Got no horse in this race but the physics of cooling satellite data centres are interesting, a discussion here. My fagpackets seem to match up with some of the actual experts! Every kW of sunshine that lands on a satellite has to be reradiated, this has been solved for small satellites since 1957.

Crazy how many spells of 20-21 GW wind power we had this January. Think it's about the ninth time and not the end of the month yet! This would have been a new record only a couple of years ago, and now it quietly just keeps happening.

Air temperatures ⁰C in our hallway. Warm air is flowing rightwards along the ceiling from the kitchen (been baking) and exchanging with cool air flowing leftwards at floor level from the stairwell. The house thermostat is set at 20 and is trying to make any kind of sense of all this.

Saw this chart from Ben Watts (his real name, I think) about different time profiles of European electricity consumption. Fun. www.linkedin.com/in/kilowatts/

If they think explaining a curved-top wing is difficult, their minds will be blown by symmetrical keels on boats! The same shape on both sides, yet creates lift so the boat doesn't drift sideways. All that Bernoulli mumbling about bigger distances and velocities over the curved side - nope!

21. Everyone is defining long-duration storage technology wrong. It's not about 6 or 8 hours — you can do that with lithium-ion and probably would — it's about having the capex to add more GWh of capacity decoupled from the capex of adding more GW.

Cottam coal power station demolished today (the cooling towers). Will be replaced by a solar farm, using the same grid connection.

UK energy flow chart 2024 assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6887aa...

So yesterday was sunny and windy and prices were very negative, -£30/MWh. Last night and today, prices went high again +£80. We badly needed a few hours storage. But our 2.7 GW existing PSH fleet hardly reacted! 0.5 GW maximum. (Dark blue line on chart) Why were they not busy pumping and storing?

The UK currently has 3GW of pumped storage capacity, but NESO (the system operator) expects this to more than triple to 10GW by 2035. In fact, by my count there is already 7GW of capacity that has begun the permitting process, and 5GW of this has now received planning consent. (3/9)

Renewables plus Nuclear producing 102% of GB demand ! Plus another 5% gas. The excess 7% is being pumped into storage and exported to Ireland and Norway. grid.iamkate.com

www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/edf-r... EDF now only own 16.2% of Sizewell C - might they pull out of it altogether?

"Adding a co-located 4-hour battery of 6.8GW capacity to ... the 8.6GW tidal barrage... reduced the negative impact on constraints costs" www.severncommission.co.uk/final-recomm... A multi-GW pulse of power at inconvenient times of day is one of the problems with both tidal and PV - same solution?

Sorry to see this dumped. On buying a home (new or old) you'd have been given 2 or 3 years to remove the gas boiler and fit something else. The sale price of the home would reflect this. Change of ownership seems like a great time to change central heating. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Good for England to do this, but please learn from the implementation debacle in Scotland - the Scot DRS collapsed. Pity it doesn't include glass bottles, plastic food trays, food tins or tetrapak, and is 'recycle' not 'reuse'. Beware if this is intended to replace household recycling collections!

🔌💡 The majority of waves are created and driven by wind. Wind is created by differential solar heating of the Earth. Solar energy is created by nuclear fusion in the Sun. I made a diagram tracing the provenance of every primary energy source on Earth:

Dedicated heat pumps have been built for 200+ degrees C. A steam turbine cycle is just a heat pump running in reverse, they get up to 600 degC, so the building blocks exist to go that hot. Gas turbines run at 1500+ deg, maybe a future HP will too? Sodium vapour cycle? If there's an application.

Love your substack, but there's a public misunderstanding. Most people are unaware that solar PV is already required on 0.4 of the roof of new homes since 2022 AD L1, same in FHS. Too arcane for most, so politicians like parliamentary stunts that exploit this, rather than explaining the law.

I don't think we all appreciate just how much more expensive fossil fuels are in Europe than in the US since '22 In Europe switching generation from imported gas to homegrown renewables makes our bills cheaper and more stable. In the US, not so, there's a gas surplus because of shale/fracking.

This will be (another) new record!

can you estimate a rough heuristic range for a typical PSH project, in $/kWh? or is there just too much variance between projects??

UK has had Economy 7 and 10 tariffs since 1978. 7 hours of cheaper electricity overnight, when there was lower demand. Typically hard-wired to heaters and hot water tanks. Search says that ~3 million customers are still on these tariffs. Time of Use and DSR are not newfangled ideas!

This is a key point. The whole idea of renewables is to build enough for the days when it's not very windy. Then when it is super-windy you just don't need to use them all. The language of "curtailment" is made to sound like a bad thing, but actually it's good to have more than can be used.

The 200th anniversary this year of Carnot's publication... Heat pumps are not a new idea! His concept of 'reversibility' is still at the heart of the 2nd Law. And he predicted that low flow temperatures would give the best CoP. books.google.co.uk/books?id=QX9...

The CIBSE Thermal Admittance method combines the effusivity of the wall or floor material, with the convection and radiation of the air. cibsejournal.com/cpd/modules/... The first 25-100mm damps out day-night cycles. Seasonal cycles go much deeper.

PV is already the cheapest power source in the UK, as bid in recent AR6 auction. PV was pre-sold at £50.06/MWh for delivery in 2026, slightly cheaper than onshore wind £50.90, offshore wind £58.87, tidal stream £172. Previously nuclear was £92.50. Gas was ~£100 today.

a 5 minute x 11kW = 30L shower takes 5 mins extra either side for drying and dressing. If a store can reheat 30L in 15 mins, it can cope with back to back showers. 15mins x 5kW is > 5mins x 11kW The graph shows the store reheating in ~15mins after each shower

What's the capacity factor for UK gas? 98 TWh generated ÷ 27GW capacity ÷ 8760hoursperyear = 41% > Capacity factor for gas is the same as for offshore wind. Capacity factors for each source of electricity (2021 data) en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacit...