I remember taking the escalators in Moscow in the 80s and thinking they were freakishly fast. According to this article they are not that fast. I wonder if they lowered the speed or it was just my lack of familiarity with long escalators.
You are not wrong. I have tried some of the faster ones in Prague and Kiev.
The difference in numbers does not sound like much but it sure does in real life.
The speed combined with the wind can be quite wild.
“If you have a massive cloud formation, the rooftop PV production can drop by so much that it looks like you have lost basically almost a nuclear power station.”
A good problem to have but still a problem. Who would have thought weather forecasting would be critical to grid maintenance.
Weather forecasting is important even before solar/wind. Extreme, temporary temperature swings require the power company to be prepared for the extra power generation.
With just coal/gas/hydro, this can be mitigated much easily, but still needs to be handled with care. If not, then the lack of power generation could cause brownouts for hours or days as backup power generation takes time to spin up.
Since we build for "1-in-a-100", it's expected we'll have these failures, as a 1% chance every year is a pretty high chance that will keep increasing as these power companies rely more on non-failsafe power generation strategies. Texas is the extreme example, where over-reliance on those systems caused too much damage.
It always has been. A weather forecast is a major input into future demand prediction. Not just for heating and cooling, but there are also many second order effects.
Also severe weather predictions are crucial to have the staff ready to respond to grid outages due to weather.
Weirdly phrased since when you have a full, real nuclear plant you need to be ready to deal with that tripping off the grid suddenly, because it happens regularly.
> Weirdly phrased since when you have a full, real nuclear plant you need to be ready to deal with that tripping off the grid suddenly, because it happens regularly.
It does not, what is with solar proponents and lying?
The problem is they are required to maintain two entirely separate external sources of power at all times. Something drives it below two, the plant trips even though absolutely nothing is wrong with the plant.
The 17 is 969 euros. The 18 Pro is 1479 euros. How can I justify the difference? I'm on 13 now and I wanted to get an 18 but since there is no such thing I will probably end up with the 17.
I'm still on a 12 pro. Was considering the 17 a couple months back, decided to wait for the 18 and now I'm in the same boat as you. The 18 just doesn't really seem worth the huge difference...
The most upsetting change for me was the missing link to Google Maps when searching directly from Google (the victim of an earlier decision from EU). So I asked a chatbot to make me a browser extension that adds it back to the top bar of the search results page. I use it almost every day. Mentioning it in case others miss it too.
>It's interesting that diesel is taxed more than gas in the US. It's the other way around in France.
Although in the US there is commonly an "on-road"/"off-road" split, at least in more rural/agricultural regions or states like mine. The diesel is dyed so it can be distinguished if inspected, and the off-road diesel is either not taxed at all or taxed at a much lower rate. The intention is to not tax agricultural usage, and also that it doesn't make sense anyway to tax tractors and other equipment (almost all using diesel still) used in fields and woods for road maintenance. In contrast, the biggest on-road use of diesel in the US is commercial trucking of various flavors, and those really do do much more damage to roads (and if anything aren't taxed proportionally at all). One of the very rare times the politics and costs have even mildly aligned.
It'd be nice if we could have more electrification in off road agricultural equipment as well but even putting aside all issues of energy density (which are solvable via quick swap packs/trailors if nothing else, and that's much easier to engineer in a tractor form factor and much easier to have a setup for at a typical farm) the weight will be a challenge, soil compaction is a very serious concern for most ag. Maybe electrification along with extra R&D/gov support can drive down the cost and improve the reliability of continuous track (or split continuous) for ag applications. John Deer has developed a few models with it, but the majority up and down the spectrum use tires. Combining the two though could allow for electrification with the same (or actually lower) ground pressure.
Any externalized cost that you tolerate as regulator is already an indirect form of subsidy in my view. E.g. allowing a mining company to dump tailings in the next river is exactly the same as paying for proper disposal with tax money (from a company finances point of view).
So any untaxed air polluter/CO2 emitter enjoys an indirect subsidy already.
But in the french case, farmers and fishermen got paid 15-30 cents per liter on top (removing all ambiguity).
Heavy trucks do more damage to roads so the fuel tax is higher.
Agricultural or ‘off road’ diesel is untaxed as the fuel tax is meant to pay for road maintenance, tractors and combine harvesters spend almost all of their time in a field and very little time on a road.
It’s largely historical. France heavily encouraged diesel cars for decades, so there’s now a huge installed base. Once you’ve done that, you can’t suddenly jack up diesel taxes without making a lot of people very angry (and probably setting a few cars on fire).
We noticed. In the 1980s, it was not uncommon to smell/hear a diesel sedan putting around town. It was invariably something like a Peugeot or a Volkswagen.
In true French colonial fashion: export the problem to West Africa and make it someone else's problem. That's where most of those old Peugeots and Volkswagens ended up.
The diesel/gas relationship is inverted between the countries, so it actually makes a lot of sense (though not perfectly as both countries use diesel for freight)
I think this will be an unpopular opinion here, but I believe gas/diesel prices in the US should be much higher. That is needed force a move to renewals with the US gov. trying to foster more use of fossil fuels.
The way we are going, we are heading to a world that will be much harder and more expensive to live in.
Fuel taxes are a good idea in principle but they're very easy to fiddle with as a popularity hack, and so like the US "Debt Ceiling" they become a useless political football. UK governments routinely announce that they are "freezing" their version of this tax because as I said, that's popular even though it's a bad idea.
Interesting fact: If you price CO2 at <$100/ton and assume that (ballpark) 2000 Gt of emissions (starting now) already lead to very severe consequences (this is quite generous), then you are pricing "somewhat intact climate for the next few centuries" at around one years GDP (which is insane to me).
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