So if you work 8-5 and only use the car to commute, what do you do in mid-winter when you travel both directions in the dark?

I imagine there is a fairly hefty cable to an 11kV or higher voltage incomer.  At best it will put some power back into the grid when it is warm and sunny and there are no customers, and take from the grid when it is gloomy and cold.

Still an improvement over no solar  generation of course, even if all it does is provide power for the restaurant and lights in the toilets, but I cannot help but smile at the way the piece is written. No mention of kilowatts or square metres, the things that would show the design details have been properly considered . Given the mails breathless journalist style, if they had the info it would be ' XX football pitches of panels', or 'saving the emissions of so many power stations'  or something.


 

Actually the  gridserve website  is equally sparse on the technical details, and looking more closely, they do not yet seem to have any completed projects at all to date, not even a plain solar farm example, so perhaps the jury is out as to if they are a serious player. I suspect given the size of the company,  after all companies house shows accounts exemptions  and the no. of situations vacant, that the business model is to try to pull in investors and then to subcontract the hard work of solving the technical details and doing the tricky sums to another company.



We know that fairly 'run of the mill'  chargers of say 7kW  need perhaps 50 square metres of panels each in  good weather and maybe ten times that to be useful when not so bright. Does not mean it cannot be done, but  some thousands of square metres of panel area will be needed for the proposed 24 charging points.


As an aside, a solar power station, say 1 gigawatt, would be 10 000 000 square metres, on a good day  (so 3km by 3km)  Again not impossible, but a serious land area.

Well, I never!


My mother, god bless her soul, was an Inland Revenue Tax Officer, crossword fan, scrabble player and believed in being very precise with her use of the English language.


Many years ago she typed, on a proper type writer without any of this spellchequer malarkey an invoice for work that my father had done for a regular customer who was a director and part owner of a substantial factory that employed a team of secretaries as well as over two hundred people in the workshops.


Apparently the invoice my mother had submitted was the subject of great debate amongst the directors and secretaries as she had used “rooves” as the plural of roof.


My mother was very defensive when she heard of the debate from my father, however today as a avid Daily Mail reader she would have had her moment of glory when she saw the label saying rooves in the illustration in that Daily Mail article.


Forty years later and after she has died there it is!


Andy B.

JRR Tolkein who, as an OED editor, knew better and said in his foreword to his books that the 'v' form was correct but he was using 'f' when he pluralised it for some reason I can't remember now

From my dim memory I think the suggestion was that the Tolkein's creatures were his own invention and not the same as dwarfs/dwarves described by any dictionary - so he was free to give them their own name (and plural thereof) - any similarity of the name being purely coincidental. I think there was a similar argument with Elves/Elfs - and the typesetters for an American version of one of the books 'correcting' the original spelling - much to JRRT's annoyance.


  - Andy.

So as an electrician do you work on the roofs or rooves on a building with more than one roof?


Andy B.

And do the cowboy builder's horses clop their hooves or hoofs ?

I have a similar grumble with the use of 'their' for singualr of indeterminate gender.


"Each child shall put their coat on a peg"

vs.

"Each child shall put her or her coat on a peg"


Problems of co-education..

One of my pet hates is the use of learned instead of learnt when it it written down, despite it being pronounced as learnt in conversation.


Anyway, regards the recharging stations, Costa is putting outlets on the motorway service area slip roads so you can grab a coffee without stopping the vehicle apart for queuing and being served, however these new recharging stations are based on the idea that you will get out of your vehicle, enter a lounge or restaurant and relax whilst enjoying refreshments, even possibly interacting with other real human beings assuming there’s not just walls of vending machines and self service tills.


Are Daily Mail readers ready for this restoration of the concept that stopping at the service area is a social event?


 Andy B.

[Ono of my pet hates is the use of enormity where very large in meant, as in "You wouldn't believe the enormity of his charitable donations" (just look it up if you don't know what it really means....)]

Well done Andy on getting the thread back on track. The real  benefit of getting drivers out of their cars in service areas is ensuring they get a rest from driving. On long journeys this is important and too few people take appropriate rests (and I can be as guilty as anyone on this). However it will be some time before electric vehicles are used for long journeys of the sort that need these breaks.

"You wouldn't believe the enormity of his charitable donations" (just look it up if you don't know what it really means....)]

Well I've learnt something today!


My pet hate is "chronic" being used as if it meant very bad - rather than just continuing for a long time.


  - Andy.