CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
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The Anthropocene is a new term used by scientists to describe our age. While scientific experts argue about the start date, many point to about 200 years ago, when the accelerated effects of human activity on the ecosphere were turbocharged by the Industrial Revolution. Our planet is said to have crossed into a new epoch: from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, the age of the human.
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No, growing more food does not mean we always need more and more inputs
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‘Climateflation’ could push up UK food prices by more than a third by 2050, report says
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Starmer defends investment in wind turbines after Trump wrongly claims it is ‘most expensive form of energy’
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Most global governments have failed to act on the 2023 UN pledge to triple the world’s renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade, according to climate analysts.
The failure to act means that on current forecasts the world will fall far short of its clean energy goals, leading to a continued reliance on fossil fuels that is incompatible with the target of limiting global heating to below 1.5C.
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David Lammy faces possible legal action over Foreign Office secondments
Campaigners say placing staff from Shell and BAE Systems in ministries creates potential for improper influence
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‘Do not buy these flats’: residents warn about unbearable heat inside London new-builds
Experts say many new homes being built in the UK not designed to withstand extreme summer temperatures
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If only we knew what the cause was, and we could do something about it... \o/
A SWARM of jellyfish disabled a nuclear power plant by entering a cooling system.© The NationalAn EDF spokesperson said that a “massive and unforeseeable presence of jellyfish” paralysed the company’s plant at Gravelines, in northern France.
Crews are working to get the generator back up and running after reactors were shut down.
A spokesperson told Politico: “These shutdowns are the result of the massive and unforeseeable presence of jellyfish in the filter drums of the pumping stations, located in the non-nuclear part of the installations."
Three of the four reactors stopped working automatically late Sunday, with the fourth unit shutting down early Monday morning. The plant has six reactors in total, with each producing 5.4 gigawatts of power in total. The remaining two units are undergoing maintenance.
EDF told Politico the shutdown did not pose a threat to the safety of workers, the public or the environment.
The plant is cooled by pumping water via a canal from the North Sea. The local jellyfish population has grown in recent years due to rising sea temperatures and the water becoming more salty as well as overfishing of the animal’s natural predators.
AI didn't see that one coming?
This has also happened before at Torness.
Just goes to show that any power plant can have an outage, and the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
A combination of smaller and distributed, wind, solar, pumped-storage, and battery generation would have greater resilience
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Electricity companies are leaking millions of litres of oil underground throughout the UK, the Guardian can reveal.
In the past 15 years, 3m litres (660,000 gallons) of oil has been spilt under southern England from cables owned by the electricity distribution company UK Power Networks. But leaks are occurring UK-wide; the largest single leak reported in recent years was in Edinburgh, when 24,000 litres was spilt from a ScottishPower Energy Networks (SPEN) cable.
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LEZ in Glasgow has had beneficial effect. Also generated £1.7 million income. Even a reduction in pollution outside zone.
The council said comparing 2024 with 2022, the last full year before the introduction of the Glasgow LEZ, shows locations within the zone have observed an average reduction in annual mean NO2 of 34% whilst locations outside of the zone observed an annual reduction of 21%.Monitoring sites with the highest reduction in N02 include Saltmarket with a reduction of 48.1% and Buchanan Street at 41.3%.
Other notable reductions include George Square, 35.8%, Union Street, 36.7%, Bath Street, 39.5% and Gordon Street, 40.4%
The report said it is the first time all city centre monitoring sites have recorded full compliance since the rules were in place in 1995.
Gillespie added: “Results from automatic monitoring stations in 2024 show full compliance with the relevant objectives for all pollutants, continuing the significant reductions observed from the introduction of the Glasgow Low Emission Zone.”
Angus Millar, convener for Transport, Climate and City Centre Recovery said: “These new figures clearly show that Glasgow's Low Emission Zone is successfully tackling city centre air pollution. A one-third drop in levels of harmful nitrogen dioxide since the LEZ’s introduction means cleaner air for everyone.
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The prolonged Nordic heatwave in July was supercharged by the climate crisis and shows “no country is safe from climate change”, scientists say.
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Campaigners bringing the action are complaining that no environmental impact assessment was made for the 90MW datacentre, which was approved as part of the Labour government’s push to turn the UK into an AI powerhouse by trebling computing capacity to meet rising demand amid what it terms “a global race” as AI usage takes off.
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The energy industry has estimated the rapid adoption of AI could mean datacentres will account for a 10th of electricity demand in Great Britain by 2050, five to 10 times more than today. And while the Iver datacentre is proposed to be air-cooled, many use vast quantities of water. In March, Thames Water warned that its region was “seriously water-stressed … and yet there could be as many as 70 new datacentres in our area over the next few years, with each one potentially using upwards of 1,000 litres of water per second, or the equivalent of 24,000 homes’ usage”.A spokesperson for Greystoke said Rayner had reached the right decision and recognised that the datacentre “meets a vital national need for digital infrastructure, and will bring over £1bn of investment, transforming a former landfill site next to the M25”.
