Transmission in this sense does not include distribution losses (by the DNOs, at lower voltages). 8% in your link.
The UK government is now touting datacentre sites with better access to the national grid (transmission network) to avoid the issues inherent in the distribution networks. E.g. Culham which had a grid connection to power the JET fusion experiments.
> There should be more incentive to build data centers in the north
There are clustering advantages for data centres. Lower inter-cluster latency being key. I do not think the UK market is large enough for two hubs, really.
The big question is how much it will cost. For comparison I believe there is a heat battery in Germany using (atmospheric pressure) liquid water (98 C), 50M EUR for perhaps 20x the thermal storage capacity (versus 20 C water).
The use of sand, presumably heated to a much higher temperature than the boiling point of water, seems overkill for district heating (unless peak heat demand requires flow temperatures above 100 C). But it does reduce the volume of sand required, so the size of the storage system.
The cost is a function of the size and mass. So, more heat capacity and less mass means lower cost per mwh.
These things are extremely simple and fairly efficient. It's resistive heating (wires and spools) of a thermal mass (sand/stone) in some kind of container (a simple silo) with a lot of insulation and some pipes to heat up water. Higher temperatures mean getting the heat out is easier and that the battery will work for longer. Basically until the temperature drops below the required temperature.
> So, more heat capacity and less mass means lower cost per mwh.
Can you compare different technologies with these scaling laws? Also what are the limits of these approximations (e.g. taking temperatures to extremes tends to run into maintenance problems).
In this case the sand battery delivers 400 C steam from 600 C sand [0], via some heat exchange fluid (solar salt?) that flows next to the sand. Going through heating/cooling cycles can cause material issues, especially for larger temperature differences.
> I guess more people would prefer to pay a $10 or $20 monthly fee just in case.
The grid becomes an insurance policy. In that case it is justified to ask for the insured party to pay their share of the system costs; both an energy fee and transmission/distribution/generation capacity fee.
> Homeowners having the ability to produce their own energy means they get to opt out of capitalist markets and socialist sharing systems.
All well and good, provided the homeowner opts out of the system. Part of the problem comes when the grid connection is not severed. Using it as a backup option (at the same time as other people, for when the weather is bad) or demanding the grid takes their excess production are counter-productive to the system as a whole.
> the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size
Of course, how does the electricity company determine which user was first in this situation. A tariff that depends on the order of connection may not be practical for domestic situations, although it may be OK for very large users, e.g. factories, data-centres.
Using fuse size seems a more reasonable and fair proxy for cost, assuming the same load patterns as the rest of the users. Then again, consumers with EVs might argue that their load pattern is different to the average user (e.g. filling up with off-peak electricity). Also consumers with air conditioning might argue for special treatment given their usage correlates with solar output (except where it does not).
You don't; you let the second one pay more than what the marginal cost was, in order to make the first one not pay so disproportionally.
That only has to happen once there is a second one, though.
Punishing a mere "large enough to not worry about popping it" fuse by billing shared infrastructure based on it (not just billing the stub line from the main in the street to the fuse/meter box in one's home in relation to what wire gauge is needed based on the fuse choosen) is pretty stifling.
If e.g. your furnace fails in the middle of the winter and the repair guy tells you it needs replacing, you might want to get some space heaters and run them for a few days until your actually-wanted new furnace/heatpump/whatever can get delivered, instead of having to get installed whatever the HVAC guy has in the local storage, because if you wait more than on the order of 12 hours, you'll start to get frost damage from pipes and such.
Having to be beholden to an electricity company having time to upgrade your fuses on such short notice so that you can plug in the space heaters without blowing them might be a problem.
But paying say 300 bucks extra because you did that for like 3 days or so would easily be cheaper than the cost of temporarily installing an available loan furnace and then having to remove it again to make way for the actually-wanted one.
They do though bill you if you make them dig the street up to say pull a medium voltage line into your factory that previously just got low voltage from a shared street transformer, but now that you've plans to use a lot more, you'd need the higher feed. Then they bill you and if within like 10 years or so someone else orders service that can piggyback on what capex you paid for, then you'd get a proportional refund from them having to pay off part of your share.
But that's not for just getting normal basic electric service to a normal residential building in a city, that's for building a new farmhouse on the other end of some field where there never was electricity, or for getting unusual service that wouldn't be in the street if you didn't request it.
Merely sizing the transformers/substations to handle the aggregate current of the users attached is not typically handled by the above mechanism, especially because it only covers initial buildout.
As for France's capacity factor, that has a lot to do with the presence of intermittents on the continental grid, combined with the EU's Renewable Energy Directive making France liable to pay fines if they use nuclear power in preference to wind/solar.
In July 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi invoked an indelible image when he described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
There does not look to be a strong correlation between population density and income, at least on a log-log scale across countries. But I would guess that these numbers hide a trend for cities to be richer than rural areas (subsistence farming etc).
The numbers and actual risks don't matter to change regular people's feelings about a technology. All they know is that there was actual nuclear fallout and now the mushrooms in their forests are radioactive.
The UK government is now touting datacentre sites with better access to the national grid (transmission network) to avoid the issues inherent in the distribution networks. E.g. Culham which had a grid connection to power the JET fusion experiments.
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