Posts by Paul Stephenson

@John

As i understand it you can't over produce on the grid, supply has to equal demand, hence the need for peaking plants, etc, instant on hydro and the likes for when we have shortfall.

technical problem?

How the hell does a technical problem result in a laptop being knicked?

I suspect that this will not be a front page spread in thier own paper, unlike when anyone else loses similar information :)

@Steve

I'm sure a legoman would be adequate for mini-me, compared to playmobil figures. :)

local spending

They could stipulate in the terms of the agreement that contract work has to be local too, and supplies where possible locally sourced so the majority of the $362M goes into the local economy.

Teeth

Agree'd, the new blood better have some teeth and give this 'outfit' a good shake up.

@pctechxp

You seemed to have missed the point that they fail _safe_, and no one bit of kit has only two sensors. I forget the technical term for it but you would normally have three sensors arranged in a way so that you always count on the response of the majority and not a single individual or the three as a whole. So essentially if a sensor said "hey ho meltdown ahoy!" the site would fail safe faster than a really really fast thing!

I would suspect in the case of a meltdown a whole bunch of sensors would be going damnwell crazy.

Sadly, the cheese eating surrender monkey's have a modern fleet of nuke running already, so they kinda have the edge on experience.

Been to the FHC site (well, Dinorwig), very interesting place but actually a net consumer of electrickery, which is a bit of a mind screw when it's a power station.

Likely to be seperate lans.

I'd have expected, and was confirmed above by someone that the grid control system and office networks are seperate networks, as is typical of pretty much every powerstation in the UK, it certainly is at the one I work in. If it wasn't - i'd be worried that they sit users on the same network as the control system. There is also a whole other DR site dedicated to controlling the grid, which if they both shared a central infrastructure would kinda defeat the purpose of DR.....

I've thankfully never experienced an outsourced infrastructure, but for friends who have it's generally a horror story.

Went to NGC HQ once, 'mission control' (real name unknown but its the grid managmeent room) is a cool place, very James Bond esque :)