Category: uk

Powerless

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Here: Kriel Power Station falls over and takes 2000MW with it, because of [checks notes] “heavy mist”:

Reminiscent of this or this.

And there: after the local joy that was felt at loadshedding almost happening in Australia last month, it turns out that the UK only just avoided the same fate last week.

Struggling with an aging and long underfunded national grid that was crying out for investment and updating (sound familiar), there was almost not enough electricity to go around last week, and loadshedding was only avoided by paying a frankly ridiculous price to secure some electricity from Belgium:

On July 20, surging electricity demand collided with a bottleneck in the grid, leaving the eastern part of the British capital briefly short of power. Only by paying a record high £9,724.54 (about $11,685) per megawatt hour — more than 5,000% higher than the typical price — did the UK avoid homes and businesses going dark. That was the nosebleed cost to persuade Belgium to crank up aging electricity plants to send energy across the English Channel.

Sounds like a lot anyway, but then especially when you compare it to what they usually pay:

The absurdity of that level is apparent when comparing it with the year-to-date average for UK spot electricity: £178 per megawatt hour.

We don’t have the luxury[?] of a Belgium right next door, so we couldn’t have lobbed out the R196,611.50 /MWh that would have been required to keep the lights on. So our lights would have gone off (like they probably will this evening), and like the UK’s very nearly did:

If Belgium had not helped, the grid would had been forced to “undertake demand control and disconnect homes from electricity,” says a grid spokesperson.

Of course:

“Demand control” = “Rolling blackouts” = “Loadshedding” = “Misery”

Thus, it can be deduced that when it comes to shaky electricity systems, the UK, Australia and SA are all basically the same, but our local (occasional) electricity provider is the only one that follows through on actually flicking the off switch.

Back to it (and it’s hot back home)

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After a couple of really awful days, today has been… less awful. I still have no voice, and am subject to painful coughing fits, but things are slowly improving. I have more hope for tomorrow.

Back in the UK, all the news (apart from all the other news) has been about the record-breaking temperatures. It looked like Sheffield – SHEFFIELD! – might even get up towards 40C today. That’s quite literally unheard of. Clearly, something is up. And yet, the climate change deniers (you may recognise them from being anti-vax/pro-Trump/pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine on any given day of any week) have stuck their oar in again with the old:

Lol. So this is “climate change”, is it?
We used to call it “summer”.

Oh yes. I remember the summers of my youth in Sheffield, where it regularly got up to 40C and the trams had to stop running because the overhead lines were being damaged by the heat. That happened every summer. And you couldn’t escape it, because – just like Brize Norton and Luton yesterday – the runways at the airports had all melted. That’s a typical UK summer, alright! Just what we’re known for. When someone says “English summer”, it’s always melty runways and over-stretched power lines that spring immediately to mind, amirite?

Even Ireland joined the party, recording it’s hottest day in over 100 years yesterday, and then it’s hottest day in 24 hours, today.

Temperature records have been kept in Sheffield since 1882, and while a couple of hot days as a standalone can’t be used as evidence that things are heating up generally, it’s interesting to note that the record temperature has been broken today (39.4C still TBC), yesterday (36.1C) and then in 2019 (35.1C). Before that day (25th July) in 2019, the previous highest temperature was 34.3C (1990).

Now, I recognise that these records can obviously only go up, but it’s more the speed at which they are going up which is the interesting/scary part.

Here’s a graph from 2019 which shows the gradual increase in mean temperatures in Sheffield:

…together with the maximum and minimums for each year. And those are all trending upwards.
We’ve now just seen that maximum increase by more than 5 degrees in less than 3 years. I’ve added today’s new record in as a red dot, so you can see just how much of an increase it really is. Incredible.

The climate deniers – being experts, like they are in Eurasian geopolitics (last month), vaccine development (last year) and supporting the fat orange man (since 2016) – will tell you that these things aren’t significant, but there’s actually only so many times you can dismiss these increasingly occurring events as “not significant”, before you have to come to see that in sheer numbers alone, they actually are very significant.

But this is just another wake-up call to ignore.

A note: I still don’t think that the media helps the understanding and gravitas of the situation by publishing “scare stories” and hyperbole about climate change. It belittles the situation and provides plenty of ammunition to those who want us to ignore what’s going on. So please stop doing that. [laughs]

Pack up your things, kids…

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…we’re headed for Wet Wipe Island!

OK, so the headline is accurate in so much as an MP – Fleur Anderson – did apparently say that, but it’s still a bit clickbaity: the “major English river” is the Thames; and it’s still a bit sensational: the “changing course” thing sadly hasn’t meant that the whole of Fulham has flooded or anything like that.
But still, there is a Wet Wipe Island according to Anderson:

There’s an island the size of two tennis courts, and I’ve been and stood on it — it’s near Hammersmith Bridge in the Thames, and it’s a metre deep or more in places of just wet wipes. It’s actually changed the course of the Thames.

Thankfully, as a family, we’re now well passed the wet wipe stage, but I completely agree that they are horrible things. I’ve had to unblock a drain clogged with them and they are pretty much indestructible. I would fully support a ban on them – especially now that it would have absolutely no effect on my life.

So yes, they’re awful and they don’t biodegrade, but there might be more to this story that no-one has noticed. Plenty of other things – biodegradable or not – float down the Thames on a daily basis, so if this island is truly made up solely of wet wipes, then it does (to me, at least) suggest that they may somehow have become sentient and are gathering for a potential attack on the city. Otherwise, how have they managed to conglomerate with such precision and at the exclusion of all other flotsam and jetsam?
Fulham might not be flooded yet, but an army of wet wipes (possibly controlled by demons?) (just a working theory) forming numerous wet wipe islands and eventually blocking the Thames would certainly cause major issues for London.

Look, I’m not saying that that’s what’s happening. All I’m saying is just to keep an eye on this story.

And to stop using wet wipes.

Interesting graph

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From a famous mathematician.

Your chances of sharing a space with someone who is Covid positive, based on a given prevalence of Covid in the local population and a given number of people in the space:

So (using the arrow as an example), when 7% of the local population have the virus, if you share a space (supermarket, pub, restaurant, SA taxi) with about 20 people, there’s a 50% chance that at least one of them will be Covid positive.

For those that are interested in the maths, I’ve calculated the probability of at least one person in the room having Covid as 1-(1-p/200)^N Where p is the population prevalence as a percentage and N is the number of other people in the space.

In the UK at the moment, prevalence is somewhere around 4%: 1 in 25 people are positive. And that means that if you are packed tightly in any given space together with any more than about 90 people, there will be at least one of you who is positive…

Oh. Oh dear.

And yet there are still no precautions of any sort being put in place. Quite bizarre

Of course there are a few terms and conditions to Kit’s graph.
Some people might isolate if they are Covid positive. Some people might be Covid positive but asymptomatic. Some people might not have bothered getting tested, so they won’t know if they’re positive or not. All of these might affect the assumed prevalence.

And then, of course, just because you share a space with someone who is Covid positive doesn’t mean you’ll get infected (although, see headline above). That will depend on the size of the space (and therefore your proximity), the amount of time you and they spend in the space, the ventilation in the space and – of course – whether either (or both) of you is wearing a mask.

But it’s a super useful tool for just showing how likely any of us is to be sitting next door to someone who is positive. Lovely stats. Only mildly scary.