Posts by John Robson

Re: Transportation

Rwanda's too good for them... send them to westminster... might actually increase the percentage of law abiding citizens.

Re: Kicking!

You can't bring facts to an argument where the EU are concerned.

Personally I'd be all for automated speed restrictors, and black box speed recording. If you don't want to pay the fine, simply abide by the posted speed limit.

You'll have pretty good evidence of whether or not the speed limit was posted if the black box records that the car didn't see a speed limit sign...

Re: I will purchase an electric vehicle - eventually

"Not so an EV. It could be taking a substantial portion of its 7kW non-stop for anything from a few tens of minutes to several hours. Many households have 2 or move vehicles so double or triple that."

Yes - but rarely.

Because you don't need to charge am EV from empty to full every day. Any more than you tip the fuel down the drain and fill up your ICEV every day.

Average car does ~20 miles a day, so needs about 5kWh, which is not a huge load. If we assume cars are at home for ~10 hours overnight then that's 500W needed.

Re: I will purchase an electric vehicle - eventually

"Storage heaters are generally in the 1 to 2kW range and are thermostatic so don't run all night, only for as long as it takes to "charge" up. They are generally used in smaller properties where the overhead of fitting a gas burner isn't justified so unlikely you'll get to a total of 7kW."

Mine is 2.3kW, and runs continuously during the timed period - whilst it does have a thermostatic "max charge" control - I've never hit that stat since I've been monitoring the energy usage.

When I had two of them on E7 via a time switch by the dual meters in my first flat then each of them would have been similar power rating, and they also ran most of the night in winter (though I don't have data on those).

"I want the radiators to be warm in the evening when I'm sat in front of the TV, not in the middle of the night when I'm asleep."

Not really - you want the *house* warm in the evening, a subtle difference, but important.

Heating load is much harder to shift, but is also substantially lower. At the absolute coldest (-8.6 degrees) we have had over the previous two winters my (fairly traditional british housing stock) family house used 5kW of gas over 20 hours - data shows that my boiler typically doesn't fire at all for at least four hours of the night. It used 5kW on just 5 days over two winters, that's maybe 2kW for a heat pump running at low efficiency (due to the low temperature) on 2-3 days a year.. There were only 22 days over those two winters needed more than 4kW (including the previously mentioned 5).

To supply our hot water would require the same power draw for a little over an hour in that four hour "break" that my boiler takes overnight.

Of course a modern house shouldn't need nearly as much energy - we are far too late in improving building standards.

It's quite easy to move any of that load by an hour or so to help the grid on days of particularly spiky demand/supply (or indeed every day if you have something like the Agile or Cosy tariff) just by turning the heating on slightly earlier, and then off for an hour - but you're right that you can't shift it to overnight without additional local storage - but we have the potential for massive additional storage, EVs can shift many hours of heating demand.

The energy consumption of heating is substantial, but the power draw isn't all that bad.

Re: I will purchase an electric vehicle - eventually

If only the national grid would think about this and model their network, and make plans... Oh, they already are.

Yes - heating is a much higher energy demand than EVs, but is also a load which the grid can handle, the "headroom" I have been describing thus far is headroom *already* in the system - no investment needed at all. Our heating load in this house, in the coldest of weather over the last two winters (-8.6 degrees), is ~5kW, which even with an inefficient heat pump (and it clearly won't be pulling a COP of 5 in the coldest weather) isn't going to exceed 2kW of electrical load; that's within the capacity of the distribution network - yes we'll need alot more generation, but that's a different part of the equation, and we'll have a whole stack of gas we don't use any more... Because burning gas in a power plant, transmitting that power over the grid, and using that electricity to run a heat pump gets more heat into a house than burning the gas on site. Is it the ideal fuel to use? Absolutely not, but as that gets phased out in favour of more zero carbon generation then everyone benefits.

"How much do you get paid for grid export? Peanuts as a fraction of what it costs to import that's how much."

