stephen_g

Worst I've had over a day in the last few months on my home solar is about 25% of my maximum daily generation. It was one day in a very rainy week here in Brisbane Australia.

I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.

It’s not even really an issue with DC either, like a lot of people’s battery systems have multiple DC loads and multiple sources (e.g. DC MPPT solar controllers) going to a busbar connected directly to the battery.

Current load pulls the voltage down, sourcing current pushes it up. No bother, as long as your sources cut out if the voltage goes too high, and your loads cut out if it goes too low.

What’s the issue? Electrons flow both ways… Just have to synchronise the AC signals of the inverter to the grid, have good limits on frequency and voltage fluctuation, and monitor for faults properly.

You’re potentially getting the wrong type of tradie. What, are you calling Fallon’s or something?

That’s absolutely crazy, in Australia you could probably get a 30 kW commercial system installed for that. On my house I paid about US$6.5K for a 6.6 kW of panels and a 5 kW inverter, years ago. You’d get the same thing for a bit under US$5K today here.

For the price you’re talking about, you could also get a system with 15 kW of panels with a good 20-30 kWh of battery storage too!

Sealand is a structure within Britain's territorial waters (since they were expanded in 1987)... From what legal analysis I've seen, a structure just wouldn't ever be considered as a 'nation' in any sense, and if anything happened there that the UK was really concerned about they would remove the occupants anyway... So unless they had a navy that could go up against the UK's...

They'd need satellite internet anyway to get connectivity that didn't go through the UK so not going to be great latency.

Highways often have powerlines nearby at least every now and then. With those you can take power from roofs many kilometres away!

And what you say about apartments is wrong, it’s definitely not impossible. I’ve heard of plenty of apartment blocks installing chargers, they have load management systems to manage the load and believe it or not, not every single apartment occupant will need to charge their car every day at exactly the same time as everyone else!

Yes and no, I mean many of the parts were off the shelf and the vertical integration did slowly happen over time, but on the other hand iPhones never used off-the-shelf processor silicon. While they were Arm-designed CPU cores and PowerVR GPU cores at that stage (Apple would switch to designing their custom designed Arm-compatible cores with the A6 in 2012 and their own GPU design with the A11 Bionic in 2017), the SoC of the first few iPhones and iPod Touches were custom designed for them by Samsung.

Nokia did seem to rely more on off-the-shelf SoCs so having a custom design I think did contribute in some part to the iPhone's success. It's true that the software was a massive part but Apple were able to make different trade-offs with power consumption, CPU power and GPU power that enabled that software to work that might not have been as practical with off-the-shelf SoCs at the time.

These tend to work fine down to -25° C or so ambient temperature (you lose some efficiency below -5° C or so), so should always be outside. Obviously you need an alternate source of water heating if you live somewhere where it routinely gets below that, but even in a lot of places like that you could set it up to use the heat pump 90-95% of the year and a cheap but far less efficient resistive heater for the very cold days, and still come out far ahead.

I have a heat pump that uses R290 (propane) (as well as an CO2 one for hot water) and would take that any day of the week over ammonia! The charge of propane is pretty tiny and the safety standards extremely strict, so not really concerning in terms of flammability, ammonia I would consider far, far more dangerous.

Profit cap would be unworkable, Hollywood is already famous for creative accounting… No work would ever reach it on paper (while actually making many times more).

And still would all the same with a 20 year term instead of what we have now…

It’s so rare for any work to still be making money that long that it would hardly change the calculation.

I hear this a lot as a rumour but has it actually ever been demonstrated in the wild?

It’s not something anyone else in the world seems to struggle with, where there are *.gov.uk, *.edu.au etc.

If anything the .gov, .mil and .edu being just American is confusing, as well plainly inappropriate (it feels like an American cultural imperialist thing to people from outside the US). It would have been much better if those had been retired decades ago and moved to under the .us TLD, so e.g. whatever.edu would become whatever.edu.us like every other country. Any existing domains on .gov, .mil, .edu etc. should only be allowed to exist as 301 redirects.

The plane has since had a cabin upgrade and is still expected to operate at least until 2028. It’s operating SIN-LHR right now as I write this, currently flying over Azerbaijan.