Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => OT Knowledge => Topic started by: geoff on 01 January, 2020, 01:44:11 pm
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http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
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:thumbsup:
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My fav: http://grid.iamkate.com/ (http://grid.iamkate.com/)
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My fav: http://grid.iamkate.com/ (http://grid.iamkate.com/)
The demand trend over the past seven years is interesting. What's the explanation for that?
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I would guess greater efficiency and lower electric lighting energy use.
For myself, my electricity bill now shows NO seasonal variation and I'm using less overall.
My winter lighting & heating for David's observatory seem to be almost exactly balanced by refrigeration in the summer.
I don't think washing machine use varies much.
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My fav: http://grid.iamkate.com/ (http://grid.iamkate.com/)
The demand trend over the past seven years is interesting. What's the explanation for that?
Renewable generation within the distribution zones (mostly sub 50MW installed capacity) is treated by Grid as negative demand. Peak Winter demand has been down about 10%, some of which is caused by lower usage at the meter.
The growth in small scale renewables has stalled with the removal of subsidies, but expect that to change in the next 1-2 years.
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My fav: http://grid.iamkate.com/ (http://grid.iamkate.com/)
The demand trend over the past seven years is interesting. What's the explanation for that?
Renewable generation within the distribution zones (mostly sub 50MW installed capacity) is treated by Grid as negative demand. Peak Winter demand has been down about 10%, some of which is caused by lower usage at the meter.
The growth in small scale renewables has stalled with the removal of subsidies, but expect that to change in the next 1-2 years.
So in simplistic terms, the same amount is being used but an increasing amount of that is being offset by production from rooftop solar fed into the grid? And presumably local schemes like municipal generation from waste incineration.
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http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
Interesting that they give coal one of the bigger four meters when it looks like it's about the 6th largest source this year.
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My fav: http://grid.iamkate.com/ (http://grid.iamkate.com/)
The demand trend over the past seven years is interesting. What's the explanation for that?
Renewable generation within the distribution zones (mostly sub 50MW installed capacity) is treated by Grid as negative demand. Peak Winter demand has been down about 10%, some of which is caused by lower usage at the meter.
The growth in small scale renewables has stalled with the removal of subsidies, but expect that to change in the next 1-2 years.
So in simplistic terms, the same amount is being used but an increasing amount of that is being offset by production from rooftop solar fed into the grid? And presumably local schemes like municipal generation from waste incineration.
There's been a reduction in energy use too, mainly due to more efficient lighting. I don't expect that to continue.
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My fav: http://grid.iamkate.com/ (http://grid.iamkate.com/)
The demand trend over the past seven years is interesting. What's the explanation for that?
Renewable generation within the distribution zones (mostly sub 50MW installed capacity) is treated by Grid as negative demand. Peak Winter demand has been down about 10%, some of which is caused by lower usage at the meter.
The growth in small scale renewables has stalled with the removal of subsidies, but expect that to change in the next 1-2 years.
So in simplistic terms, the same amount is being used but an increasing amount of that is being offset by production from rooftop solar fed into the grid? And presumably local schemes like municipal generation from waste incineration.
Rooftop but also most large-ish solar and onshore wind. Even a big field of solar won’t warrant Grid’s attention. They’re also not very good at forecasting - we don’t use their numbers at work and use other sources.
Demand is also down, though. More industrial and commercial than domestic - recession did for quite a lot of business and other consumption has moved off-shore.
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Ten years ago, there were still a lot of big CRT and plasma TVs. These were real energy hogs if you watched a lot of TV. There were also more desktop computers (not many people have those at home now, except for gamers) and they could pull 400W. One I had was quite useful as a space heater when the boiler packed up; I set it to work cracking Windows XP product keys all evening to keep the CPU at 100%.
I suspect incandescent lamps were also a lot more prevalent. I kept them for a few things because CFLs were so shite. Now there are decent LEDs, it's much better.
The biggest user of energy in most homes is, however, the fridge/freezer.
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Which is why there's no seasonal variation in my electricity use...
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Businesses are still using broadly similar computers (there's been some shift to laptops for office workers), but they've replaced a lot of inefficient lighting, especially in the commercial sector where CFL never replaced halogen for many applications.
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I'd have thought most offices and shops went straight from fluorescents to LEDs, and probably many are still on fluorescents. Don't know about industrial premises.
