sbi

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net @JillsJoy@NerdJoy.social Among developers, it is well known that the best way to solve a complex problem is to step away from it. Some software companies have pool or table tennis tables or something similar, for people to get away from their desks and clear their heads. For me (mostly working from home), classic moments for solving hard problems are when I'm emptying the dishwasher or cutting veggies.

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net I understand that this is much better — except when it comes to German potato salad. 🤣

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net Ah. Here, it's a mayo-based dressing (a rather common recipe for this area). Traditionally, we add hard-boiled egg, fried pancetta (except when the vegetarians are around), tomatoes, apples, onions, scallions, and herbs (esp. chives). To the horror of my mother, I also add olives, anchovies, bean sprouts, deonjang and/or gochujang, and other things her granny never knew existed.

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net That's a very un-German POV! (The German POV would be: "Most of them aren't mine, so they are Scheiße." 😃 )

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net Potato salad is not a problem: the potatoes basically cook themselves, and it's mostly eaten cold. (In Germany, there's about 1.5 times as many recipes for potato salad as there are households, and at least one more common variant, the Swabian, is eaten lukewarm. But that's a fluke.) I love meat salad on rye bread or on wheat buns, but my younger kids are vegetarians, so I rarely ever buy it nowadays.

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net I hear you. Germany is pretty strict when it comes to private fireworks — except on New Year's, when the whole country transforms into a war zone. We have experimented with salad dressings and ingredients. The one the kids loved best was made from eisberg, arugola, water melon, mozzarella, roasted sunflower seeds, and a dressing made on the spot from avocado oil, apple vinegar, mirin, and shoyu. But this is Germany, so there's also things like potato salad and meat salad. (No kidding!)

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net Yeah, the kids mostly wanted to eat cold stuff, too, but just salad for a week is a bit monotonous, and some cold stuff needs to get cooked before it can get chilled. I have retreated to my bedroom which is just shy of 25C, so comparatively cool. The forecast says outside will get <25C in 6hrs. *knocks on wood*

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net Yesterday we got some rain, and the atmosphere cooled down so we could open up windows and doors in the late morning. Keeping everything wide open until today, we brought down the room temperatures to below 25C. But at 10am the outside temperature has again risen past 26C, so I just went through the apartment and closed everything again. It's supposed to peak at "only" 28C here today, and getting noticeable cooler beginning tomorrow. Everybody is sooooo looking forward to that!

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net On the weekend, the temperature outside my kitchen window peaked at 61.7C. This house got insulated to current standards 12 years ago, but no amount of insulation can keep that amount of energy out. I got cooked at 32C inside my kitchen while cooking. For a week now, we have kept windows and doors closed during the day, and only opened everything during the night for the drafts to cool down the apartment. But with lowest night temperatures being 25C some nights, it doesn't help much.

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net I have been using TB on WIndows since forever. (Also, they have forked an existing app and are turning this into Thunderbird on Android.)

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net Um, Thunderbird ist still around??

@whoosh @sfwrtr Since I am regularly staying at a household that does not have any of it, I bought a bottle of travel-worthy gochujang to take with me. I now feel like a true traveling Korean.

@whoosh@techhub.social @commonst@social.vivaldi.net @JillsJoy@NerdJoy.social Yeah, that's along the old advice that the Brest debugging technique is a good night's sleep. 😁

@dreadfulsanity@mstdn.games Tassen/Schrank? 😃

For the last 10 years I have been paid for writing code which controls AC batteries (DC batteries plus inverter) or whole grids with fossil fuel, wind, PV, and batteries. I have seen small containers with a single 100kWh battery and 500MWh battery power plants. Some of them support tiny microgrids, like the (backup) power for a single hospital, others are cutting diesel consumption on certain islands down to 20%, and yet others provide primary control to Europe's biggest national power grids.

@pachli@mastodon.social I am using too much software across too many devices and platforms for reading all the release notes of everything. There are several new updates every day on my private phone alone, and simply I cannot keep up with that. (Yes, sometimes this makes for surprises.)

Addendum: I simplified things to the point where electrical engineers and battery chemists might feel physical pain. I have not talked about generator and battery chemistry inertia, active/reactive/apparent power, inverters being able to do both grid-forming or -following, genset synchronization, the dark art of black-starting grids, and lots of other stuff. I skipped this partly because I deemed it unnecessary to get the big picture, and partly because I know too little about it. I apologize.

@veronica @Alice The en øl, ei flaske øl, and ett glass øl is pretty much like German, then, where beer is masculine, a bottle is feminine, and glass is neutral. What a mess!

Thanks for reading all the way down here! I am looking for a better job, BTW: https://toot.berlin/@sbi/110491545613352166

@oschonrock …found it: https://mastodon.social/@sbi

@oschonrock @iinavpov @cstross @rootwyrm You should move. If everybody moved who understands this, then that would mitigate the problem.

Because nuclear power keeps being brought up in the replies: Technically, I know very little about NPPs. AFAIK, they can change their output power only slowly and hence cannot provide primary control. So in this regard they are not different from renewables. More important, though: nuclear power installation is *way* too slow to compete with renewables. ATM, the PV power installed globally rises more than twice as fast as everything else *combined*. Nuclear is minuscule compared to that.

@oschonrock Why? When you move, your old postings stay where they were. You will have a new account on a different server, your followers will be moved, and (IIRC) your old account will have a reference to the new one. All that has nothing to do with your archive.

@Bristow_69@framapiaf.org Signal's account is linked in her profile, and that has a link.

