We got some Cobi set on a ferry cruise a few years back (Cobi 69120 Viking Line) and while kinda neat looking the tolerances/design made it hard to snap in and the decal placement (over edges) really made it a build-once model sadly.
At least there wasn't an horrid chemical smell as when we opened some Chinese figures off Ali-Express (soldier minifigs).
Cobi is more of a model-building company. Their brick-builds are meant to resemble the real-deal just as a plastic model would. Lego (especially Lego Technic) goes deliberately more for a brick-style appearance. Cobi thus creates a lot of custom molded parts to avoid the brick-style look and more of a real-world approximation. I don't think they market creativity, or B-models/custom builds with their products.
This is quite cool, seeing taking off planes appearing and rising is cool.
Some comments:
- Is the Up axis correctly scaled? The ascent rate of planes taking off seems very steep
- Planes landing seems to get "stuck" at the beginning of a lane at about 600 feet (tracking/radar cutoff?), maybe a fix the that slightly adjusts it to ground in a landed state if a plane "stops" or disappears from the data tracking.
It's amusing that changing the altitude scale doesn't reset the "trails" -- when I dragged it around quickly (on mobile) it left vertical streaks behind all the in-flight planes
For reference, this city is about as north as Anchorage Alaska and today they got less than 7 hours of sunlight and it'll continue to decrease for the next 3 weeks.
The Nordic countries generally still wants to increase their wind and solar power, but the big issue during winters is when there's cold air high pressure systems we get neither sun nor wind, having an energy storage that can hold up to 5 days worth of energy should help us nudge past them.
Hydro-energy exist (mainly Sweden and Norway, but I think some in Finland as well), but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear, or wind/sun + storage (that hasn't been good enough so far).
> “Hydro-energy exist, but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear, or wind/sun + storage”
Interconnectors also exist (and more are planned), which means, for example, that Norway can buy wind energy from the UK when it’s cheap and abundant, in preference to using stored energy from their hydro lakes.
That way they effectively get more out of existing hydro lakes, which in Norway is already a very significant storage capacity.
Theres not going to be built any more interconnectors from Norway anytime soon.
Electricity became a lot more expensive in Norway after building several interconnectors to UK and mainland Europe. Importing high prices from the failed energy politics of UK and Germany which both have among the most expensive electricity in the world.
This has been a huge debate, and the general concensus seems to be that joining ACER and building inrerconnectors to mainland Europe was a big mistake.
About 90% of Norway's 40 GW energy production (mostly hydro) is state owned. By exporting energy and thereby getting other countries to pay, the money literally goes to the norwegian people. Not directly into their bank accounts, but into their govt budgets, which they later pay less in taxes.
Norwegian power generation is sized for the domestic market, so tax income from selling excess is marginal at best. The power bills however have indeed crept quite a way up. This was especially noticeable in the first winter of the Russian invasion, when the Nordics had to subsidize the bill that suddenly dropped on short-sighted German energy policy.
Germany benefits a lot from the open market. If only countries introduced a rule to export only the excess of the energy then Germany would be cooked, because prices would sky rocket for them, not 2x, 3x, but way more. Luckily for them they can make strategical mistakes and go away with it making others to pay for that.
"Excess energy" is not a static value. It dynamically depends on price point. Which depends on demand and supply which both depend on price. That dynamic (and circular) interplay is at the core of why economics as a discipline exists in the first place.
Example, the Netherlands had the biggest gas reserve in forever. It's 2/3rds or 3/4ths empty now and extraction has or is stopping due to it causing earthquakes. But the income from exporting the excess gas has been used for socialist policies. Now that that income is gone, and now that expenses for gas have gone way up (also due to reliance on cheap Russian gas), people are feeling it in their bank accounts directly and the socialist policies are being dismantled one by one.
Only if you compare apples with oranges. Scandinavian taxes are considered high, but they include things like child care, health care, public transportation infrastructure. For people participating in all of those services, the take home pay (as percentage of gross income) ends up not less than in presumably low tax countries.
Do they actually pay less in taxes because of this? I’m not arguing. That is great and I would appreciate if you could provide a source for me to read.
We do not but there's a social consensus about the value people get from this taxation level. However the excess power price which is not a domestic supply/demand outcome is a lot harder to sell.