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http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
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Thanks for posting that Geoff, as well as being interesting in its own right having followed one of the links I've discovered that I can book a tour of my friendly neighborhood nuclear plant. ;D
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While offices and shops have used tubular fluorescents for general illumination since prehistoric times, halogen was the standard option for spot-lighting until quite recently, when single-LED efficacy became sufficient to replace it.
LEDs have started to replace discharge lighting in industrial/outdoor applications, though those were already relatively efficient.
(Of course, fixture reliability is another matter. But we're talking electricity demand.)
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http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
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Thanks for posting that Geoff, as well as being interesting in its own right having followed one of the links I've discovered that I can book a tour of my friendly neighborhood nuclear plant. ;D
That's great! I've just been reading about Chernobyl after watching the HBO series. So I'm experiencing mixed feelings about nukes. BTW credit where its due.. I got the link in the OP from a comment posted in the Grauniad...and thought it needed setting free over here!
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Here's the original article:
"Zero-carbon electricity outstrips fossil fuels in Britain across 2019"
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/01/zero-carbon-energy-outstrips-fossil-fuels-in-britain-across-2019?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
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http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
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This is a great resource for physics teachers, I used to use it when covering the energy generation topic. Coal use has gone down quite a bit since then!
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http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
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Thanks for posting that Geoff, as well as being interesting in its own right having followed one of the links I've discovered that I can book a tour of my friendly neighborhood nuclear plant. ;D
It's worth doing, I've done a few in both the US and UK. Admittedly, I don't need to turn the lights on after dark now. The guide at the local one in Connecticut told me the core was so safe I could kick it. So I did. The next day they had to turn it off for safety reasons.
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Businesses are still using broadly similar computers (there's been some shift to laptops for office workers), but they've replaced a lot of inefficient lighting, especially in the commercial sector where CFL never replaced halogen for many applications.
I dont know about that. Modern processors are much more power efficient than older ones. They dont get as hot as they used to and they scale theri performance when its not needed so office computers will be more efficent. You dont see CRTs anymore either.
Datacentre stuff is a lot more efficient these days. Power and cooling are one of the biggest costs in a DC. Virtulisation has seen compute estate reduced masively from hundreds of bare metal servers to far fewer servers running lots of VMs (or containers or whatever the flavour of the day is). Also the switches in DCs are a lot more efficent than they used to be, unused ASICs and optics get no power delivered to them.
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Have a look at http://www.electricitymap.org/
This shows CO2 emissions (colours from green through black) per kwh for various countries around the world. Most countries have no data. Notable dirty countries are Poland, Australia, with somewhat less dirty being various Midwest States and some of the smaller European countries. Click on a country for 24h history of CO2 and sources.
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Businesses are still using broadly similar computers (there's been some shift to laptops for office workers), but they've replaced a lot of inefficient lighting, especially in the commercial sector where CFL never replaced halogen for many applications.
I dont know about that. Modern processors are much more power efficient than older ones. They dont get as hot as they used to and they scale theri performance when its not needed so office computers will be more efficent. You dont see CRTs anymore either.
I wasn't thinking as far back as the CRT era; the graph was for about 10 years of demand. Dell Optiplex level kit has't changed that much, and spends most of its time twiddling its electronic thumbs while the user stares at Excel/Facebook.
Datacentre stuff is a lot more efficient these days. Power and cooling are one of the biggest costs in a DC. Virtulisation has seen compute estate reduced masively from hundreds of bare metal servers to far fewer servers running lots of VMs (or containers or whatever the flavour of the day is). Also the switches in DCs are a lot more efficent than they used to be, unused ASICs and optics get no power delivered to them.
Oh, sure. But has that reduced overall power demand, or has that just enabled a lot more computing to happen for the same (or increased) number of electrons? If I had to guess, I'd imagine a lot of that computing is now happening Somewhere Else, clouding (pun intended) the issue. (That's an interesting question, actually: How much of the UK's electricity demand takes place in other countries, via the internet? How would you even begin to account for that...)
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In terms of visting sites I did find the coal plant that I looked after to be the most interesting just in terms of the scale of the quite agricultural process. I was there a couple of times when the trains were offloading but also the stockpile management is fascinating. They were continually turning the stock to avoid self combustion. When we first took the contract over there was over 1m tonnes on site. I suspect the sites that have switched to biomass are pretty good, too, but I haven't had chance to see any of that large scale.
Gas and nuke are marginally less interesting. I have walked round on-shore wind farms but there's not that much difference between them. For something completely different Dinorwig is an excellent trip.
