Dams are subject to silt buildup up, which requires maintenance.
They’re so destructive to local ecosystems that environmental groups have blocked any new hydroelectric dams being built in Australia for over 40 years.
All modern concrete eventually fails, and dams are notoriously difficult to remove and replace.
Fortunately they last long enough that if you paint them pink and plug a torch battery in to them they can remain somebody else’s problem for quite some time.
Please see elsewhere on HN. Lots of threads about the increasing crackdown on free expression online in the UK, and forcing through digital ID online (alongside the EU, Canada, Australia etc).
They aren't per se coupled to gas. Here's roughly how it works:
We work in half hours, 48 of them per day. If you're a very large user (e.g maybe you're a factory which makes cars), or if you choose to do this at home, you can be metered in half hours and billed this way.
In advance of the half hour, we guess how much power we might need. 9pm here soon, I reckon 30GW per the British mainland. Now we run an auction. Everybody who can make power from 9pm to 9:30 bids, saying how much they'd accept to make power
Then, starting from the lowest bids, we add bidders up to 30GW of power, those people will make our 30GW of electricity, and we pay all of them the same price, that price is last bid needed to meet our 30GW goal.
This is often a closed cycle gas turbine because:
1. There are fucking shitloads of them. Probably 35GW nameplate, maybe 40GW, that is a lot of power generation. More than any other single type (Wind can deliver about 20GW to the grid, solar is smaller, nuclear is much smaller, storage also smaller even if you count it as generation which it technically is not)
2. They are (almost, maintenance is necessary) always willing to run, for a price. Rain or shine, night or day, if there is gas at any price they can charge that price plus a little profit to make it into electricity. Only question is if you'll pay
For a typical home tariff the "supplier" you're paying has guessed that on average they'll make a healthy profit if they charge you say 24p per kWh plus standing.
They pay that half-hourly price, if they guessed badly wrong and can't cover the difference they go bankrupt, which sucks for the government who are on the hook to ensure you still get electricity anyway.
So, the de-coupling would happen automatically if the current system stayed the same but you added a lot of cheap storage and enough wind power that on average the country was mostly wind powered. Or indeed nukes or solar if somehow this country built loads of nuke stations or got improbably sunnier.
Solving the engineering challenges of "useful amount of time when the grid doesn't need any gas" without also digging into why the UK's energy pricing structure is such an outlier at the expense of consumers, seem a bit like one of those doomed attempts to solve a social issue by purely technical means.
While that is a slightly different cause, "banning nearly all construction of onshore wind" was and is a social issue. It's culture and politics, not engineering.
Anyone have suggestions for which other browser is best for power saving? I’ve been using Edge on my Surface as it seemed much better on the battery than Chrome.
The comment you’re replying to also has many characteristics of trolling. It’s ignorant of what actually happens inEU countries, as well as the motivation behind the regulations that seem to have become a between noir for a certain libertarian flavour of HN commenters.
There are now d-locks that are angle grinder resistant. The reviews I've read suggest they need two cuts to open and each cut uses a full angle grinder disc.
As ever, impossible to stop a determined thief, but starting to get "good enough".
It'll provide power for decades with little maintenance and not much further in the way of environmental issues now that it's built.