There are government subsidies for consumers to either have a fixed price or a price cap on electricity in Norway as a political response to the increase. This would be harder to pull off if not most of the profits from export didn’t land in the public sector (either taxes or government owned energy companies).
Electricity prices don't go up because you have access to expensive power, it goes up because you don't have enough cheap power so you have to buy the expensive power.
It seems like Norway just wouldn't have power if they weren't connected to other sources, not that they'd have more cheap power.
Electricity prices go up when you have access to customers who are willing to pay more. If grid connections to other regions are limited, people in regions with a lot of cheap generation (such as Norway) pay low prices. But if you add grid connections without increasing generation capacity, prices start equalizing between regions, as every power company tries to sell to the highest bidder.
Norway could power itself fully with domestic hydro. But it chose not to, as the power companies make more money by importing foreign power when it's cheap and exporting hydro when it's not.
Washington state has the same problem to a lesser degree. California pays more for cheap Washington hydro, which causes the costs to go up for us, although I guess not as drastic as Norway since our electricity is still considered cheap.
> "Norway could power itself fully with domestic hydro."
We have events where the we cannot get enough load from domestic production. Typically in winter when water freezes.
> It seems like Norway just wouldn't have power if they weren't connected to other sources, not that they'd have more cheap power.
This is not the case as Norway and neighbouring Sweden have plentiful hydro. It's especially valuable as it can be regulated to complement wind/solar fluctuations, essentially replacing storage.
Obviously the presumably large amount of money spent to interconnect could have been spent adding local production and storage. It would be a waste of money if there was a reasonable path to local energy independence that was neglected.
A significant proportion of Norway's domestic energy production is hydro, which comes with it's own "built in" storage up to the capacity of the dams, so Norway already has a very significant storage capacity.
Estimates suggests a storage capacity of 87TWh of storage in hydro reservoirs, compared to production capacity in recent years between 146 and 157 TWh, and a theoretical production capacity of ~309TWh (I don't know the basis for that - I'd imagine peak production at all the plants, but I doubt that could ever happen in reality, so the 146-157TWh based on real production are better...)
Compare that to Norwegian electricity consumption of 124 TWh in 2020.
Of course, since so much of Norways total electricity production is hydro, large storage is necessary, as the hydro supply is highly seasonal, based on e.g. things like the amount of melting snow in the mountains in spring.
they have too much cheap power, so they decided to sell it. But the fact they have a buyer that buys for more than locals, means they do not longer have to sell to locals at low price.
Tho it being state owned make it weird, you'd think state would keep lower rates for the people
It’s basic supply and demand. And by linking to other grids, you increase demand since there’s now more customers for your supply. What they have (comparatively) less is supply since the supply in those markets is shite in comparison to what Sweden and Norway have for their local demand.
Prices went up in norway because the uk had even higher prices than norway.
Having these interconnections is good for producers in norway and consumers in Uk, but very bad for consumers in Norway
> Importing high prices from the failed energy politics of UK
Remember that its a market, not the consumer price.
The spot price for UK electricity is still quite competitive in the winter, just not reliable.
The other thing to note is that peak in the UK is different to peak further up in longitude, which means that there is benefit to both countries for this.
> Importing high prices from the failed energy politics of UK and Germany which both have among the most expensive electricity in the world.
Look at it the other way: producers of electricity previously could only sell for cheap at home, and now they can export and make more money. That's good!
Even Southern England cannot get enough wind energy from Scotland to fully utilise wind farms because transmission capacity is insufficient. I would imagine a transmission line to Norway will be even more expensive than to England.
But they are building such a link, because it'll make/save more money than it costs.
Imagine how many doom and gloom headlines we'd have avoided if these two massive construction projects could have been sync'd up perfectly or if we had a national press that could do anything other than try to scare people with big numbers.
One of the interesting things about hydro is that it's usually constructed to satisfy baseload power. In reality, shifting that over to a peaking plant requires relatively modest changes to system, a small fraction of the cost of an entirely new dam. You don't actually need the "Pumped" part of pumped hydro, you can just throttle normal hydro on and off if you have enough turbines (though for ecological & geomorphological reasons some minor downstream damming also helps). There wasn't any reason to install the extra turbines in the age of fossil fuels. They only take ~30 seconds to spin up, versus days or weeks for thermal plants.