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Here's the original article:
"Zero-carbon electricity outstrips fossil fuels in Britain across 2019"
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/01/zero-carbon-energy-outstrips-fossil-fuels-in-britain-across-2019?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
Only if you class nuclear as "zero carbon".
Maybe zero carbon at the point of generation, but how much carbon involved in mining and processing the uranium, then disposing and storing it afterwards.
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I went to Dungeness A a few years ago to look at a pile of 20 foot containers. After I'd done that my host asked if I'd like a look round. That'll be a yes. In a door, wandering round a partly decommissioned nuclear power station, full of 1950s tech. What's not to like?
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Oh, sure. But has that reduced overall power demand, or has that just enabled a lot more computing to happen for the same (or increased) number of electrons? If I had to guess, I'd imagine a lot of that computing is now happening Somewhere Else, clouding (pun intended) the issue. (That's an interesting question, actually: How much of the UK's electricity demand takes place in other countries, via the internet? How would you even begin to account for that...)
It's an interesting question, I'm sure much of our power-intensive big industry has gone elsewhere. We forget that it wasn't just labour we outsourced. My mothership stuff generally runs out on Amazon servers ostensibly in Oregon (but who knows if it's physically located there, or just another layer of virtualization). Our in-house electron shuffling is in India (though, like a lot of companies these days, we're pulling out in favour of another location). In the UK, it's just laptops and the occasional server, and most of the admin stuff now runs on Azure.
But anyway, as ever we're dumping out emissions elsewhere. Be it China-manufactured Christmas tat or cloud datacentres. Out of sight, out of mind.
(I suspect we'd be a lot less keen on EVs if the cobalt, rare earths etc, where under the home counties.)
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Very good point. We've heard of offshored water consumption via industry and agriculture but it applies to all sorts of things, from electricity to waste disposal.
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Have a look at http://www.electricitymap.org/
This shows CO2 emissions (colours from green through black) per kwh for various countries around the world. Most countries have no data. Notable dirty countries are Poland, Australia, with somewhat less dirty being various Midwest States and some of the smaller European countries. Click on a country for 24h history of CO2 and sources.
Even Poland has plans to clean up its electricity generation, but by building at least one nuclear power station rather turbines or solar. I expect renewables are for gays and Muslims. But what's most noticeable about that map is how few countries actually have figures.
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I went to Dungeness A a few years ago to look at a pile of 20 foot containers. After I'd done that my host asked if I'd like a look round. That'll be a yes. In a door, wandering round a partly decommissioned nuclear power station, full of 1950s tech. What's not to like?
I used to do the health and safety for part of a previous company the did stuff at Harwell, spent one afternoon being given a tour of one of the early experimental reactors by the archetypal mad scientist. It was fascinating, but you also got a sense of just how seat of the pants some of it was.
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Here's the original article:
"Zero-carbon electricity outstrips fossil fuels in Britain across 2019"
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/01/zero-carbon-energy-outstrips-fossil-fuels-in-britain-across-2019?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
Only if you class nuclear as "zero carbon".
Maybe zero carbon at the point of generation, but how much carbon involved in mining and processing the uranium, then disposing and storing it afterwards.
The figures used at the website I linked to above are:
12g/kWh for nuclear.
11g/kWh for wind.
45g/kWh for solar PV.
230g/kWh for biomass.
490g/kWh for gas.
820g/kWh for coal.
I'd say the first three are effectively zero, given the relatively high values for the others.
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My son's doing his maths homework. What's that got to do with electricity generation? He's using a calculator which is powered solely by a PV panel. Presumably it has some sort of rechargeable battery, capacitor or other storage device, but there's no external source of power. And when I bought it for him (four or five years ago), all calculators were like this. Whereas when I was at school, a few calculators had solar panels but they were just additional to a battery. An indication of how much more efficient PV has become. (They are also much cheaper than when I was at school, but that's presumably down to China.)
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My son's doing his maths homework. What's that got to do with electricity generation? He's using a calculator which is powered solely by a PV panel. Presumably it has some sort of rechargeable battery, capacitor or other storage device, but there's no external source of power. And when I bought it for him (four or five years ago), all calculators were like this. Whereas when I was at school, a few calculators had solar panels but they were just additional to a battery. An indication of how much more efficient PV has become. (They are also much cheaper than when I was at school, but that's presumably down to China.)