My off peak import rate is 7.5p, my average import rate (total cost/total import) over the last six months has been about 10p, and my export rate is 15p - so yes its a fraction, but what we used to call a top heavy one. (That import rate is just the import, not accounting for export credits, DFS sessions, self generation).

That's also the "now" situation. Half hourly tariffs are really in their infancy, and the ability to have these tariffs dynamically adjust to the grid is still very new. Octopus Agile and Intelligent Go are good examples of two approaches being trialled:

- One where the price tracks the wholesale price, set each by the "day ahead" rate.

- One where there is a traditional "off peak" period, but also a completely dynamic "additional half hours" that can be given to you at effectively no notice at all.

Neither of those are the same as tariffs from twenty years ago, so why do you assume that tariffs in twenty years time will look the same?

"If it was ready and capable of handling it then why is there be a back-log of generation schemes waiting to be connected? "

Because you're asking why the tip of the chisel is blunt when I've said that the handle is comfortable. There is a massive difference between HV connections to new generation and the ability of the distribution network to handle as much energy as it handled twenty years ago.

Of course we're not yet ready for the load we expect to have in thirty years time - we'd be foolish if we were, it would be a waste of resources.

I'm well aware of toyota's defense of their old business model... and I have some sympathy with their BEV vs PHEV, but none at all with their fuel only vehicles.

Re: I will purchase an electric vehicle - eventually

"Cables to the house are already sized to supply whatever the house fuse breaker is set to - 100A so so. I have yet to see an EV that will draw more than 11kW off three-phase, or 7kW off single phase AC charger. 7kW is 30A - not to be sneezed at, but there are many induction hobs that draw this on the market already. And I note you're not suggesting the cables under the street will all need replacing if everyone cooks dinner at once."

To be fair there is an assumption that not all houses will draw maximum power at the same time.

But... we used to all draw substantially more power all day long than we do now - and storage heaters used to draw more than 7kW all night if you had more than one room in the house...

Re: VAT

Absolutely -They pump huge amounts at fossil fuel drivers - continuing the 5p cut, and the long term freeze on fuel duty.

Gridserve (the only network that I could easily find a figure for) claim to have charged 160 megamiles across ~2 million charging sessions last year.

Let's be conservative and assume that's 40 GWh (or 20kWh per session, seems maybe a little low)

They're the fifth biggest DC charge network, with about 10% of the total - let's assume that they're representative.

That's ~400GWh, charged at ~75p/kWh which is about £300 million in takings, of which £50m would be VAT - drop the rate to 5% (to match domestic charging) and you're looking at a cost to the treasury of <£40 million.

Assume that the AC network does as much charging as the DC network and you're still under £100 million

The 5p fuel duty cut which should have expired keeps the duty down to 53p, thats on 16 billion litres of petrol and 27 billion litres of diesel (RAC figures from 2023). That's £2,100 million - more than an order of magnitude more.

Re: Not a real problem

Well, I have to get the wheelchair out, then wheel down to the service station, navigate to the loos which always seem to be at the far end of a slalom/obstacle course of all the shops "extra display" space and food outlets... Then I go to the loo and have to do the same in reverse.

Can easily take 15 minutes.

Wrong fuel is something ~150 thousand motorists do each year, and that's those who get it wrong enough to need help.

Re: Home charging is worse

"If that's the extent of the aspiration then what a terrible missed opportunity"

Yep - the internal networking is deliberately disabled, presumably because if there isn't a network, then there isn't a hackable surface.

Having something which does that translation into the network is useful, and having APIs which whatever your chosen "hub" can talk to is useful.

Re: Home charging is worse

Yep - local connections should be standard.

And the APIs should interact nicely...

Smart meters should at least be able to do something like pushing MQTT messages out - I'd like my Octopus Mini to do that in fact...

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

The market isn't a subsidy - though I agree that it is distorted. But some of those distortions are deliberate. The biggest distortion is that the cost of electricity is so tightly tied to the price of gas.