> You don't actually need the "Pumped" part of pumped hydro, you can just throttle normal hydro on and off if you have enough turbines (though for ecological & geomorphological reasons some minor downstream damming also helps).
Yeah that generally can work for a week or so, not for entire season.
Imagine if we build hydro to full capacity and monetize the excess with data/compute centers and/or crypto mining. We'd have so much spare capacity for any residential or industrial purposes.
Datacenters and crypto are evidently a bad source for large-scale load variability because their significant capex demands that they be kept running 24/7.
This is often a problem with variable load schemes that do any useful work, rather than just dumping heat into something. It would be interesting to see a list sorted by just how thick they are with capital considerations. Aluminum smelting, hydrogen electrolysis, lots of other options on that list.
> their significant capex demands that they be kept running 24/7.
US companies are sitting on a pile of not yet connected GPUs because they have no place to put them. They would take 10 out of 24h if they could get 10. It's better than zero that they currently have for those GPUs.
Same with crypto. No point of running a rig if it's losing you money becaus electricity is too expensive at this moment. Regardless of capex sometimes it's better not to run it.
I think the point is that winter can create periods where there is neither adequate wind or adequate sun. Having strong wind production at some times will only be good if there's a way to store the excess. That's exactly what this project does and I believe that was GPs point.
Hydro energy generation is fairly built out, but the Nordics have lots of places suitable to build out hydro energy storage. Hydro generation requires a flow to dam, but storage doesn't.
We don't really. Hydro storage requires reservoirs where you can freely adjust the water level. Most of our lakes have shorelines that have been built out, and the property owners get really angry if you suggest frequently adjusting the water level significantly.
The largest planned hydro storage projects are using decommissioned mines, and those are going to run out quickly.
You could just build a back-channel for the existing hydro-dams? Those reservoirs are only full for a short period and that is when you dont need pump energy.
But where? In Finland, at least, the land is relatively flat when compared with Norway and Sweden, and with a large rural population there aren't really any good locations.
In my local area, we had major flooding this spring because the hydro plant operators were sleeping on the job (or whatever they did instead of regulating water levels). And that was a simple 2m increase in water levels.
NO/SE have some more geographically suitable locations, but last time I checked, flooding them was considered too environmentally destructive too the local environment.
Yeah, you're right regarding the environmental concerns.
Most of Norway's hydro dams were built a long time ago when there was little focus on the environmental effects.
The last major plant went live in 1993. Most of the focus now is on far smaller schemes, that doesn't really add up to a lot compared to Norway's established generating capacity (which outstrip the total electricity use anyway), but which also meet far less opposition.
Part of the reason for that was growing local opposition to larger plants, and sometimes national opposition, culminating with the Alta controversy[1] in the late 70's that were some of the largest civil protests in Norway since the end of WW2. The protests eventually failed, but it had a lasting effect on Norwegian politics.
If you pump the water back into the existing reserviors you will have less flooding?
I suggested a pump-water extension to existing hydro power reservoirs.
Like your EV recharges when you release the pedal.
Right shouldn't talk about EVs with a Finn, that analogy will not fly. Ok, like if you plan carefully where you throw up your koskenkorva you can re-use it.
The reservoirs in Finland aren't quite at the scale your Explorer Vodka-fuelled Swedish mind believe them to be. Most are small generators hooked up to the local rivers, and are required to prioritize keeping the water from flooding residential areas.
There's a reason we're looking at using old mines for pumped hydro rather than trying to pump water upriver during a spring flood because other power sources have surplus generation.
You could use the ocean for the bottom level and an artificial reservoir for the top level. You're not going to noticeably affect ocean levels.
Or just use a large lake. You're not going to noticeably affect the water levels of a large lake. You might pump 10 billion litres of water, which is .02% of the volume of Mjøsa.
> And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.
This is incorrect. There is currently not a single pumped hydro station that is suitable for seasonal storage. They're all designed to drain their upper reservoir in 4-16 hours.
It's the only thing that's half economical. Do the math: Even a modest power plant - 1 GW output - that can run for 1000 hours means you need a 1 TWh (even typing it feels ridiculous) storage reservoir. If you only have 100m of head, that's 3 cubic kilometers of water. That would mean building an artificial lake that immediately would be Norway's 6th largest body of fresh water, and draining it completely every winter.