It's not just PV that has become more efficient - you can have way more processing power per Watt now than in the past, so you can have a much more functional device on very limited power.
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That makes sense. Presumably that would also be a factor (along with Far Eastern mass manufacturing and increased global demand) why items like this are so much cheaper than 30-odd years ago?
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I met with a solar developer just before Christmas. Subsidies for new-build solar disappeared some time ago and new projects have been thin since then. In the meantime the cost of PV has come down so much that they can now work unsubsidised at the current, albeit depressed, wholesale market prices. I'd expect more new build to roll out during 2020 and 2021 provided there isn't a further down-shift in wholesale prices.
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That makes sense. Presumably that would also be a factor (along with Far Eastern mass manufacturing and increased global demand) why items like this are so much cheaper than 30-odd years ago?
Except when they conspicuously aren't. I'd previously noticed that the development of calculators seemed to have stagnated in the late 90s (which sort-of makes sense, in a world with ubiquitous fully-functional desktop/pocket computers, the niche for physical calculators is basically the extreme low-end, and exam/classroom-legality).
Not having experience of the USAnian edumacation system, I didn't realise that this was going on, though:
https://gen.medium.com/big-calculator-how-texas-instruments-monopolized-math-class-67ee165045dc
(As for the shift to solar for calculators, I suspect that's more about low-power electronics and avoiding the cost or shipping/shelf-life issues of batteries than developments in photovoltaics. They're hardly cutting-edge stuff. My first calculator in about 1987 was a purely solar-powered four-banger, though the scientific ones we had at secondary school mostly ran on lithium cells (occasional dual-power model), and programmable/graphing calculators ate AAAs[1].)
[1] I recall a mathmo friend draining the batteries in a couple of hours trying to get it to render the Mandelbrot set.
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Mandating a specific model of calculator is a bit like mandating sources of school uniform here. Anyway, the calculator I bought when he started secondary school cost a tenner. I remember calculators costing at least £10 in the early 80s. And I remember precisely one person in my class having a solar powered calculator (on which the display faded if you covered up the panel with a sheet of paper). I don't think there was a shipping cost to batteries back then, you had to buy your own separately.
The late 90s was a different world. By then we had all sorts of stuff like mobile phones and email squeezy-powered torches which were just sci-fi in the early 80s (even if they did actually really exist).
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It works similarly for textbooks, publishers lobby hard to tie a book to a curriculum and make sure updated editions quickly deprecate previous versions so students have to keep buying new ones.
I confess that I never bought any books at university, which is why I'm as clever as I am.
I seem to recall our school recommended a Casio something or other. I'm sure it was solar-powered. Had a mysterious RAD feature which turned out to be less than billed.
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I still remember being hugely excited when I got the Ti-30 Galaxy I asked for for Christmas. Lasted all the way through my A-levels and to University.
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School didn't care about calculators, though they got wise to the fact that a programmable calculator could be used to carry arbitrary information into exams about halfway through my A-levels, at which point they mandated that any brought into the exam hall would have to be hard-reset in front of an invigilator. I recall buying a bag of 2.5mm jack plugs from Maplin (back in the days that they were good) and making up some Casio crossover cables at a fraction of the price of the official ones, so people could copy programs to each other's calculators and avoid losing them. There was a brief games/demo scene amongst the higher maths and physics sets.
Brizzle University (or at least the engineering faculty) had a list of authorised models, and I promptly invested in the most functional model on the list. (The only real benefits over a typical scientific model were a one-line edit history, which was a useful error-check, and numerical integration, which was much less useful than it sounds.)
I vaguely recall that UKC issued all first years CS student with their exam-legal model which they bought in bulk at a hefty discount. I didn't get one, as I went straight into the second year, but the Brizzle one was fine.
My CFX9850 has barely been used since uni. I've probably dusted it off a couple of times as a convenient out-of-band way of converting between binary, decimal and hex, but I've forgotten how to do anything clever with it.
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Not having experience of the USAnian edumacation system, I didn't realise that this was going on, though:
https://gen.medium.com/big-calculator-how-texas-instruments-monopolized-math-class-67ee165045dc
That's terrible.
The nearest equivalent that I recall is the HP 12c calculators which were required use by people who worked at Bain, the management consulting firm, but were basically big chunks of weird American kit that nobody else could work out how to use.
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My dad had a Casio FX7000G and I borrowed that for later years at secondary school. I remember writing a horse racing game for it with 6 lines slowly inching randomly towards the other side of the screen.