"Also, many tariffs are directly subsidised by other tax/bill payers, and i'd be surprised if you weren't using one with your eco green set-up. Heat Pump tariffs for example where a portion of your HP usage is subtracted from your bill.. Solar feed-in tariffs, v2g tariffs, DFS events, these are all directly susbsidised."

DFS isn't a direct subsidy - it's actively cheaper to pay people not to use energy (and this year to return energy to the grid) than it is to pay to warm up and then start generating from an additional power station.

I don't have a feed in tariff, or any tariff where some usage is subtracted - I have what's now called Intelligent Octopus Go, with a flexible gas tariff and a fixed export tariff. So I get six hours of off peak energy (good for things like the dishwasher and my storage heater), as well as any other times when it's advantageous for Octopus to charge my car at a different time of day.

Doing those few simple things means that over 80 percent of my electricity usage in February was from "low carbon" sources (based on my actual energy consumption compared with the national numbers from https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/GB) - that includes a small proportion from my PV array. January was ~70%, December about 80%... summer will be much better. That doesn't calculate any "discount" based on exported energy.

The grid is pretty robust, and we have twenty years to increase capacity in those areas which need it most, and those areas are already known to the grid. inverter technology has improved to the point where we are not limited by sheer tonnage providing grid stability any more - one of the Australian grids are running trials last time I checked (though they still use non generating syncros if I recall correctly, and have a couple of small plants always warm).

Even in the UK LEDs are a massive win, my (midlands) heating is off for at least six months of the year looking at last year's gas usage figures - so fully half the time that heat is wasted... so a 90% reduction in energy usage is achieved. "But sometimes" isn't a good reason to leave things inefficient. You don't eat an elephant in one bite, you take it a spoonful at a time - LEDs are an easy win.

A heat pump COP of 3 wouldn't be considered good - and my calculations (based on 70k lines of raw meter data) are that even assuming that my boiler is 100% efficient (it won't be, it's a condenser boiler that's just shy of twenty years old) and I were to replace it with a heat pump with a SCOP of 3 (I would hope to significantly exceed that), and my heating electricity costs are at peak rate (I can do better than that) then I'd be a few hundred pounds a year cheaper with a heat pump than a boiler.

To be equivalent to a gas boiler in other terms I'd need the overall COP to be ~0.9 to match the efficiency of a good boiler - and even accounting for the <10% losses in the grid, and the ~50% loss in conversion at a power station... you'd need a "local" COP of under 2 (which would be _appalling_) to get to the stage where you "may as well use gas".

"Anyway, always a pleasure arguing with you Mr Robson. Have some upvotes and an e-pint :)"

Discussing, surely... ;)

\_/ \_/

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

The grid itself can deal - we will need to increase generation, but the transition is going to take another twenty years or so, it's not happening overnight.

I'd like to see micro reactors at every service station as a starter:

- already good grid connections

- close enough to populated areas, but out of nimby zone

- substantial local demand as EV journeys increase

- distributed generation, with slightly increased rates near population areas.

We don't need to limit them to those ~100 locations either, but they'd be a good starting point. And it's one thing I hope that the hyper-scalers who are currently looking how to power their next generation of data centres can actually accomplish as a net positive.

But more generation of various (preferably zero carbon) sources is always going to be needed, because a substantial amount of our primary energy consumption isn't electrical yet. Of course there will also be some savings from not having run refineries etc - but that's relatively small beans.

When I say preferably zero carbon... if we took petrol that was delivered to the pump and instead burnt it in a power station, using that electricity to charge EVs... we'd get more miles out of it than we would have done by using it in ICEvs - and as we continue to decarbonise the grid, all of those EVs get "cleaner" every step of the way. It's also relatively easy to implement CCS at a few power stations rather than across a fleet of cars - and of course the air quality where people live would be far higher.

Shutting down coal is a good thing, not replacing them with other sources is the mistake - although we've had a very significant drop in demand... so if you had replaced them... then there would be power stations sitting idle.