And effectively, you'd have to build it twice - you also need a lower reservoir. Because there's nowhere to get 3 cubic kilometers of fresh water to fill it otherwise, and you really don't want to do pumped hydro with seawater.
Norway already have seasonal storage with a storage capacity equivalent to 6-8 months of total electricity use in the form of its existing hydroelectric plants, with no need to pump things back up again.
> And yet it's still far cheaper than any other form of seasonal storage.
Only for countries with very suitable landscape, and the willingness to use it - damming high altitude valley is extremely unpopular and bad for the environment.
Also, pumped hydro is expensive. Initial capex is higher than today's lithium batteries, if you design comparable systems. The only reason anybody is still building new pumped storage is that you can use it for 100 years (instead of 20 for the batteries, although nobody really knows how much they'll actually degrade).
I think we'll find hundreds of TWh of seasonal storage elsewhere. Thermal storage is extremely attractive if (or once) you have district heating installed. Takes care of a massive junk of domestic heating, and could take over light (food processing, paper,... ) and medium (chemical, ...) industry. Just don't try to turn it back into electricity...
Once steel and concrete get electrified, we might get seasonal hydrogen storage in underground salt caverns. Concrete and steel need absurd amounts of high heat which probably means making lots of hydrogen, putting those in the right locations might make additional hydrogen for fuel cells/gas turbines available, relatively cheaply (still extremely expensive, seasonal storage always is). But who knows...
> A typical pumped storage facility uses 100m of delta
Most projects seek 200-600m. This map doesn't even consider pumped hydro <200m: https://maps.nrel.gov/psh
> And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.
Based on what? Cost is particularly variable for pumped hydro. It can be one of the cheaper options when stars align. But you need 1) a suitable geography that minimizes the cost of damming or digging a resivoir with sufficient head 2) available for development without too much backlash 3) Near enough grid resources to minimize infrastructure and line losses. I'm surely leaving pieces out.
It can be cheap, but it has far more hoops to jump than alternatives like batteries, hot sand and other "storage-in-a-building" designs which can be built where needed and using fairly standard industrial construction.
10 billion liters of water is 1,000 m^2 * 10m deep. There is no suitable location for that that is both elevated enough and near enough to Mjøsa to be financially viable.
Norway also existing hydro reservoirs with a capacity equivalent to around 6-8 months electricity supply, so it's not really a major need for Norway, anyway, but this is a fairly general problem: Finding suitable locations that are close enough to a water source, and provides a large enough potential reservoir is hard.
Looking at a few of them, a few obvious problems are apparent.
Firstly, it takes a rather liberal idea of how close the basins need to be to each other to be viable.
Secondly, most of the ones I looked at would require extensive relocation of existing populations and/or large-scale infrastructure changes, such as re-routing important roads.
The first few I looked at also do not have a sufficient water supply nearby - you'd face either covering them or you'd quickly run into problems of evaporation that you have little ability to replenish/replace.
A lot of the ones I quickly looked at would also face "fun" issues such as no nearby infrastructure such as roads to bring in construction materials.
I have no idea how many suitable locations there are on that map, but it seems pretty apparent it is a small fraction of the ones marked before you even consider how many would be politically unviable because of public resistance to the environmental destruction.
To be clear, I'm not at all opposed to investigating pumped storage, but it's also not nearly that simple.
True, but that disrupts ecosystems. Or so the argument against go building storage dams go.
That said, there's been a fair bit of talk here in Norway recently about tax incentives blocking hydro owners from upgrading old generators, improving efficency. Apparently a lot of currently unused power available if they "just" did that.
I wonder if it's possible to also increase the amount of generation on existing dams? I could imagine there being situations where there's excess peak flow capacity but it isn't utilized because the flow rate would be unsustainable. But if we're looking for storage it could make sense.
A reversable pump-turbine is not significantly different from a standard hydro generation turbine, and there are tons of examples of those operating in cold regions.
> Are there extant succesful examples of pumped hydro in cold regions?
There's some pumped hydro at Niagara falls in Canada, which is far enough North that it should see a bit of a that/freeze cycle but is still a relatively mild climate.
Don't know anything about what issues this does/doesn't present to them, just happen to know it exists.
