prices, environmental considerations, bulk power transportation (which is possibly why they turn of some of the capacity) and other reasons.

Why is it wrong? Or is that just your opinion? Worth looking up Game Theory and John Nash. Spend a few hours down this rabbit hole. https://www.nationalgrideso.com/what-we-do/electricity-national-control-centre/what-balancing-mechanism

I had a girlfriend who was a 'saver', I always knew how much she had saved, it equalled my overdraft.