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

"Of course, the current concept of off peak pricing is something that will become much more difficult to sustain if the current ambitions to increase EV charging and electrification of heating continue. If through increasing off peak demand, and better use of flexibility then the demand curve becomes far flatter, then supporting a 4-5x multiple between peak and off peak simply isn't justified. Yes, there's need for payment to flexible demand/generation but that's not going to help much for EV charging that has to happen overnight, or heat pumps that because of slow response times and heat demand profiles are very inflexible without expensive storage."

EV charging doesn't have to happen overnight - there are approximately 23 hours a day when a typical EV isn't in use.

Yes - we need chargers everywhere, but especially with V2G an EV should always be connected to the grid when not in motion.

Heat pumps are also somewhat flexible - there is an ongoing demand during the day, but taking an hour or so off shouldn't significantly affect comfort, and will make a significant dent in instant demand. We can also pre warm places at the end of any low demand period. But if you have a car at home when you need your heating - than the idea is that you plug the car in, and it can power your heating if the grid is at peak load... the model is very different, and the ability to shift demand to match supply rather than the other way round substantially changes how things operate.

We won't have a static peak/off peak, but that's already going away, we have the ability to have dynamic costs with half hourly meters - I have a cheap rate which applies for some hours overnight, and then also at any time my supplier chooses - I also have an export tariff, although that is static at the moment.

My supplier could also (given permission) talk to my car, my EVSE, my home battery... and automate all of those things to ensure that the cost of supplying me is as low as it can be, indeed it can also make supplying other people cheaper for them.

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

"It bloody well IS subsidised!"

No it's not - it's a commercial rate which is available to anyone - it's not a subsidised rate.

E7/E10 have had this concept for decades, and I've been on a variety of those tariffs over the years - I am on one at the moment.

Negative pricing happens when supply exceeds demand - that's usually because demand is low (overnight) and supply is up - and it's always been passed on to some consumers, but domestic retail customers haven't had the metering equipment to allow for them to take advantage of the fluctuations in the price on the grid. Now we do have that capability, and there are tariffs which track the wholesale cost of electricity.

Imagine if we have EVs rolled out - you'd never need to curtail output at a wind farm again, never need to pay to adjust supply to match demand, you can just encourage demand - energy draw can be decoupled from energy usage.

The rectifier in an EV on board charger is generally one of the least efficient parts of the charging system, those which are designed to push 350+kW are usually more efficient, they are less weight and packaging constrained.

"LED lightbulbs ... often quoted as an example of how energy efficiency is somehow an unstoppable trend, but it's bollocks. Especially if someone is using electric heating, for example. But even if not, the "waste" heat from their lightbulbs would previously have warmed them up enough to not need to stoke up the coal fire. Now, we have all these wonderfully efficient LEDs which produce no infrared and ironically cause people to turn on their gas-fired central heating because they feel cold."

Ah yes, the "but sometimes" defense. It is better to use a more efficient lighting system, and an efficient heating system.

If I replace 10 100W light bulbs with 5W LEDs then I have 950W of heat less in my house. However I can run a heat pump and only need to use 300W of electricity to get 950W of heat, so my total consumption of electricity has gone down by about 2/3rds and I am exactly as comfortable as I was. Though in the summer, and indeed most of the year, I'll actually have taken my energy consumption down from 1000W to 50W, that's a 95% reduction. So averaged across the year my electricity consumption is down by probably 80%, with no change in comfort.

No the "but for some of the year the waste is actually useful" isn't a defense. Even if I used a purely resistive electrical heating system, I'd still be better off, because all the time when I have lights on but don't need heating, I wouldn't be running the heating.

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

"People who charge at home often pay a heavily subsidised rate 7p/kWh apparently)"

Not subsidised, it's just a time of day tariff, as have been available for many decades, because electricity prices fluctuate throughout the day - even going negative.

My off peak rate is 7.5p, but my peak rate is substantially higher (spent much of last year at 40p), and my standing charge is a little higher than the "standard" rate flat tariff. That encourages me to use energy when the grid has more than it needs, and to *not* use energy when the grid is strained.