For reference, Niagara Falls is at roughly the same latitude as Barcelona and Milan. Vääksy, Finland, is approximately 1,250 miles (2k km) north of there, slightly north of Anchorage, Alaska.
Latitude is a poor point of comparison here, North America tends to be substantially colder than Europe at the same latitude.
Or concretely Niagara Falls goes from an average low of -6.44 C in February to 21.0 C in July. Barcelona an average low of 4 C in January to 20.2 C in August (according to the internet).
But yes, it's warmer than Finland, just cold enough to see something of a freeze that cycle.
A couple days of -6 is probably a lot easier. Its probably still economical enough to heat the equipment on the days below 0. I imagine having a couple months of -20 is a bit different.
Either fusion or drill baby drill is necessary. Watt’s steam engine was absolutely horrible, but it was the worst steam engine ever built. If Finland builds the worst deep geothermal ever that still works, we can hope for better ones.
Yeah I know drilling through ~8-10 kilometers of rock is kinda hard… they know, they tried, maybe it now is a good political climate to try again?
> Yeah I know drilling through ~8-10 kilometers of rock is kinda hard… they know, they tried, maybe it now is a good political climate to try again?
The Finnish 7 kilometer geothermal drilling failed commercially, I guess that's what you're referring to. Is there any reason to assume drilling deeper would work?
Yeah, that’s the one. Economics of this are hard - but money is numbers in computers, it’s just a question of how serious the government is with getting it done - physics-wise it gets like 10-15C warmer with every km, which is important for the delta T obviously. I know nothing about drilling the extra couple km, though, only assuming it can be done with enough engineering.
I understood that temperature wasn't the problem. How it works is that you pump water into one well, and get it out from an adjacent one. The main problem was permeability, they couldn't get the necessary flow rate between the wells.
They tried in southern Finland not long ago. At great expense and spending a lot of time they managed to drill down 6-7 km until they figured out that the porosity of the rock down there was so poor that it was impossible to make the project economical, so it was cancelled. The idea was to pump this heat directly into the district heating grid.
> but it's fairly built out so stable non-fossil power needs to be nuclear,
Or just gas turbines running on decarbonized fuels. The backup for the "10 year winter" can be fossil fuels. It is such a minuscule problem that it does not matter in the slightest.
It is essentially the emergency reserve we are talking about, no point wasting tens of billions in subsidies per new built nuclear reactor.
Those "10 year" winters seems to appear every year with producers falling back to burning fossil fuels to keep the grid working.
Now part of that problem is that we more or less constantly export electricity to Germany (but that was because they closed their nuclear plants).
The main problem domestically in Sweden is that 30% of current electricity generation in Sweden is nuclear, but the _newest_ plants are 40 years old, on top of that the electricity generation needs to increase, steel mills de-carbonizing, more electric cars and so on.
For a few hours leading to insignificant emissions.
> Now part of that problem is that we more or less constantly export electricity to Germany (but that was because they closed their nuclear plants).
We have previously imported way more. The problem nowadays is that carbon emissions are expensive and even more so when coming from LNG rather than pipeline from Russia.
In other words: our prices were previously more aligned with Germanys because ours were more expensive and Germanys was cheaper.
If you are Swedish, or understand Swedish following from the "we", take a look at this talk starting at 43:40 to understand where the prices are coming from:
> The main problem domestically in Sweden is that 30% of current electricity generation in Sweden is nuclear, but the _newest_ plants are 40 years old, on top of that the electricity generation needs to increase, steel mills de-carbonizing, more electric cars and so on.
And new built nuclear power won't be online until the 2040s. Are you saying that we should wait until the 2040s to decarbonize those parts of the economy rather than do it ASAP with renewables and storage?
The existing nuclear power fleet has now targetted their maintenance on operation until the 2060s, so it is not like it will disappear overnight.
I'm not ruling out Nuclear in general, but let's remember that:
* Energy can also be carried northward from other areas in the same country or neighboring countries, where there are more sunlight hours or more wind.
1. The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.
2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.
3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.
4. Likewise.
5. Improvements in efficiency do not help you stay alive when it's -30°C.
The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help. They are nice to have, and it makes sense to build them because they complement the reduced output of nuclear in summertime, and because the lower cost/kWh can help some industry, but that's all.
