generatorguy

Quebec has profited 28 billion dollars from Churchill falls between 1971 and 2016. They built the dam for 1 billion dollars, taking on all the risk.

Quebec has great talent in electrical engineering and building hydro electric power plants. Quebec companies bring their expertise and develop hydro power plants across Canada and around the world for customers who don’t know how to do it themselves, sometimes in exchange for part ownership of the project.

The power transmission had to go through quebec, any other option was uneconomic as they are now finding out with the muskrat falls.

$45/MWH for renewable dispatchable power is cheap. $3/MWH is pratically free but Quebec also has financing costs for the project on top of that to pay. Plus the risk.

I don’t think Newfoundland got taken advantage of here, this is a deal that works out well for both sides. Nobody makes a deal they don’t like - if they had a better option they would have done that.

The CBC should be using British spelling!!

Wow that is egregious. I've known professors whose pensions were 70% of the average of their best 4 years.

I recently read that the CCP only accepts the top students whereas mostly i see the top students avoiding government bureaucracy in favor of private industry as it is more lucrative and there are not many prestigious positions in public service.

I believe the atmosphere within these institutions isn’t conducive to action either. Put your time in and get your pension. Do nothing and nothing bad will happen, try something big and it might fail and you look worse than everyone who did nothing.

So we need to start offering 300k/yr for middle level public servants just like programmers in California.

Wind, solar, and run of river hydro are unscheduled so if load ramps up due to renewable generation ramping up there is no change in load to be accommodated by dispatchable scheduled units.

If the load responding to increased renewable generation exceeded the generation then the excess load should have just run whenever it was convenient since it isn’t using renewable power anyway.

I’ve omitted nuclear and large hydro from my discussion even though their fuel doesn’t emit carbon.

Toshiba has the 3.5" HGST tech [0] so you can buy a toshiba drive if you are afraid WD will ruin the HGST technology they bought.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST

Can you quantify the difference in electricity costs? Start with difference in Watts, guess 0.15$/kWh and then find $/year saved?

I bet the increase in quality and maybe the reliability or support costs for the old analog equipment were bigger factors.

also some of the ones with a really long lineage are impressively fast and memory efficient since they used to run on such old hardware. Actually dealing with some 80 character length alarm strings right now!

Are there lower AGC environments ? The document concluded they need to test more but I imagine there is just one AGC per system operator. BC hydro, fortis, BPA, PGE?

AGC just balances power flows so imports/exports over interconnections between power authorities flow as scheduled right?

The footer indicated the issue occurred in the western region. I wonder if this AGC system is built On a scada or control system package offering from one of the major vendors or if it is more or a one off or even totally home brew.

Some SCADA software has existed since the early 80s and they have supported their customers through upgrades the whole way. As you can imagine there is some serious cruft.

A lot of power utilities have their own fibre as they own lots of poles and transmission towers and have lots of skilled staff to design systems, string up cable and make terminations.

The intent of my comment was that I am surprised to now be seeing that there may have been some substance to the comments on Reddit.

If there is a known reservoir of pandemic causing virus it should be managed in such a way so as to avoid pandemics.

Seems like not enough lessons were learned from SARS. How many pandemics are going to come from this reservoir before the world gets fed up with the mismanagement of it?

I saw posts on Reddit months ago pointing out the virology labs in wuhan studying this exact virus and wasn’t it a coincidence. I am actually quite surprised that US scientists that twice visited the lab sent strongly worded official communications back to the US government stating concerns over safety and the competence of the personnel working at the lab and saying that they needed more assistance.

Now that China has disappeared people who were speaking out, shut down the Shanghai lab that originally published the virus’ genome, and is back to tightly controlling information out of the country, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure if this pandemic was a preventable accident. Either way it is a major black eye for China.

exhaled air is exhausted to outdoors through filters, fresh air comes in. different tubes for different direction of air flow

Are you familiar with the instrumentation on nuclear plants? I can’t imagine there are high tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of variables let alone sensors to be monitored. On the hydro plants I work on there are about 1000 variables per turbine generator unit and another 1000 for the substation and river system that are centrally recorded.

Regret throwing out my Chumby now

li

great! good to have an alternative to qiqqa in case it disappears, although it looks like qiqqa has killed their cloud libraries and gone open source. I found qiqqa after google desktop was EOLed.

I have been quick to recommend Qiqqa whenever it seems like it might be a useful tool but I never really saw those comments get much traction - maybe because everyone was already using zotero?

I've been using http://www.qiqqa.com/ for 8 years and it does a fantastic job of organizing my PDFs and managing citations. It can do cloud based shared libraries as well.

for me the killer feature is that it makes all the PDFs full text searchable so it is like my own personal google where the links never break and the content is all relevant.

Highly recommend!

My circles are all on zoom due to superior audio and video quality in zoom than FaceTime for groups. 1 on 1 still FaceTime

In Canada the constraint is going to be the number of doctors that we have, not the number of ventilators or the physical space to house patients.

I understand exponential growth thanks. If China was able to take the measures they did on January 23 with only 500 cases in wuhan, nothing amiss in the rest of the world, based on their understanding of exponential growth of the disease that is impressive. Every other government had China as a warning and all of them except three have waited to react.

No, they probably under reported the numbers. Do you think they locked down wuhan with only 600 confirmed cases or were they way further along the curve?

The world was shocked when they started to build the new hospitals that the numbers didn’t seem to justify. Maybe the numbers were right and they understood what they were in for, which would be a real feather in their hat for their country’s model.

200 million surgical masks but only 600k n95 masks, per the npr article gp linked to.

The machines to make the n95 masks take both the Germans and Chinese about 6 months to make.

i work on hydro electric power stations and often see drawings showing the 50, 100, 500, 1000 year flood water levels at some structure such as the powerhouse or intake. The civil engineers design the plant to withstand the 500 year flood. I've personally seen the 100 year flood level occur at about 7 different projects, and I only work on site at 1 project per year generally.

and remove the comment about sneaking an easter egg in to drupal core. If I were looking to hire a web developer I wouldn't want a sneaky one.

Won’t be strong enough to move a tank though if designed for a focus...

The Article describes 100% what has happened with covid based on the sars experience and research since then. Whether the covid19 virus jumped from bats or civets hopefully the Chinese wet markets will stop carrying animals that have viruses that are so detrimental to humans.

I think you are bang on with capabilities vs capacity. We should have one factory for anything critical so that in case we can’t get as much as we need on the free market we can ramp up capacity by building more of the machine that makes the product. If you don’t have all of the know how that is in that machine or plant design already in your one factory making the product you are starting from zero. Hence why all of China’s cheap labour deals had technology transfer riders.