University didn't allow anything that could draw graphs so it was a generic Casio FX-mumble. I still have it somewhere but, like most things like this, my 10yo squirrels it away for herself in her room.
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Not having experience of the USAnian edumacation system, I didn't realise that this was going on, though:
https://gen.medium.com/big-calculator-how-texas-instruments-monopolized-math-class-67ee165045dc
That's terrible.
The nearest equivalent that I recall is the HP 12c calculators which were required use by people who worked at Bain, the management consulting firm, but were basically big chunks of weird American kit that nobody else could work out how to use.
I still see those on desks of colleagues who came from US offices or companies. No idea how they work.
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One of my classmates, to celebrate the completion of our maths O level (obviously optimistic about resits) chucked his Casio out the window.
Where it hit the deputy-head, appropriately, on the head. The calculator didn't break and the teacher lived to issue stern words about tossing stuff out the window.
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I still have a credit card sized (fold out) Casio calculator that is solar powered. It was purchased in 1987. Still works, no worries about mercury batteries being banned etc.
It does metric to Imperial conversion too!
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I had a Sinclair Programmable calculator at one time - 1970s I think it was. Quite fun for a while. I recall programming ti to churn out the Fibonacci sequence, but the buttons were susceptible to conking out. They were "clicky" buttons, unlike the much more reliable "soft" buttons that more modern calculators have.
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I had a Sinclair Programmable calculator at one time - 1970s I think it was. Quite fun for a while. I recall programming ti to churn out the Fibonacci sequence, but the buttons were susceptible to conking out. They were "clicky" buttons, unlike the much more reliable "soft" buttons that more modern calculators have.
Clicking calcluator buttons! That takes me back. At one point that was a very important issue. People lost sleep over whether their new calculator would be allowed in exams on noise grounds.
IIRC Casios had lovely soft buttons and Texas Instruments were clicky and clunky
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While we're being retro, and keeping with the electricity theme, the main maths department lecture theatre at UKC had (or possibly still has, though there was an outbreak of builders after I left, so it's unlikely) benches with mains power sockets, akin to a physics lab. This was due to the forward-thinking designers anticipating that electronic calculators would become common.
To be fair, for the period in the early noughties between laptop computers becoming affordable to students and their battery life being vaguely decent, they pretty much got it right.
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There was a mains-powered calculator in one of the maths rooms at college. It display was incandescent wires, each decimal place having enough wires to generate all 10 digits. It was about the size of a typewriter and I think it could calculate square roots, but it took a fair bit of time to come up with an answer.
We also had a dial-up connection to a computer. it was via pulse dialling. You had to put the receiver in a special cradle so that our terminal could talk to the computer, which I think was in Preston Polytechnic, or it might have been Lancaster Uni. i found that telephone very useful for making calls on. It had a little lock on the dial, but I knew where the key was...
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It display was incandescent wires, each decimal place having enough wires to generate all 10 digits.
Nixie tubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA
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About 20 years ago, flipping channels, I caught the end of some classic BBC sitcom of the 70s. Maybe The Two Ronnies? A long time ago but also a long time after its original showing. One of the Ronnies (the little one, if indeed it was the Ronnies*) was in an office when a mystery parcel arrived, which turned out to be a calculator similar to what Wow describes, accountants for the use of.
*Makes them almost sound like a Motown girl group.
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But that's got nothing to do with electricity generation. What fool introduced the subject of calculators? Oh!
(Modern TVs must also consume less electricity than their CRT ancestors, but this might be offset by the additional energy and resources used in making them and transporting them, due to their size, and the additional time we spend watching them. Which is also time we spend not doing other things with other people.)
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Modern TVs must also consume less electricity than their CRT ancestors, but this might be offset by the additional energy and resources used in making them and transporting them, due to their size, and the additional time we spend watching them. Which is also time we spend not doing other things with other people.
Ignoring plasma as a temporary aberration (those things were basically convection heaters), for television (rather than computer monitors, which have generally remained fits-sensibly-on-your-desk size) I reckon it's a case of what LCD giveth, screen area taketh away.
Of course we spend a lot less time watching telly than we did in the CRT area, but many of the activities that have displaced it involve similar amounts of electricity consumption.
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I doubt if we spend less time telly watching now. There are so many ways to watch it! Not just cable and satellite but things like Netflix and Prime. And then there are those things like Wii, which use a TV screen but aren't TV.