The difference between baseline and peak electricity consumption in Finland is >2x. That's mostly driven by heating. Because renewables make electricity cheap on the average, utility companies invest in cheap heat storage systems such as sand batteries. They use electricity when it's cheap, store the heat, and distribute it when it's needed.
As for nuclear, the challenge is finding companies that are able and willing to build it. Areva and Rosatom both failed at the "able" part. And a power company (I think it was Fortum) recently stated that they would consider building new nuclear reactors with German electric prices but not with Finnish prices.
There is more to that than a power company asking for subsidies. Finland is a small country. Olkiluoto 3 alone generates >10% of the electricity. Newer reactors would likely be smaller but still ~10% of the total. Finnish power companies are too small to take risks like that on their own. They can't build new reactors at their own risk, in order to sell the power in the market. Before a reactor gets built, the power company needs long-term commitments from industrial users and utility companies to buy power for a guaranteed price. Such commitments would make sense for the buyer with German electricity prices but not with Finnish prices.
I think this is exactly right, and people are focusing on the wrong risk with nuclear. It's financial risk, not safety risk, that is the biggest burden for more nuclear.
Finland was very very wise and savvy to get a fixed price contract for Olkiluoto 3. The final cost was far far far above its price, and France ended up paying that price. I'm not sure if you'll see a builder go down that route any time soon again.
Well that covers the financial risk from the safety risks... but even if it were purely about safety it's an act that's part of making the safety not be an issue. Unless it were not renewed, then it would be a problem agai.
>2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.
The project for properly deep geothermal for district heating in Espoo was not resounding success. And that is 6,4km deep hole in southern part of Finland. My understanding is that it somewhat worked. But not as good as expected.
>The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help.
Hey now - renewables gave us electricity up here long before Einstein started thinking about atoms!
We are very few people here, 250MWh helps a lot, but if we have to chip in to build a nuclear plant we'll be broke before the project planning is done. ;-)
> The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.
Note that even if Central Europe did have sufficient energy for export it wouldn't really help during crisis. To get the energy to Finland it would need to either go thru the Baltic Sea via undersea cables or via Northern Sweden. We have seen that it's not necessarily good idea to rely on the former during the crisis as those lines can easily be cut, they have been multiple times in just past year or so by certain commercial ships "accidentally" dropping their anchors.
As for latter Sweden, doesn't currently have capacity for it and I don't think they have been very interested in increasing it, currently Finland often benefits from the fact that there isn't enough transport capacity between Southern and Northern Sweden electric grids so Finland gets some cheap electricity from there.
> 3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.
Show me your Monte Carlo simulation where wind (which is negatively correlated to solar) and 8 hours of battery storage are factored in, along with small amounts of gas peaking plants.
What is also important to know is during the winter is that while production on average shows numbers every day, in practice that production comes only during the few actually sunny days in December when the panels aren't covered in snow.
Go even a bit up north from Helsinki and unless you keep your panels clear of snow manually, you'll hardly make anything between Nov and April.
We have the problem of stable high-pressure polar air masses potentially parking over the country. Whenever that happens, we get 2 weeks of dead calm, coinciding with the coldest weather that occurs in the country. At the time of the year when there is no solar.
Show one where it does work. Even in far souther countries like Poland solar production is 1/4 of what it is in summer. I'd have to fill my entire roof with solar and still would have to get some power from the network to heat my house
Right, the worst case scenario is cold temperatures, transmission problems (say days after a storm), lull, and nuclear and hydro power malfunction. However, it should be pointed out that winters are usually quite windy and there are only a few days per year you get very cold temperatures coupled with nearly no wind at all.
The system in the article works alongside gas and wood chips heating, so there are other options in place if the sand battery cannot be "charged".
FTA:
> The project will cut fossil-based emissions in the Vääksy district heating network by around 60% each year, by reducing natural gas use bu 80% and also decreasing wood chip consumption.
Not really, we're currently borderline. If OL3 goes down, and it's simultaneously cold over the nordics + northern germany and the baltics, and no wind, our industry will have to shutdown.
This would be an argument for widespread backup power, actually. If every residence had enough backup power to get through 24 hours, it would be far easier to deal with these relatively rare doldrums.
But "stable" isn't really want they want or need. They have a) cold, dark winters so they want more energy in the winter not a constant amount year round, b) hydro (89% of electricity in Norway!) that is already used as seasonal storage and can be varied to meet daily variation.