@corsac I'd rather have a hundred local fires where lithium batteries burn indistinguishably, than one more Fukushima. That, however, is irrelevant since we cannot install enough nuclear power in time anyway. Building a NPP from scratch takes 20 years nowadays. Until we will have increased the current amount of installed nuclear power by a significant factor (thereby increasing the chance of another disastrous incident, BTW), it will be too late to avert the catastrophe we are heading into.

@TheLancashireman@hostux.social @Janeishly@mastodonapp.uk "IRC? I skipped that fad." 😁

@MicroSFF@mastodon.art *bows* Thank you.

@BillySmith@social.coop @katanova@social.coop From what I learned in the 90s, modern agriculture uses way more energy than what the sun provides, mostly in forms of fertilizers, pesticides, and diesel. I understand that this doesn't have to be. (No chemical fertilizers, and no pesticides in my garden.) It currently is, though. Add to this the ineffective land use, the need to have private vehicles etc., and sustainability in the countryside is just a dream sold by advertisement agencies.

@SkipHuffman Yeah, this could be done. ATM, these are mostly concepts, though. The amount of "green hydrogen" available right now it nothing to write home about. It's a future thing. Hopefully. Primary control with batteries can be done *now*, allows a much higher renewable penetration in existing grids, and significantly reduces the carbon footprint of energy production.

@BillySmith@social.coop @katanova@social.coop I dunno where you live, but in the western world, the rural life is anything but sustainable. Agriculture has long since used up more energy than it provides. I'm living in a city, in a rented apartment, with, sadly, a north-facing balcony, so private PV is not possible. But I rent a parcel of land for gardening and put two PV panels on the roof of the small hut I have there, and now I live off solar power there.

@hruske Yes! (Note that, according to what I know, gas turbines are too slow in stepping up and down to do primary response beyond of what their inertia provides.)

@albonycal Yeah, some high-profile account boosted it two days ago, and I've been getting two dozen likes and boosts per hour ever since. Plus lots of replies. Sorry, I didn't mean to be unfriendly, but I've become a bit terse as I have a very hard time keeping up.

@albonycal Yeah, there's been several discussions of pumped storage already. Please see my replies there!

@chrisnelder @TransitionShow Read the blurb again! It says "through _grid-forming_ inverters". Battery inverters are grid-forming, but PV inverters aren't, they are _grid-following_. So this seems to say exactly what I am saying: stabilize your grid without rotating masses by using batteries.

@mdione The first two are about tertiary control, flywheels are about primary control. So far, I have not yet come into contact with any of those. The main objective of this thread was to explain that batteries, while problematic for large-scale storage due to their low energy density, still play a key role in the transition to renewables because they can replace fossil fuel generators for primary control, and that they can do this *now*, and at a profit.

@baishen I dunno. What for? (As I understand it, capacitors are interesting things in DC, but in AC, there mostly like short-circuiting wires. Am I missing something here?)

@wlach Yes, you need to have some overcapacity in renewables if you want a higher penetration. And curtailing is necessary in order to protect your grid. Interesting article! Thanks for pointing out that job. However, this is all about DB's and financial stuff, whereas I love tweaking dispatch algorithms to get the maximum out of the available assets in a microgrid. :-(

@tetron Sorry, but I cannot decipher that statement. "Power protection device" is a rather generic term and I don't know what this refers to here. And 6% doesn't seem a lot to me, but then I don't know the other parameters of this grid. FWIW, as I wrote in my thread, you can always _curtail_ solar power to protect your grid. You throw away free energy by doing so, but safety has its costs.

@jaj Yes, when you have the necessary geographic features, these are great for storing lots of energy. OTOH, they are relatively slow. So they are used very differently from batteries. Sadly, I have never had the opportunity to work with one of them.

@jaj Cool!

@tetron Great to hear! I suppose they want to use batteries as short-time storage, in the hours range, to store daytime energy for the evening power spike. That is something batteries can do, but as I described, their ability to do primary control is even more important for energy grids with lots of renewables.

@tetron Ah, 12 out of 40MW sounds way better! Yes, the problem with PV is that you need way more of their nominal power, because you rarely have their peak power, and when you have it, it's usually too much. This naturally leads to you wanting to keep that excess energy to cover for when you do not have enough. And, yes, batteries are great for that. They can gobble up excess power, and later discharge it, and switch between the two in milliseconds.

@xnor@fed.xnor.in Frag die Manager, ob sie die Berechnung ihrer Boni dann von jetzt ab auch der KI anvertrauen. Wenn sie das nicht wollen, dann scheint es auch in ihren Augen Dinge zu geben, die mit KI nicht gut gehen. Die nächste Frage ist dann: Warum denken die Leute immer nur von den Dingen, von denen sie was verstehen, dass KI ausgerechnet die nicht kann, glauben bei allen Dingen, von denen sie keine Ahnung haben, dass KI gut genug dafür ist?

@corsac Ack.

@klmr But then you are programming in R, so who cares?

@wlach@mastodon.social Thanks anyway, and thanks for the good wishes!

@mdione After a few days of thinking about this: You are correct, of course, I focused on fossil fuel generators, PV, and batteries, and left out lots of other alternatives. Part of this was that I wanted to keep it simple, and wanted to get my point across. Another part, however, is that I simply do not know much about those alternatives, and I do not like talking about stuff that I do not feel well-informed about.

@shinealittlelove @NuanceRhymesWithOrange @bluegreenandfree @benlockwood If you want to abolish golf courses, then I guess my shovel will be more helpful than sword, axe, or bow.