OT - what's your commute overhead ?

They have a minimum wind speed, to engage them.

Once the equipment senses the minimum speed is being met properly, they can let off the brake and unfurl them (adjust blade angle to capture wind).

And that curve is an idealized curve, intended to show the operating principle. The machine has to compute the time average of the wind available, and make a decision as to whether to "run" or "stop", and this will influence the temporal behavior.

The output can't be used for anything directly, because the frequency of the output is variable. And you need enough output voltage, to drive the conversion step. The output stage makes, say, 50Hz, and the phase is adjusted to lead or lag, to whatever degree is required to "transfer power to grid".

This means there could be "bang-bang" control responses, resting on top of that smooth looking response curve, as various parts of the device cut in and out. Maybe if the wind blows at 50 for 3 seconds... the machine does nothing with the gust, and remains furled.

The message here, is that the "machine isn't broken if it isn't spinning" :-) "It's just resting". "Beautiful plumage, the Norwegian Blue".

Paul

And the huge volume of pollutants that Greenpeace claimed were on the platform simply weren't. It caused more pollution bringing it ashore and dismantling it than iut woudl ever have done if just sunk at sea!

I remember reading an article (or maybe a leader/opinion, can't remember) about this in the Independent, where they raged at Greenpiss for this major own-goal.

Well greenpeace have to do something to justify their existence to the numpties that believe in them

You miss my point.

Today when I looked at the windfarm on the next hill one of the turbines wasn't going.

ONE.

The rest of the dozen or so were all working fine.

I would say the down time must approach 10% - certainly more than 5% - where one or more turbines are not working when the rest are, which implies there is enough wind and not too much.

Not working because there isn't any wind affects them all, and is probably more common.

Andy

They will continue to turn in no wind - they function as motors, drawing power to stop the bearings going pear shaped/ Our local excrescence had two out of twelve mills turning in a totally windless day last time I drove past it.

The reality is that once the warranties have expired about 30% of windmills are out of action awaiting maintenance of some sort or another.

Only useful to collect 'constraint' payments on.

So, 3 weeks later, and every (week)day Google has said "heavier traffic than usual on your route".

Which makes me wonder, at what point does it become "usual" ?

Does usual mean "for this time of day" or "averaged over e.g a week"?

You don't want to come down here to live. We have a Local Government subsidised conglomerate called "Cormack" who are responsible for "Road Improvements" and "Self Pension add-ons" who could teach your local road contractors a thing or two about road delays. Their examples on the Wadebridge to Bodmin main road are things of great beauty and total f--- ups. Greatly admired by the road delay experts. Dig a hole in a main road and puts lots of traffic lights up. Leave to simmer for a week then fill in hole, and remove traffic lights a week later. Ten days later go back and dig up hole. Foreman lost his false teeth and they might be underneath.

No, stay up there were the living is easy.

It's like the climate, every time it gets a bit wetter hotter colder or drier or more or less windy we are told its 'abnormal'.

When for the last 10000 years its been all over the bloody place already

As a software developer, I started doing work from home in 1988. I was working on large (by today's standards) mini-computers for GEC Computers who designed and built them, and I'd managed to acquire enough scrapped bits and pieces to build myself a working one at home (technically, a GEC 4162, although some of the boards were old prototypes which I had to fix). I still have it sitting idle, and it did mostly still work when I last fired it up (just the Ethernet controller had died, which is usually recoverable by reseating all the chips, and one of it's 4 disks died some time ago).

Since then, I've always done increasing amounts of work from home, and in 2001 I joined a Sun Microsystems team based in Los Angeles from the UK, so there was little point going in to the UK office given I eventually shifted my working hours to start in the afternoon and work into the evening, and Sun provided (in those days) ISDN access from home anyway. Sun was always very pro-home working. One of the senior execs was quoted as saying "If you want the best people in the world working for you, you have to have first class home working in place, as 99% of them won't live near one of your offices." I saw that first-hand.

I introduced home working in a large financial institution, because it enabled me to get the best staff in the country, not just within a 30 mile radius of the office. I did a year working for a US startup who had no UK offices, so that was entirely from home (and just occasionally from their Santa Clara or Amsterdam offices), and then as a contractor at a bank in the City, but working from home. This had become essential as I was a carer for my mum by then, so I was actually working from my parents' home much of the time. I took a year off for prostate cancer, and the bank offered me a permanent post which I accepted as a home worker. However, the manager changed before I started, wouldn't allow work from home (even though as a contractor I had), so I pulled out. I decided that even a lucrative City job would not compensate for commuting every day - that's 3+ hours of my life wasted every working day. I've not regretted that decision for a moment.

I would never do a daily commute again which was beyond cycling distance. My work-life balance is a big factor in what I do nowadays.

Are you trying to say the increased jams on our roads is normal, and not do to demand or indeed any other reason such increased population?

I can see your logic of denial here too.

Yes, those things are contributory. But there is also greatly reduced road capacity now, due to deliberate government action.

I live now about eight miles from where I spent my first twenty years, the last four or five of those involving considerable cycling. Today, the area where I do most of my driving overlaps with my cycling area significantly. First, as a former cyclist I can certify that the road surface conditions are far worse than they were fifty years ago, but I think everyone knows that.

Apart from that, I would say there are four or five times as many traffic lights as there were then, and many of the junctions now have three or four phases where the original lights had two. There are fifty years more of 'road improvements', and considerably more time is given to pedestrians, even though there are far fewer now. It is quite common these days to see one or two pedestrians on a hundred-yard stretch of pavement beside a main road, where in my youth there would have been dozens. Many pedestrian crossings were once Belisha types, whereas now they are traffic light controlled. And not Pelican types, either, but fixed period.

I don't know if you've tried driving in London inside the circular roads, because that is now vastly more difficult due to the increase in one-way streets and the reduction in many road widths. Did I mention 'more traffic lights'?

when I first started to drive in Edinburgh, the major road junctions in the city centre had policemen on 'point duty'.

Perhaps your experience is different, but all new housing development around here have commanded a new set of traffic lights where previously a junction or roundabout would have sufficed. Either way the demand for traffic lights is largely population led.

There are also instances where lanes have been created for buses where statistically it was shown there was no effect on car traffic flow. I've also known some bus lanes to be removed. This is perhaps a more famous one:

In London, even in my youth, subsidised public transport made the motor vehicle pretty much unnecessary.

I recall a family member who would regularly drive while over the limit where he simply said if he was ever caught his wife would do the driving for a year and it would have no effect on his train journey to work.

I think Bristol did too. Didn't they go on strike and the traffic flowed more freely?

Much like multiple traffic lights on roundabouts. When the lights fail the traffic flows more freely.

Cormac (not 'Cormack') is wholly owned by Cornwall Council.

Swindon is the capital of crap roundabout systems. Apart from the famous Magic Roundabout (simple, drive nearly straight across the middle) it specialises in putting traffic lights on roundabouts. There are several worthy of note but the champion is the M5 west roundabout with the maximum number of traffic lights and unnecessary numbers of lanes changing from two to three or one to three or four - who knows. Strangers have driven round it for hours trying to get off.

The only thing, as mentioned elsewhere that is more incompatible than roundabouts and traffic lights is roundabouts and rozzers. Many years ago when I used to commute into Manchester daily we knew when the jam started two miles or so before it normally did that the rozzers had parked their Velocette noddy bikes on the Princess Parkway roundabout and were doing their aimless gesticulation routine.