Cheap wind that produces more in winter is the obvious answer and indeed seems to be a focus of their build out.
> But "stable" isn't really want they want or need.
Yes, that is exactly what they need. They need stable energy over let's say a 1-2 week period. A windy week is often followed by a non-windy week. So if they can store the energy from the windy week and use it in the following week then they can rely on wind power as a stable energy source.
You intend to restrict this to a single market? There's some sibling comments that do point out that.
Much "annoyances" when it comes to money is all those weird laws and rules from lower level companies in place, improving things for developers is a laudable goal but I do hope that you guys have some real world experience with these systems apart from frustrations as system users because doing a good DX right now feels like it could make you end up in a dead end.
100% agree - this is not a space to tread into lightly.
We have some really knowledgeable payments people in our corner, including several veterans with many decades of payments industry experience as leaders at the big payments players. There's a lot that we've been able to learn from them as they help us navigate the financial services side of this business. We're conscious of how much work there is to do, and how the "good DX" is really just the visible tip of the iceberg.
Currently through Stripe we are able to onboard merchants wherever Stripe can serve them directly. Our upcoming merchant of record offering (which we hope to launch soon), will be available to merchants wherever Stripe can send payouts, which is a longer list of maybe 150+ countries.
The pathway to building deeper payment rails will indeed have to be country-by-country as each one requires new banking partners and compliance regimes.
Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips, but arcade games like the Sega Model 1 (Virtua Racing) was via Virtua Fighter an inspiration for the Playstation, and before that there was crude games on both PC and Amiga.
Games were always going to go 3d sooner or later, the real pressure of the high volume competitive market got us more and more capable chips until they were capable enough for the kind of computation needed for neural networks faster than a slow moving specialty market could have.
> Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips
Yes. That is my point. The customers willing to pay the high initial R+D costs opened up the potential for wider adoption. This is always the case.
Even the gaming GPUs which have grown in popularity with consumers are derivatives of larger designs intended for research clusters, datacenters, aerospace, and military applications.
No question that chip companies are happy to take consumers money. But I struggle to think of an example of a new technology which was invented and marketed to consumers first.
Computers themselves were non-consumer to begin with, but the Personal Computer broke the technology moat to consumers before anything else and once that had passed it was mostly a matter of time imho.
Many 3d games like doom, quake1, flight unlimited,etc ran purely on software rendering since CPU's were already providing enough oomph to render fairly useful 3d graphics in the mid 90s. CPU power was enough but consoles/arcades showed that there was more to be gotten (but nothing hindered games at that point).
And already there, the capital investment for game consoles (Atari,NES,SNES,PS1,PS2, etc) and arcade games(like the above mentioned 3d games) were big enough to use custom chipsets not used or purposed for anything else (I think also that in the 80s/90s the barrier of entry to making competitive custom chips was a tad lower, just consider the cambrian explosions of firms during the 90s making x86 and later ARM chips).
Yes, there was vendors that focused on the high end commercial customers, and yes many alumnis of those firms did contribute a ton of expertise towards what we have today.
But if you look at what companies survived and pushed the envelope in the longer run it was almost always companies that competed in the consumer market, and it was only when those consumer chips needed even more advanced processing that we breached the point where the chips became capable of NN's.
In fact I'd say that had the likes of SGI prevailed we would've had to wait longer for our GPU revolution. Flight simulators,etc were often focused on "larger/detailed" worlds, PS2-era chips with higher polycounts and more memory would have been fine for simulator developers for a long time (since more details in a military scenario would have been fine).
Leisure games has always craved fidelity on a more "human" level, to implement "hacks" for stuff with custom dynamic lighting models, then global illumination, subsurface scattering,etc we've needed the arbitrary programmability since the raw power wasn't there (the most modern raytracing chips are _starting_ to approach that levels without too ugly hacks).
Compared to the JS ecosystem and number of users both Python and Rust are puny, also the the NPM ecosystem also allowed by default for a lot of post-install actions since they wanted to enable a smooth experience with compiling and installing native modules (Not entirely sure how Cargo and PIP handles native library dependencies).
As for Windows vs the other OS's, yes even the Windows NT family grew out of DOS and Win9x and tried to maintain compatiblity for users over security up until it became untenable. So yes, the base _was_ bad when Windows was dominant but it's far less bad today (why people target high value targets via NPM,etc since it's an easier entry-point).
