Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Doesn’t the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act basically reimplement the Foreshore and Seabed Act, except with a name partly in Te Reo, which is of course enough symbolism to keep the Maori Party happy? I don’t believe any iwi has acquired anything under this act.
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The Edge’s well-engineered pop fare makes it the most listened-to individual station in the land.
I guess most people don't want to hear any music they haven't heard a hundred times before.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Alfie,
There has been interest in the electricity profession in enabling islanding (which normally refers to multiple connection points rather than a single house) - e.g. this paper: http://vbn.aau.dk/files/19638822/Publication in order to improve network resilience. I thought that was what you were about.
However, your idea, which is basically engineering your system to detach it from the grid when the grid fails is perfectly sound. For NZ, it's questionable if the cost of breakers and/or UPSs is justified by the frequency of power failures.
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True as, forgot latent heat. But yes, making the ice blocks in the day and leaving them out at night would work in many climates.
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The trouble with STV in local elections (and possibly in national ones) is that it's a personal popularity contest, which can easily turn into a stupidity contest.
Local government would be far better if we had a list system similar to MMP and a mayor/leader elected by councillors.
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MMP does not meet the constitutional requirement that MPs be directly elected by the people
How? Each list is published, the people vote for the list as a whole. If you don't like a list, don't vote for it, there are plenty to choose from.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Moz,
I think the problem with islanding is not so much worker safety (as you state, electricity network techs are trained to treat all circuits as live at all times) as problems of restart and load.
If your local substation trips, then a small number of inverters will try and drive all the local loads – which they obviously can’t do, so they’ll go into a trip/restart cycle, which might break stuff. Then, if an island does get established (middle of the night, most loads switched off) it’ll be out of sync with the grid, so on restart, everything will trip (possibly accompanied by blown pole fuses) again.
I guess there’d be ways to deal with this, like locking inverter phase to a GPS time reference, but it isn’t implemented now (and of course, since we import all such things, NZ can’t take a lead here).
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
Total digression, but something just occurred to me about HFO-1234yf.
When CCl4 was widely used in the home, a noted hazard was that if you smoked whilst using it (the sixties were the sort of time when you could work with one carcinogen whilst deliberately inhaling another), it would be oxidised to phosgene (carbonyl chloride), which isn’t good for you.
If an aircon filled with CH2=CFCF3 leaks and somebody is smoking in the car, it’ll get oxidised to COF2 which is similarly bad for you. I guess it’ll remove people who smoke in old cars with leaky aircon from the gene pool.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
Also, you could maybe make near zero-energy iceblocks in winter in somewhere like northern Manchuria (or indeed the Mackenzie basin) by pumping input water from the zero degree layers of a semi-frozen reservoir?
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Speaker: Darkness in New York, in reply to Tom Semmens,
The Electron wouldn't make a very good ICBM - it uses liquid O2 as its oxidant and thus has to be fueled (which takes some hours) immediately before launch. ICBMs use storable propellants - these days, solid fuel.