"Then there's the inconvenient fact that fast charging is inefficient. Both chargers and battery (and sometimes even the cable) need active cooling at >50kW rates."

It's not inconvenient, it's just how charging works - the efficiency is actually pretty high though, even with the various wireless interfaces which are being developed.

Typically a home charger will be ~90% efficient (slightly lower for 10A chargers), and that efficiency is maintained for DC charging - partly because the rectifier in the on board charger is usually one of the least efficient steps in the chain. Yes, you need to actively cool when you're pushing hundreds of kW, but that really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. It's another argument for not waiting beyond 80% on a long journey charger - the efficiency does drop when the SOC is over 80%.

"EV charging is always going to be more expensive at a fast charger station."

Of course it will be - you have a fairly expensive bit of hardware to pay for. An AC EVSE is just a relay with some safety comms around it.

It's not that long ago that most houses were burning 5-600 watts in light bulbs alone... we're using way less electricity now than we used to 80TWh less than 2005 in fact. That enough for more than 40 million EVs.

Re: Home charging is worse

Smart meters don't connect to homes... they only connect to the network operators.

And they aren't constantly connected either.

But there is no reason your charger shouldn't be able to query some standard API for the current spot price - or your car, or you home automation system.

Oh, look - you can use Octopus Agile, know what the prices are the day before and automatically enable charging when the price is low enough.

Saying that intelligent "lets you charge at any time" is a bit misleading - it gives you more off peak hours, and potentially gives you some additional hours as well, depending on the grid (yes there are ways to game it, but that's going to get shut down at some point).

Getting the smart meter enables half hourly billing - that's what enables the tariffs above. They're not smart at all, they're just half hourly meters rather than "once a quarter, maybe" meters.

And "Whether the common man as opposed to the early adopters will be able to or willing to deal with the complexity and uncertainty remains to be seen."

There doesn't need to be complexity. You say "I want between 50 and 90% each morning by 8 am" and the car/charger do the rest.

That's not complicated. I appreciate that I am particularly interested in my energy consumption - 70 thousand rows of data in my tracking spreadsheet attest to that - but the *vast* majority of the savings that has brought (which are substantial) would be achieved by a similar setup (I might change the EV charger, or slightly change where it's wired) requiring no setup further than "make sure I have this range each morning" on the EV, and "these are my cheap hours" on the battery. The complexity for me is that the charger could draw power from the battery as it's configured at the moment, and that's pretty obviously a bad idea.

Re: I will purchase an electric vehicle - eventually

"Remember a huge number of UK vehicle owners do not have dedicated off street parking. For these people charging at home is difficult or impossible. The cost per kWh at public charge points is far higher than the cheap off peak rates available for people who can charge at home and the higher charge rates reduce battery lifespan."

Not nearly as many as most people think - less than 25%, but there will be substantial overlap with the 8-9% without a car. Yes, that's still a lot of people, but you then have to subtract those who have a regular place of work etc.

There is no reason public charging has to be at a high charge rate - that's required specifically for long journeys. But if you can charge whilst you shop, whilst you're at a restaurant, a cinema, theatre, gym, down at the pub, wherever... then you don't need high power DC charging.

And the real killer here - the infrastructure to support such charging is orders of magnitude less expensive than even a single DC charge point - if every supermarket had a couple of 50kW chargers and a bank of 50 7kW chargers, then that 20% suddenly get really good coverage.

We should also drop the VAT on public charging to match domestic charging.

Tesla chargers are frequently half the price of other networks - so there is alot of scope for competition to drive prices down, and I suspect that the supermarkets will be a significant contributor to that process. Lidl have historically had some of the cheapest rates around, and provide a nice lunch.

"A further point - there is NO WAY that the UK mains electricity supply can handle the replacement of a significant proportion of the current ICE vehicles with EVs"

Yes it can... 30M EVs, 5kWh/day is an average load of just ~6.25GW.