Android/iOS is young enough that they did have plenty of hindsight when it comes to security and could make better decisions (Remember that MS tried to move to UWP/Appx distribution but the ecosystem was too reliant on newer features for it to displace the regular ecosystem).
Remember that we've had plenty of annoyed discourse about "Apple locking down computers" here and on other tech forums when they've pushed notarization.
I guess my point is that, people love to bash on MS but at the same time complain about how security is affecting their "freedoms" when it comes to other systems (and partly MS), MS is better at the basics today than they were 20-25 years ago and we should be happy about that.
This comment seems to address users intentionally installing malware. I mean to address cracking, the situation where an attacker gains root or installs software that the user does not know about.
Preventing the user from installing something that they want to install is another issue completely. I'm hesitant to call it exactly security, though I agree that it falls under the auspices of security.
Cracking is a term related to removing copy-protections. Rooting or privilege escalation is better terms for what you're mentioning.
As for "users intentionally installing malware", Windows in the early 00s had a bunch of fundamentally insecure deployment models like ActiveX controls and browsers (IE especially) were more or less swiss cheese in terms of security even outside the ActiveX controls.
Visiting the wrong webpage was often enough to get crap on your computer.
My view is that once you have bad native code running on your computer there's a large chance that it's game-over (the modern sandboxes like WASM were designed to enforce a probably safe subset where regular kernel mistakes are shielded by another layer of abstraction that needs to be broken).
Even Linux has had privilege escalations every year as far as I know. Notarization/stores is just a way to try to keep check on what code runs on end-user computers that isn't sandboxed (and allow for revoking that code if found to be malicious), maybe Linux is slightly safer still but that's probably due to less older features in the Kernel, but Windows has for example recently gotten a rewritten font-parser in Rust (the previous font parser was a common exploitation point that was placed with a too high privilegie).
No. By NPM not allowing any package to run code on the developer's machine. I can trust npm (the software), but not the library. It's a very weird choice to just allow any package to run post install script. Especially when there's little to none verification done on npmjs side.
Developers can feel free to not secure their computer or sell their keys. But that not means npm should allow straight code push from their computers to everyone that has downloaded their library.
> Compared to the JS ecosystem and number of users both Python and Rust are puny
This is just plainly false in case of Python.
> also the the NPM ecosystem also allowed by default for a lot of post-install actions since they wanted to enable a smooth experience with compiling and installing native modules (Not entirely sure how Cargo and PIP handles native library dependencies).
Rust is already "native" so Cargo doesn't need to do anything.
Python has the logic to do native builds baked into pip and friends, so a Python package can just specify what to build in the manifest. But it also allows for precompiled wheels, and most popular packages do them for all major OSes, so users rarely need to actually build stuff in practice.
"Complaining neckbeards" are a part of the problem, but the bigger issue is often developer-users that has oversight (or preference due to "control") with shitty UI-decisions that have little interest or agency in fixing them. The non-movment complainers are more of an alibi for those developers with little UI improvement interests.
GIMP is just bad sadly even when it comes to basics, it has nothing to do with wanting Adobe products but more about GIMP just being a "coders-tool".
Every time in the last decade I checked, i still had to input a resolution when creating a new image layer.. that's a fundamental operation that hasn't been that clumsy in Photoshop since the 90s (Photoshop has "infinite" layers, they can be larger than the image, yes it's "bloated" but that's what you want as an artist 90% of the time.. not an annoying border).
> The non-movment complainers are more of an alibi for those developers with little UI improvement interests.
True, but i also remember vehement discussions on everybody else in the world that wanted the scroll / zoom to work as in every other software in the world, and a few vocal users that would spam every thread and discussion insisting that we (the rest of the world) should have been using other software instead.
You know, the usual hostile attitude open source communities are famous for. I guess that for GIMP the moment that will change everything is when they will add a proper circle tool /s
GIMP and Inkscape are already moving in the right direction with the new UIs, fingers crossed
Blender went from a shitshow way worse than GIMP to almost killing the competition. Those working on GIMP took notice (and perhaps those that had felt sidelined before dared speak up).
At least there wasn't an horrid chemical smell as when we opened some Chinese figures off Ali-Express (soldier minifigs).
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