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Back to calculators, when I was at school I had a Casio fx-39
https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/113700515681?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=710-134428-41853-0&mkcid=2&itemid=113700515681&targetid=910044633967&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=1006766&poi=&campaignid=1669190336&mkgroupid=88374263757&rlsatarget=pla-910044633967&abcId=578896&merchantid=113601272&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4r7yq6eD5wIVh63tCh0uiw1eEAQYBSABEgLRZ_D_BwE (https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/113700515681?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=710-134428-41853-0&mkcid=2&itemid=113700515681&targetid=910044633967&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=1006766&poi=&campaignid=1669190336&mkgroupid=88374263757&rlsatarget=pla-910044633967&abcId=578896&merchantid=113601272&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4r7yq6eD5wIVh63tCh0uiw1eEAQYBSABEgLRZ_D_BwE)
The interesting feature, which made it dual purpose, was that it had a Vacuum Fluorescent Display. Not only can it do 'hard sums', but also you can hide under your blankets at night and read books by its gentle glow - long after your parents believe you should be asleep.
Given my -9 optical prescription, I have always encouraged my own children to keep their lights on when they want to read. As a consequence they seem to drop off much later than I do these days, but I ope they will have better vision than I had prior to my cataract replacement.
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I doubt if we spend less time telly watching now. There are so many ways to watch it! Not just cable and satellite but things like Netflix and Prime. And then there are those things like Wii, which use a TV screen but aren't TV.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/269918/daily-tv-viewing-time-in-the-uk-by-age/
I'd like to see a longer term graph. I remember routinely watching television out of boredom as a child. Haven't done that since The Great Our-Favourite-Teclo Dispute of 2007. I watch plenty of video, be it films, or YouTube or even occasionally live broadcast television, but since it competes with general spodding, the Wikipedia random article button and indeed gaming, it tends to be something I'm actively choosing to watch. It's massively easier to find something worth watching these days, but I find myself watching less and less.
OTOH, there are plenty of people, probably increasingly older demographics, who still use television[1] as wallpaper.
[1] Using radio as wallpaper is obviously completely different(!) and not something the middle classes tend to get snobby about.
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In my first job in the motor industry in the late 60's, the office calculator was a mains-powered device that chuntered away. If a division by zero was attempted, it went into an eternal loop. The remedy was to unplug and return to the cupboard for the next user to deal with it.
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It display was incandescent wires, each decimal place having enough wires to generate all 10 digits.
Nixie tubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA
Jurek knows about those I think.
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I doubt if we spend less time telly watching now. There are so many ways to watch it! Not just cable and satellite but things like Netflix and Prime. And then there are those things like Wii, which use a TV screen but aren't TV.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/269918/daily-tv-viewing-time-in-the-uk-by-age/
I'd like to see a longer term graph.
All I can see of that graph is a fairly level purple (might be blue to you ;)) line at the top and a big splodge asking me to pay "only $59 a month". I'll just take your word for it. :D
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Back to calculators, when I was at school I had a Casio fx-39
https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/113700515681?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=710-134428-41853-0&mkcid=2&itemid=113700515681&targetid=910044633967&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=1006766&poi=&campaignid=1669190336&mkgroupid=88374263757&rlsatarget=pla-910044633967&abcId=578896&merchantid=113601272&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4r7yq6eD5wIVh63tCh0uiw1eEAQYBSABEgLRZ_D_BwE (https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/113700515681?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=710-134428-41853-0&mkcid=2&itemid=113700515681&targetid=910044633967&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=1006766&poi=&campaignid=1669190336&mkgroupid=88374263757&rlsatarget=pla-910044633967&abcId=578896&merchantid=113601272&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4r7yq6eD5wIVh63tCh0uiw1eEAQYBSABEgLRZ_D_BwE)
That was the weapon of choice for maths when I was at school as well. We all traded in our slide rules for one of those.
For A-level maths I was bought a Sharp EL-506P which I had for about twenty years before it died.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-Sharp-Calculator-EL-506P/143500736825?hash=item21694f7939:g:Dt0AAOSwDUJc~m95
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It display was incandescent wires, each decimal place having enough wires to generate all 10 digits.
Nixie tubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA
That's them!
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I can't remember which thread it was where it was mentioned that total demand is a lot lower now, but anyway.
Peak system demand 10years ago was 59.5GW. This Winter's looks like it is going to be sub 45GW.