Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Time for Electric Power?

For me the deeper problem is the "all eggs in one basket" concept. Having grown up being educated to do things like, for instance, having a gas hob and electric oven so that there is always a way to cook if one supply drops out, am I the only person I know who has an old fashioned telephone plugged into a socket so that it works when the electric supply fails? Ask my neighbours who come and use it when, as happened recently, the power went off when the overhead cables burned.
I was educated to avoid all eggs in one basket.
It's going to be so easy for "someone" to turn off our power and then we are stuffed.
In fact the small town where I live did suffer a complete power failure a few years ago and it was chaos. None of the shops could sell anything etc.

It's bound to happen isn't it?
Nick

Seems we may think alike Nick w, being the product of grandparents and parents who lived through world wars, rationing and saw much in the way of poverty, I tend not to take too much for granted and avoiding single point failure wherever reasonable to do so, seems like a reasonable plan. I spent the majority of my working life where standby`s for the standby systems were ever the way, and with the birth of digital computation, adoption of risk management and cost cutting thus associated it seems so very much is taken for granted..... until..?

Perhaps that line of thought caused me drew me to Trad pre-digital Morgan ownership and the adoption of Luddite as my NDP...

It's been an interesting exchange, I too am of the not putting all eggs in one basket school of thought. Which was very much driven home to me during the early 70's 3 day week during the winter when we had electricity shortages and shutdowns that not only impacted the work environment, key distribution infrastructure, shopping and domestic life. Fortunately we had other sources like coal and gas for heating and cooking. In those days our reliance on electricity was much less than today, eg computers and availability of electricity were not key to the delivery of services in nearly every facet of our lives.

I still remember going food shopping with a candle perched on the edge of the shopping trolley, and the till assistant using a manual add-lister to work out the cost of the shopping. But how would you be able to do the same today, with highly linked point of sale systems, that not only scan the item for price to add up your shopping bill, but re-order the goods for replenishing stock........these days price tags don't even appear on most food items and supermarkets don't have the same staffing levels.......I would love to see the various 'risk' registers under the subject matter no electricity supply.

This is perhaps a little unfair, but we are not in a position of having overcapacity, we are playing catch-up with a rising demand curve that may lead to shortages and at the same time we are removing alternate energy sources for basics like domestic heating and cooking making us even more dependant on electricity. We have come a long already but as Australia found out when it closed down its last coal power station, the wind does not every blow every day and they had little or no battery storage to cope with those day. Interesting times ahead.

regards

John

Which is probably why most supermarkets, hospitals etc. have their own standby generator sets.

I know that hospitals do, but I'm not so sure about supermarkets all having generators.........this is where planning requirements should put in place alternate energy provision requirements to ensure continuity.

Most small businesses certainly wont have generators eg the local High Street, in fact not having Wifi has caused major issues around here whilst outages have occurred with disruption from laying fibre. Wife was in restaurant that wifi went down, they could only handle cash so everybody headed off to the only cash point and sadly the money at the cash point ran out for some, so those people couldn't dine that night.

Why?

The mess, noise, money it would result in would be a farce? All retail shops having the need for a Honda 2 stoke?

I was told the concept of treating the national grid as a critical infrastructure and planning it correctly meant we did not need this level of service and did happen to put up with a few burps from time to time?
Yes Hospitals and other life critical services have a need for persistent backups, data centres included. I can live off my iPhone/Pad for a week or two with battery driven charging. 3G/4G/5G masts all have backup.

I wasn't suggesting Honda 2 strokes...I referred to alternate energy provision not totally reliant on the network....eg Solar panels therefore increasing our overall electricity generation capacity.

Whilst it is critical infrastructure as Texas recently found out that a change in demand caused by an unusual cold spell created massive outage and disruption. Increasingly we are finding that freak weather events are becoming more the norm eg flooding over last decade in UK, Germany, Italy and China to mention a few. Then the forest fires are more persistent and widespread in California, Australia and so on.

These are increasingly less normal and less predictable times. Today our local temperature is forecast to hit 30c the last high was 24c in 2006 the historic local average temp for today was 19c. We are fortunate to have the cooling effect of the sea in summer, but local sea temperatures are forecast to be around 17/18c today, that's warm for the NW.

I'm sure the demand for energy will also change for today compared to the average temperature to cool properties, pretty uncomfortable sleeping last night, tonight will be worse without some cooling therefore increased electricity demand which would not have been necessary on an average July day.
Wasn't there a report recently issued that much of the recent houses built some 500k are not capable of efficiently dealing with predicted future temperatures and some 70k have been built on flood plains......

regards

John

WHY..?

It used to be the queen who never needed to carry currency, and I wonder just how many of the population actually carry currency in note form let alone coin..? I often hear economic experts using the term "printing money," how out of date is that given we have been exchanging digital data as currency by plastic card and more recently by our i phone..?

My guess is that the RISKS have been assessed as the result of some algorithmic process and it will be alright on the night..

I suspect we are WELL past the time when clanky machines used as backup were prevalent.

With two separate national grid supply points of access, if one was at risk of failing as happened now and again over a circa 40 year period, generators were fired up and essential services switched to run off generator supply using the national grid as backup to the generators, further to that, in normal circumstances essential services ran from battery power, the batteries being constantly connected to float chargers, all of which extended operation in varying degrees if generator supplied voltage might finally fail... NOT that we ever got to that point but close to it once...

With the passage of time I have seen more and more levels of RISK becoming acceptable, and as one who worked through those changes in priorities and seen the new breed take over as will ever be expected of evolutionary processes, I just shrug in the partial comfort that it is no longer my responsibility while accepting that I too have been the subject of evolutionary processes to become the grumpy old man I find myself to be, though I do try not to grump too much...

The drive to go paperless is more about curbing the 'cash' black economy and bring more digital transactions into the purview of HMRC and its tax raising paws, ...raising taxes in part (also curbing criminal activity).is behind the recent drive to bring cryptocurrencies under greater regulatory control and to identify the holder.

Are we moving away from being risk averse or is it more a question of our state of mind in that ,as we grow older and hopefully wiser and more experienced we see risks differently to how we perceived them in our youth. I must admit during my project review days the mitigation used for some risks did raise a wry smile.

Looks like the Teslarati will need to start learning to queue shortly?

https://hothardware.com/news/musk-t...work-to-competing-ev-makers-in-late-2021