Just noting that for the last few days we have had a high over a lot of the country, but instead of grey skies and no wind we have blue skies and a lot of wind.
Could be the weather front stalled half way down, of course.
Anyway at the moment there are bright blue skies for lots of solar and plenty of wind. Coal off most of the time, nuclear running lower than usual (maintenance?) and CCGT not doing a lot.
Probably just coincidence, but it's interesting the first 3 days of "lockdown" have seen (certainly in the Midlands) 3 days of uninterrupted sunshine dawn to dusk ....
Of course if a lot of staff are off maybe that is why coal is off, after all working in a coal fired station means you are probably inhaling dust and hence your lungs are not too good. Brian
I managed nearly 6 miles walk today - saw few others out - and the M1 wind farm (SE of Northampton) had all blades feathered - was solar input enough? I suppose industrial and commercial businesses shutting down has a large effect.
actually no., there is no wind power today. remember most of the wind subsidy goes to porridgewogs up on edinburgh...it can be lam in the south and blowing a gale up in orkney
Of course the more renewable energy is online the higher your electricity bill.
I worked at the Scientific Services Department of the CEGB which was co-sited with the Portishead A and B power stations.
No coal dust floating around at all, and the B station had a marvellous canteen, except that you had to warn them in the morning that you were coming for lunch.
Nearly 50 years ago now, but it seems like only yesterday that I first had an undergraduate internship there back in 1971 during which I experienced that most exciting of playthings, a PDP11/20 computer with its Blinkenlights interface.
Ever since then, with the whole of the machine available to me at a very low level (Single step or even single cycle of instructions ! ! ! ? ? ? ) I've had a DIY attitude to software, with very much a Not-Invented-Here (NIH) approach to software provided by others.
Kind of you to say so, Jim, but it has a downside, and that is that I've a number of Raspberry Pis awaiting installation but have stalled for lack of detail on the GPU processor which looks to be more exciting than the ARM bit.
There's no doubt that the real power, and the concomitant excitement thereto, in the Raspberry Pi lies not in the ARM but in the GPU, and I wait forlornly for the necessary data to be able to program it in assembler or machine code.
Actually, one place I worked as a contract softy had produced its product in hex machine code! This goes back to the days in the 1980s when schoolchildren were considered by some to be the real geniuses of computing and in this particular company (no names, no pack drill!) the MD had given the company's new product to be programmed by his teenage son, but unfortunately that son's experience of low level programming had been via PEEK and POKE in BASIC so the product ended up as a block of machine code to be laboriously entered by hand into the PROM programmer!
WHen I went there, it was to program a PID controller, ideally suited to the floating point in the C language, and I recommended to them that they should purchase the C compiler for the micro they were using, but unfortunately they had only just discovered assembler which they considered to be self documenting (which it might seem to be if your only experience is with hex machine code) and they insisted that the project be done in assembler.
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