You can tell it's cold

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think that we have a shade over 25GW of coal and about 22GW of gas but its all a bit vague really - lots of plant is semi mothballed.

[Dave Liquorice]

demand get

17:40 57450MW 645MW from wind

Thanks for the updates chaps. At 1800 I was busy making my own small contribution to that demand by cooking dinner (electric cooker).

Trouble is it's a market, if France is prepared to pay I guess we will sell and our lights will go out... As others have said France uses *a lot* of power for space heating. That report about the German power grid had some figures.

436MW of Other still showing at 22:20.

With the OCGT and Other it certainly looks like a misjudgement. Doesn't look likely to get any warmer tommorow wonder what will happen at 1800? It being Friday will POETS spread the peak demand out a bit?

[The Other Mike]

Part, or in some cases all of the capacity on the interconnectors is traded on the open market. There are about half a dozen traders on the French interconnector. If parties either end of the connection don't want to trade then the connection 'floats' and there is zero transfer other than where an emergency condition exists.

The price for the electricity is, as near as makes no difference the price on the rest of the system, and that is varying from about 3p to about 16p per kWh depending on demand and supply. The difference in the peaks due to time zones for instance often helps keep prices down in both countries.

What the French charge, or what we are charged varies all the time. If they want supply when our prices are 'cheap' then that is what they pay. If they want supply when our prices are hitting the roof, then they pay that price. They don't get any discount and nor do we. There is also a charge for use of the interconnector, so what goes in one end comes out the other at a small markup, but that is effectively no different to any other connection in the UK, hence why, in theory, if you buy your electricity from a local generator it should be cheaper than one sited across one or more transmission boundaries - but it very rarely is!

[Andy Burns]

[snippage]

Thanks for that, so it isn't all traded weeks in advance then? I seemed to remember looking into how the energy market worked internally, and pricing seemed very odd being based on a demand during a small number of "triad days" or was that just for use of the grid, rather the electricity itself?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have never got my head around the electricity market.

But some things have shown up. E.g. Denmark MUST take all its wind turbine power at the FIT price BUT it can only sell it abroad at market rates. So Sweden and Norway buy the wind peaks dirt cheap.

If Scotland became independent,. it too would ideally not be able to force us to buy its overpriced porridge-wind, but have to sell it at a loss - a net gain for English Welsh and Irish consumers. So much for creating an economic boom there through renewables.

Iwould *imagine* that he major resellesr - the power companies like EDF, Eon, British gas etc, buy most of the anticipated demand forward. Its up to the power generators whether they take up the contracts or not.

The spot prices would be for the residue of a few GW only where emergency shortfalls are put up for auction if you like.

Of course renewable generators don't enter the market at all - all their power is guaranteed a market at a fixed prioce I think. Totally anti-competitive practice.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Gordon Henderson escribió:

They did a lot of work to improve memory use and garbage collection in FF7. The memory footprint, with the same collection of tabs open, halved between FF3.6 and FF7 on my Windows PC.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1901 mdt 20 0 1067m 525m 19m R 0.7 16.0 904:00.45 firefox that's with about two dozen tabs open. Remarkably similar.

just adblock+ and ghostery here. (Love ghostery!)

[Nightjar]

Perhaps the Belgians charge more for transmitting it than we do.

Colin Bignell

[Another Dave]

Yes, but the point I was trying to make was that they can't then export it to Germany. Surely something like Kirchoff's first law applies? :)

[Jules Richardson]

Yes, I installed it on this 'ere system yesterday (which had FF6 before)

- typical resident mem usage before was about 350MB and it seems to have droppped to around 230MB, so it's a lot better. This machine only (haha!) has 1GB of memory, so that kind of improvement will help quite a bit.

I put thunderbird 10 on too and performance there was initially dreadful (several seconds to open an email) - but it seems that it has spent the last 16 hours indexing my email, and now it's done with that things have improved a lot (and slight saving in mem; was about 220MB before and is

170MB now)

cheers

Jules

[tony sayer]

Very clever not. You'd have thought that Merkel would have waited till the warmer weather before she shut of the Nuclear capacity..

