It later transpired the real reason the Police wanted to ban the group:
"West Midlands Police did have "high confidence intelligence" that members of the local community in Birmingham were planning to arm themselves to attack Maccabi supporters."
But surely it's not an apple to apples comparison?
Wind farms can only generate electricity when it's windy. While you might be able to get cheaper energy from wind when it's windy, but unlike other technologies such as gas or nuclear with wind you still need to build out and maintain infrastructure for base power load when it's not windy.
Surely you need to factor that double build cost in with wind and solar since it's not required if you were to build out say nuclear power plants with similar output?
It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity. And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt. Most of the cost is drilling wells, liquifying gas, shipping it, unloading it, etc. All those other costs are much lower because the generators only run a small fraction of the time.
If you go to https://winderful.uk and set the date range to a year, you can get a sense of how many long dips there are.
> It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity.
The expected load factor for offshore wind power is around 50%. Much better than onshore wind (~35%) but still far from perfect. You can compensate some part of it by installing more power than what you need, but then you must pay for the unused capacity (£1.5B paid last year).
> And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
A day maybe, but in winter night last up to 16 hours. And wind droughts can last more than two weeks.
> But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt
But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Renewable are an important leverage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are also really challenging to work with, far from the simplistic view people can have on the internet.
> But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Gas peaker plants are extremely flexible and fast to turn on and off. That's the style that will fill the gap until batteries (or whatever else) takes over the last ~10%.
My understanding is that base load tends to refer to a source that produces constantly to cover base usage levels round the clock. That’s what nuclear is good for, and then you have other technologies that service the peaks it can’t quickly scale to.
That’s not really a relevant model any more with renewables, what you need is in-fill for times the main power source isn’t producing well. As a complementary power source you want something agile and switchable. Usually this is gas generators which are easy to spin up/down more or less instantly. Obviously gas is not ideal as it’s still a fossil source, so some countries are looking at batteries etc to service those loads.
That is correct. Which is managed by the day ahead market. If you can produce electricity when the grid is strained you will be paid a lot.
The problem with for example new built nuclear power is that it is essentially only fixed costs. Therefore it does not complement renewables at all.
Why should someone buy expensive grid based nuclear power when renewables deliver?
We've seen people starting to muse on the "unraveling of the grid monopoly" now when renewables allow consumers to vote with their wallets rather than accepting whatever is provided.
You need to have the right levels of energy available at all times. But that doesn't mean baseload any more. Hasn't for ages. It means having a variety of different sources that tend to be available at different times, backstopped with something like gas turbines.
The gas and other base load infrastructure are largely built, it just needs maintenance which is a lower cost than building something new. The CfD is a competitive process, so the price (should) fully incorporate the cost to build the infrastructure, maintain it, operate it and make a profit.
Correct, this is the problem that the Tories failed to identify when they started to reduce fossil fuel usage. It was a political decision taken to shore up support with people who ended up moving to the Lib Dems anyway (and everything unravelled anyway with Brexit for Cameron, who was probably the biggest proponent of this...Lib Dems incidentally also played a key role in blocking nuclear).
Comparing the prices of these two things does not tell you what the eventual cost is going to be.
To explain the context: the UK had to cap electricity prices because costs have risen so much, government is paying huge subsidies to providers, minister made bombastic claims in the last election that he could fix everything, nothing has worked out, he has now set up a range of quangos to employ his friends (reducing quangos was one of the promises in the election) who are now briefing the press aggressively with other lobbyists that costs are going to drop...despite the government having no political ability to do anything that will reduce costs (the latest briefing is that new gas plants are too expensive, an obviously misleading comparison on many levels).
UK electricity prices are extraordinarily high, the political context is that you have to say this will reduce them. This is obviously not going to lead prices to fall but the context has to be the same.
The other question is why we are doing this if this isn't going to actually cause prices to fall? As with many similar problems in the UK: too many people making too much money. Government is now subsidizing retail electricity prices to pay for private sector investment in high-cost technology that guarantees a high ROI. Most of the people quoted in the government's presser are lobbyists, as I said above a cottage industry of quangos has now sprung up surrounding Miliband. There is no way back.
In terms of macro, it is definitely quite interesting because the last few years of this have essentially made it impossible for the UK to operate as a modern industrial economy. How do you maintain employment with essentially no industrial function? Energy prices are so high commercially that some services businesses are actually struggling too. It is incredible employment and wages are so high in the UK (although the level of economic support the government is providing, particularly in services, is huge).
It's kind of mentioned in the article, but I'm more comfortable cooking with lard than either tallow or oil based on the current evidence. Avoiding UPF is probably the most important factor though.
Pretty much all, if not all, cooking oils/fats when heated past the smoke point create this problem.
Avocado oil has a smoke point of 500F, which is what I use for high heat cooking. By contrast lard is only 370F, which means it supplies less flexibility than avocado oil.
sadly one of the most frustrating things is that everyone groups saturated fats in one big group. there is lots of evidence that only specific types of saturated fats actually cause CVD, in particular some specific configurations of palmitic acid. the other saturated fats are not nearly as problem causing.
Lard is a different mix of the oils from the others. Much less saturated fat than tallow (but still a lot). You can look up the proportions if you want to.
UPF as in ultra-processed food? UPF designations are farcical; they're a modern formally-ratified instance of the naturalist fallacy. There are attributes of ultra-processed foods that are bad, but it's not the ultra-processing that makes it so; it's a very "correlation is causation" situation.
The fundamental problem with UPF isn't the nutritional qualities of the food. It's the _process_ itself. UPF is basically derived from A/B testing food continuously to making it (a) highly consumable and (b) low cost. Repeat that process over decades and thousands of times and you get overconsumption of shit food.
I think you mean highly palatable. Hyperpalatability is a real problem. But that's not intrinsic to "ultra-processing"; there are lots of reasons to "ultra-process" foods that aren't about maximizing caloric input.
I mean, that's not as far as I know an actual commonly-used metric but it's closely enough aligned with hyperpalatability that I think the distinction doesn't matter.
Those atoms were made in supernova, but the molecules themselves probably didn’t. It’s like saying "my car was made in a supernova" because it’s made of atoms. Sure…
That's a very purist viewpoint. The other side hired people to work against Britain and managed to get them into sensitive organisations, particularly the security services of course. Should Britain have surrendered to that in the name of purity?
Outside actual national security, like the military, isn't the moral high ground precisely "we use reason, you use force"? I'm really not interested in picking sides when, as I heard a friend say, "the dog bites the dog and everyone has fur in their mouth."
Democracy is a noble ideal, and I believe in it, but anyone can call themselves democratic. You need to put your money where your mouth is.
Communism, for better or worse, was the system of the opponent. It's the reason that various people did turn over to their side or give them secret intelligence. Did Pravda knowingly employ right wing Russians? They wouldn't even have bothered with this kind of ridiculous question.
There's an old story about sombeody like Manny Shinwell (a CP member in the house of lords) and somebody in the labour party convinced they were being bugged and speaking Yiddish to each other on the phone (as if MI5 couldn't find somebody to understand Yiddish, polari, you-name-it)
"West Midlands Police did have "high confidence intelligence" that members of the local community in Birmingham were planning to arm themselves to attack Maccabi supporters."
https://news.sky.com/story/ai-evidence-a-fake-match-and-misl...
reply