And the vast majority of that load will be requested when the grid is at it's least stressed (which doesn't have to be at the same time each day).

We have six hours overnight with demand that's ~15GW below the daytime demand... not quite enough on it's own for a completely electrified fleet - but at the same time we should be implementing V2G, which actually helps smooth the grid even further - we won't need to curtail wind power, we can just charge vehicles, we won't need to fire up coal plants, we can just pull from vehicles. And no that doesn't mean that you'll wake up with an empty battery, it means you'll say "I want 50% SOC each morning by 7:30, but don't charge beyond 90%" and you'll have somewhere between 50 and 90% every morning, but your car will be arbitraging and earning money whilst it's parked.

Electricity demand in the UK has fallen at a fairly steady rate since ~2005, indeed it's currently 80TWh lower than it was (that's 2.7e11 miles of driving, over 40 million UK cars worth of driving (even at a pessimistic 300Wh/mile)). So actually the grid has already coped with a higher load than EVs would place on it.

Re: Not a real problem

In many ways it's even simpler than filling up a tank. And for some vehicle/charger combinations it's far simpler.

Whilst the tesla is the most famous version other brands also have "plug and charge" capabilities on various networks - so you drive up, plug in, go to the loo, come back, unplug, drive off.

Yet to see that level of convenience from a liquid fuel station.

You also cannot put the wrong kind of electrons into the vehicle - unlike putting petrol into a diesel tank (which is fairly easy since the petrol nozzle is smaller than the diesel one).

You can't spill the electrons, they don't smell, they don't make everything around the charger smell of electrons, they don't get deposited over the charge connector due to the vapour escaping the filler cap - thus ending up on your hands and clothes...

Re: Meh... Either way

So in 8 hours you reckon a team of four could cut 6 thousand cables... that's a little under five seconds per cable.

Factoring in time to move between cables, as well as cutting time I think you're wildly optimistic.

Of course vandalism is an issue anywhere - but I've not come across a snipped charging cable, whilst I acknowledge that it is possible... I doubt it will be for scrap. It will be because people are bored, or started off the evening drinking petrol.

Re: Home charging is worse

Octopus Go doesn't need any comms, Octopus Inteligent Go does.

The fact that the all home chargers don't come with WiFi and/or ethernet is verging on unforgivable.

"But fundamentally *why* does the charger need to call home to report its usage? Isn't this exactly what Smart (sic.) Meters were supposed to solve? "

It's not reporting usage - it's being told when to charge the car... I say how much energy I want by what time, and then my energy supplier picks the cheapest charging times available - I also measure the usage directly and use that information to control other devices to take advantage of the additional cheap rate power.

My original EVSE's "smarts" never worked, I simply put a small relay in so it's now a *much* smarter unit than it ever was before - they have a little bit of safety checks, which is worth something, and a decent relay to hook the car directly to 240vAC.

I don't think Chademo will be rocking horse manure for a while - current deployments do still have chademo connections on at least some units. We do however need to educate people that they shouldn't use the limited number with those connectors when there are CCS only units available.

Re: This may become a much bigger problem, not a smaller one.

Except that every building can be a charging point... Public charging will always be a minority activity for most drivers.

The vast majority will charge at home, and many of the rest will charge at work.

You then get into what I'd consider the most important bit of public charging, but that isn't being built out yet - supermarkets/shopping centres/restaurants/cinema... .whatever - all of those places should have dozens of AC chargers, which most people won't need to use, but those who don't have easy access elsewhere will use them, it's far cheaper to distribute AC at a reasonable rate...

They don't.

There are typically only two plugs you might find in the UK (and all across the EU):

- Type 2 CCS This is DC fast charging, and is the standard

- Chademo This was an early DC standard, still widely used in Japan, but only used by (some) Nissan vehicles in the UK

You might rarely see a Type2 tethered cable at some of the older gridserve units - these tend to supply high power AC charging, effectively only used by some early Renault Zoes.