Well perhaps not, a stiff winter and a few blackouts will have her changing her mind no doubt or the voters changing it for her..

I somehow doubt, suppose, we've all that much spare capacity either have we?. Bet we couldn't throw away 8 GW of capacity.

[tony sayer]

And where would that be?, at existing power stations?.

Or at mothballed ones where surely it takes quite some time to bring them online?..

[The Natural Philosopher]

We COULD, but it would be perilous, and we would have to remove restrictions on all the coal burners and oil burners that are semi-mothballed.

But a winter like 1962 would be...very very dangerous with almost no margin for failure of any link or generator.

[The Other Mike]

Hopefully none, but maybe both :) Forecasting is usually quite accurate, for it to be 2GW out would need a few more GW of wind on the system...

They only permit speculative trading on the excess capacity on the link, some is reserved for system stability and the chances of a near simultaneous event affecting both networks is considered remote.

While you can't buy from a local genrator, you can in some areas choose to get supply from a company that own cheap generation within your transmission boundaries. Have a look at the Ebico website to get a feel for the transmission boundaries and their impact on one suppliers prices. It's only one pence or so. Ebico effectively buy from Scottish and Southern. So where their generation is located should have an impact on the prices in that area.

It's more complicated now with much fragmentation in generation, but where suppliers have the majority of their low cost generation the prices charged to consumers and other users in that particular area should be lower than if they were 50 miles away across a transmission boundary. But suppliers may choose to charge the same and make more profit.

Every time a transmission boundary is crossed then there is a charge. By knowing all the infeeds and places of demand in real time then the appropriate charges to all parties can be determined when all the checks have taken place to ensure something hasn't gone wrong with their calculations

for a more detailed view page 6 of this

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well we have seen exactly that. The oil burning stations have been fired up once last month - to presumably make sure they worked - and then they missed yesterday but today they are working.

The total stupidity is that companies are closing their efficient CCGT sets because there is more money to be made out of wind - but those are the best balancers of wind and the best emitters of the fossil plants - and the fastest to get up to power (apart from hydro or OCGT).

I.e. the crap way the economics are managed into a cliff face shaped playing field actually encourages the most inefficient and the highest emitting power stations in preference to the better ones.

Possibly in a World Without Huhne we may start to see some form of decision making based on facts and results in DECC, rather than faith and adherence to an emotional narrative of pure green mythology.

But I am not holding my breath.

What does a limpdim tosser with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics know about electrical engineering, after all?

[Dave Liquorice]

It was warm when she did it...

It would be a good wake up call.

either

You mean like the Germans have? Shut carbon clean nukes and open up old ineffcient carbon emmiting coal stations to make up the lost capacity.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It's happening already here because N Europe is short on power.

Germany's decision makes us emit more CO2. Magic!

[dennis]

Its just leading up to the announcement that they got AGW wrong. They will have to soften up the population a bit first.

Then we can get down to the real reason we want nukes, to get rid of our oil dependency.

[Dave Liquorice]

Summat up with the days attribution ATM. Maybe beacuse it's just gone midnight. But the profiles of the plots labled "Sat" are definately those for Friday and similar slip for other days, "Sun" is Saturdays data etc.

It's just auto updated itself (00:20) and a forced refresh doesn't alter this error. I have a screen grab if required.

[The Natural Philosopher]

you get the prize for the first person to notice that the chart labels occasionally go awry.

Probably spent more time on that algo. than on the rest of the code to make the charts..its still broken.

[Dave Liquorice]

I probably wouldn't have noticed without having paid so much attention to the profiles for Thursday and Friday

Often the way, error checking and handling normally takes up far more code and time than the real work a program is doing. It's OK now at

08:10. As it was just after midnight I suspect something getting 0 when it is expecting a 1 or vice versa. 50GW already, 0.069GW from wind but 0.462GW from the mysterious "Other". Both French and Dutch interconnects in fairly high (Dutch flat out) export mode.