England is seriously overstressing its environment. Scotland is next. Insatiable desire for AI backed by UK Gov means higher zonal pricing (for Highlands) while renewables here work flat out (or get paid to be switched off. SSE gas power plant patch in on low wind days so effectively get paid twice?).
Local community garden gets money from SSE. Never seen the ground so dry. We can't eat AI.
Just musings on the environmental disconnect!
“Just musings on the environmental disconnect!“
Think “disconnect“ is the key word in all this.
t’s mad, oops, bad enough that ‘AI is inexorably the future and we need to help the rich companies that want to develop it rapidly as part of our “growth” agenda’.
Whether AI is a ‘good thing’ or not is largely irrelevant - it’s happening I have no idea if the currently competing options will result in a ‘winner’ meaning some data centres will become redundant (probably not).
But then I don’t how much electricity Cryptocurrencies consume.
There’s undoubtedly a disconnect between wild ambitions of the ‘let’s colonise Mars’ sort and more rational assessments of what can be done now without making things worse.
I still believe more people riding bikes more often would be a good thing.
But maybe that’s more niche than ever.
Just musing.
while renewables here work flat out (or get paid to be switched off. SSE gas power plant patch in on low wind days so effectively get paid twice?).
There is a degree of constraint in the system where the lines between the wind farms and consumers can't take any more power but there is big money and a lot of stuff being done quietly to resolve this. However gas plants often have to be running even when wind is otherwise providing 100% of the electricity to supply inertia to the system - https://www.neso.energy/energy-101/electricity-explained/how-do-we-balance-grid/what-inertia - on the east coast this comes from Torness for the moment.
There are plans afoot to provide synthetic inertia from large grid scale battery systems, the few test units being deployed in England have been hampered by nimbys...
Stop calling it AI - it is not intelligent and never will be.
Large language models (LLMs, ChatGPT etc) are exactly that, large models that produce words randomly, based on probabilities. Those probabilities are then adjusted so you hear back what you what to hear - a stochastic parrot of confident lies. That's it! No further explanation, no magic, and no intelligence.
Generative models are similar, randomly creating images based on the probability of what may surround things, with no concept or understanding of the real world - this is why you see images of trains on 3 rails, with the rails misaligned, people with missing or additional fingers, etc. No concept. No understanding.
It's complete junk, filling the internet with more junk. It's only called "AI" by tech-bros so they can keep the venture capital funds flowing.
And I reckon most of the "need" for datacentres comes from software bloat. For example, Microsoft Sharepoint storing 63 copies of exactly the same powerpoint, one for every minor change that's ever been made. There's even some arbitary limit of a maximum of 1024 changes! And that's in addition to the fact the powerpoints, Word docs, etc are already bloated in terms of the way they store data.
This country is run by morons who have no clue how anything works and keep taking the wrong decisions at every turn
From current Private Eye
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DATA FLOW
As YET another summer heatwave hit last week, the National Drought Group took a strikingly modern approach in its guidance to address England's significant water shortfall.
Alongside traditional exhortations to use a water butt and turn off taps, the group (which includes the government, water regulators and companies, the Met Office and other experts) urged people to "delete old emails and pictures, as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems".
While it's true data centres do devour water
- scientists at Oxford estimate a small data centre requires 26m litres per year to keep cool
- it's not the burden of a few old emails and jpegs driving the demand. Far more onerous is generative AI, the government's current obsession.
Keir Starmer's January blueprint to "turbocharge Al" committed to speed up planning approvals "for the rapid build-out of data centres", designating them critical national infrastructure. Planning documents indicate an estimated 100 more are due to be built in the next five years, including 28 in the area served by beleaguered Thames Water, adding an even greater burden on the country's increasingly ailing water networks. Better start deleting those photos!
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Yes. Private Eye still cuts to the chase.
So on the land not being used for data centres and solar farms we will have battery storage. Apparently 240 in Scotland already.
This from STV News is typical. Are the people 'nimbys' or do they have some justification?
Not about CC as such, but anything that puts doubt on ‘facts’ just makes arguments about ‘science’ even harder…
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Deep problems at the UK’s statistics agency with the quality of its data are piling pressure on officials in the run-up to the autumn budget, sources have told the Guardian.
Staff at the Treasury and its independent spending watchdog are struggling to get a clear picture of the economy because of troubles at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) with producing reliable numbers
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If only there was some way to meaningfully use all the waste heat. Perhaps heating a housing district via a network of pipes. It could be called a district heat network.
Of course like heat pumps the big money power doesn't like that sort of thing as it reduces our reliance on planet wrecking technologies.
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