Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to BenWilson,
despite no clear markings that bikes can use it
Bikes (motor and push) are permitted to use any bus lane on any road where they are otherwise allowed to be, markings or no.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Bart Janssen,
My hope is someone will figure out how to make efficient organic solar cells.
There's some really interesting stuff happening with using carbon nanotubes for solar cells. Does that start to become "green", or is the production of the nanotubes still dirty? And this is not a facetious question.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Sacha,
It's not really denialist, and probably worth a read if you've actually got an interest in staying abreast of what's happening in the field. The Economist wrote the article from which the NBR piece is drawn. The scientists whose work is used aren't denialist hacks, either.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to BenWilson,
that would give us 4000MW. This is around 4 times our current total capacity from all power sources.
You sure about that? Vector put Auckland’s highest peak load in 2011 at 1722MW.
ETA: Never mind, I see your mistake was found.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to BenWilson,
the aggregate effect of ten thousand panels on roofs across an entire city would very much have a smoothing effect.
Exactly. There's fairly strong evidence that the rise of domestic photovoltaic installations in Australia has deferred the need to build significant additional generating capacity in response to the air-con demands of the higher temperatures, by reducing the grid load that occurs on precisely the days when demand for air-con is highest.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Russell Brown,
they appear to have risen late last week on the assumption that the taxpayer would step in and make it all nice.
Not a bad assumption, given that Ryall came out and said it was so. It's the smelter operator who've screwed things up by not accepting the generous offer.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Paul Campbell,
wish we could get fibre – looks like I’ll have to wait another 3-4 years at this point
That's not Auckland's fault. I'm less than 10km from the centre of the CBD and we're still two years away. Some people deep in Henderson are due to have it by the end of the year. Chorus and National fucked up the projections though, to be fair to National, they've said they'll hold Chorus to the contracted timeline without paying more to allow that to happen. Depressing that National will happily look for the national jar of lube when a big multinational wants a bit of taxpayer money, though.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
So this morning it seems Rio Tinto have walked away from the government negotiations and are going back to Meridian.
Citation. If I believed that National was actually capable of long-term vision I would be expecting an announcement by the end of this week that a task force is being established to plan for how to make best use of the electricity supply bonanza. But I hold no such belief.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Harder than you think – here’s a map
So I see. I hadn't realised there was no generation north of Christchurch. That's a bit of a whoopsie in its own right.
As for Dunedin's land area, not quite 5th. More like 10th. Quite incredible, though, that its land area is more than three times Auckland Council's area (yeah, Auckland's not even in the 50 largest cities by land area, never mind the largest).
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One thing about redirecting electricity from Manapouri is that it doesn't have to be redirected all the way north. The station is already some distance from Tiwai Pt, so changing the feed direction to north instead of south would allow power from stations further north to be sent north, and so on. It'd be a very significant oversupply to the bottom of the south, to be sure, but by shifting the various stations' supplies to a northwards direction it would make it easier to minimise transmission losses.