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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #105 –
Quote from: PaulP – on
Texas is simply today's bad example. The culture that gives rise to their predicament is rampant, and manifests itself at all levels of American society.

The 'values (prejudices/arrogance)' of 1963 still live in many Texans - they really believe they are a nation unto themselves. And you are right, Pauly, those same 'values' live in tens of millions of US citizens outside Texas as well - mostly southern and through the middle!!
Only our ruthless best, from Board to bootstudders will get us no. 17

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #106 –
The Yallourn power station is closing 4 years ahead of schedule.  Economics is proving to be a major factor in turning away from fossil fuel.

Yallourn currently produces 5% of our power.

Apparently, our largest storage battery will be constructed on the site.

This sends a very strong market signal to renewable power companies.
It's still the Gulf of Mexico, Don Old!

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #107 –
Quote from: DJC – on
The Yallourn power station is closing 4 years ahead of schedule.  Economics is proving to be a major factor in turning away from fossil fuel.

Yallourn currently produces 5% of our power.

Apparently, our largest storage battery will be constructed on the site.

This sends a very strong market signal to renewable power companies.
I hope those batteries have better longevity, support and warranty than those '25 year' solar cells, many of which are forked after just 3 to 5 years and the companies that installed them long long gone. They are basically China's rubbish that we are importing!
"Extremists on either side will always meet in the Middle!"

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #108 –

They won't

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #109 –
Quote from: capcom – on
They won't
The media report about these batteries like the spend is once off, based on my experience with industrial UPS I'll be surprised if that sort of facility isn't fully refreshed with new batteries and cooling fans every 5 to 7 years. The ongoing cost must be horrendous, but I bet that won't appear in the report!

Knowing our politicians, they'll leave it switched off like the Desalination plant and when we go to use it the lot will have corroded and sprung leaks everywhere! ;D
"Extremists on either side will always meet in the Middle!"

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #110 –
And if we'd built a dam 15 / 20 years back?   Look at the charges on your water bill and what % component is for just the H2O.  I don't mind new technology at all (save for Windows 10 insofar as PCs go) but how dumb can you be to embrace the "next big thing" and abandon the old and proven.   

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #111 –
Quote from: capcom – on
I don't mind new technology at all (save for Windows 10 insofar as PCs go) .......
Actually, Win 10 is pretty good these days, from a business perspective probably the best version of Windows ever.

 btw., If you still have Win 7, 8 or 8 Pro you can probably still get the free upgrade.
"Extremists on either side will always meet in the Middle!"

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #112 –
Still got my late wife's Dell PC i5 laptop which came with W7. I remember she accepted the offer of a free W10 upgrade which just absolutely stuffed it. It was a nice laptop with W7. I ended up taking it to the local PC support guy who reverted it back to W7 and made sure it would no longer upgrade to W10. I suppose W7 is no longer supported, I haven't fired it up for a long time now.
Reality always wins in the end.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #113 –
Quote from: cookie2 – on
Still got my late wife's Dell PC i5 laptop which came with W7. I remember she accepted the offer of a free W10 upgrade which just absolutely stuffed it. It was a nice laptop with W7. I ended up taking it to the local PC support guy who reverted it back to W7 and made sure it would no longer upgrade to W10. I suppose W7 is no longer supported, I haven't fired it up for a long time now.

W10 is excessively intrusive and I will never use it.  Despise the interface plus it doesn't support my email program.  I HATE it.  Yep Cookie, support for 7 finished a few months back but mine still hums along.  There's a few freeware programs out there (Never 10 being one) that deny any access to a W10 install.

EDIT - I don't believe 10 is any longer offered as a FOC upgrade

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #114 –
All I can say is we've now migrated more than 95% of a moderately sized business network to Win 10 and have little or no problems, and in most cases our users tell me performance has improved over Win 7 or Win 8 on the same old hardware. I've a few users who complain a bit, but mostly coming from users who complain about any change at all, even if it's to brand new hardware.

I've really only had two PCs that had genuine problems, and these were related to very specific hardware bugs. I've had to retire a couple of legacy printers but note that Windows Update has since made drivers available so if I'd kept them they'd still be running.

I can advise, that the up to date experience of Win 10, is quite different from when it was first launched, they've greatly extended hardware and software support for legacy applications and hardware. I also find remotely managing or assisting users is a far better experience under Win 10 than 7 or 8, 8 was a real nightmare and perhaps only beaten to the worst ever title by Vista. I'm not a fulltime IT Admin though, so perhaps my comments are out of place.
"Extremists on either side will always meet in the Middle!"

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #115 –
Yep, we might hear from Thry on this but Vista was a flea infested dog.  Windows ME even worse. 

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #116 –
@LP

I am a happy user of W10 on my standalone HP laptop, which I believe has the latest version. My problems were with the Dell which just did not want to run under W10 and it became an absolute nightmare, so much so that I took the drastic action of reverting it to W7. That was a few years ago now.
Reality always wins in the end.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #117 –
Quote from: cookie2 – on
@LP

I am a happy user of W10 on my standalone HP laptop, which I believe has the latest version. My problems were with the Dell which just did not want to run under W10 and it became an absolute nightmare, so much so that I took the drastic action of reverting it to W7. That was a few years ago now.
I don't doubt your experience @cookie2‍, but I will tell you on our network we have PCs with far older processors than i5 that run Win 10 comfortably so don't give up! It's this ability to unify the OS for old and new hardware that partially drove the decision.

Alternatively, if you'd like to try something completely different, download and boot a live CD or DVD of something like Linux Mint for that older hardware, you might find it delivers it a new lease of life! It's a version of Linux that has been skinned to be reasonably familiar for WinXP or Win7 users, and we use it whenever we have cause to migrate a workstation to Linux. Some people swear by the Cinnamon edition, but my preference is Mate which older Linux / Unix users will understand why.
"Extremists on either side will always meet in the Middle!"

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #118 –
Quote from: LP – on
I hope those batteries have better longevity, support and warranty than those '25 year' solar cells, many of which are forked after just 3 to 5 years and the companies that installed them long long gone. They are basically China's rubbish that we are importing!

The company that owns the Yallourn power station is Chinese so you never know.

The one being built at Moorabool is Tesla so that should be reliable and long term.  Interestingly, the South Australian Tesla battery has saved SA consumers for than $150M since it commenced operations in 2017.  With the recent upgrade to 150MW, the current cost of the SA battery is $160M.  SA is almost at break even and that's not considering the benefits of avoiding blackouts when the Heywood Interconnector was out of action for three weeks around this time last year.

Quote from: LP – on
The media report about these batteries like the spend is once off, based on my experience with industrial UPS I'll be surprised if that sort of facility isn't fully refreshed with new batteries and cooling fans every 5 to 7 years. The ongoing cost must be horrendous, but I bet that won't appear in the report!

Knowing our politicians, they'll leave it switched off like the Desalination plant and when we go to use it the lot will have corroded and sprung leaks everywhere! ;D

I suspect that the batteries require no more in the way of maintenance and upgrades than any other component of our power network and the SA battery costs include a major capacity upgrade.

I'm not a huge fan of the desalination plant.  Using recycled water would be cheaper and more energy efficient.  However, the plant has been producing 125GL annually for the last couple of years.
It's still the Gulf of Mexico, Don Old!