The final option is a type2 socket, for destination charging - low power AC charging for use when you are actively doing something else.

That would be type 2 - which has pins for both 1 and 3 phase AC.

We even have the CCS extension, which adds two beefy pins to take care of DC charging at up to 350kW.

The only other cables really seen in the UK are chademo, which has some benefits (built in bidirectional charging being the main one), but it's going extinct.

There will continue to be a few chademo equipped chargers at many locations for a long time yet. The trick is to choose a CCS only charger if you can, then the chademo driver can access the appropriate charger without you having to move.

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

They do.

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

You don't any more - because chargers are required to accept contactless.

Even Tesla are introducing contactless on their V4 chargers.

Of course you're welcome to use an app if you want, and some distribution networks might offer you a better rate for doing so.

I have a couple of charge cards in my car, but they're just RFID tap and go - paying on an app isn't the biggest issue facing disabled EV drivers, the obsession with kerbs to "protect" the chargers is far more difficult for far more people.

The other is the lack of accessible spaces around chargers, and the solution is either to provision enough that only blue badge holders use the accessible ones, or they are *all* accessible.

Re: Seems a bit short sighted

"It really would be worth putting Mars sample return on hold until cheaper general purpose technology is ready rather than designing single use tech compatible with current launch vehicle limitations."

It's certainly worth keeping an eye on starship... but you have to design with what you have, and we *can* do the return without starship.

Re: Seems a bit short sighted

Don't want them to get stuck inside perseverance in case of that rover's failure.

Re: investigating whether it can turn some geriatric laptops into useful tools once again.

Whilst I applaud keeping machines out of ewaste...

At some point there comes a time when the efficiency gains of the last twenty years outweigh the waste.

Very dependant on whether the machine is likely to be on 24/7, or just there to run ${hobby} for a few hours a week.

" it does seem to make FAA rather toothless."

Not really - it means that they don't need to employ as many people as the rest of the aeronautics industry combined.

The report has to satisfy them that SpaceX know what went wrong and that they have a decent plan to prevent it happening again.

If you want the FAA to look toothless then take a look at Boeing, at that point you realise that they are toothless - you just can't infer that from the fact that SpaceX wrote most of the report.

Re: They'll make it boring soon.

And tell me - exactly how many production ready starships have blown up so far?

Oh, wait that would be none, because they are still prototyping the thing.

There are quite a few cases of boiler failure (which gets *very* nasty, very fast because all the water flash boils when the pressure vessel is breached) in the steam engine era - often killing people.

Re: Moon landing

SpaceX have more experience with powered landing of spacecraft than... well everyone else in history combined.

So yes, I do think they can manage it from on board sensors - since that's what most landings do.

The two recent landings on the moon:

- One had an engine nozzle fail and separate from the vehicle whilst still a way off the ground.

- The other had a complete failure (human error) of the primary ranging system, and ended up landing fast and not in complete control.

All the Apollo landers managed to land without any external reference - so yes, I have every confidence that we can calculate relative velocity without previously landing a pad on the moon. The regolith isn't that mobile, it's far less mobile than for example the sea.

Depending on the chosen engine configuration there might not even be any dust being kicked up.

Re: Moon landing

Huh?

Are you trying to suggest that starship will be landing with significant lateral velocity?

Stability isn't determined by "mass" at the nose and "weight" at the tail - it's determined by CoG.

The aim is to land the thing vertically - and to use RCS to ensure that it lands vertically with zero velocity.

"How many times has SpaceX successfully landed Starship on Earth so far?"

Several, though most of those exploded - the more interesting question is: How many Falcon 9 boosters have the landed on a barge sitting in the middle of the ocean, moving with the waves?

Re: Crypto don't...

Why on earth would you think that EV load is predominantly an evening load?

Is it because you haven't taken a few seconds to look at how EVs are charged maybe?

Re: All this hand-wringing

You can be concerned about flooding and still want to supply drinking water.

EVs are very, very, different from crypto mining in *so* many ways.