[–] 4 points 7 months ago

Oh they absolutely do! My only point is that grid supply must equal grid demand. There are many ways to achieve this, as folks here have pointed out.

Throttling power generation (turning off/disconnecting PV from grid for example), and storage (chemical, heat, or hydro battery) are all established technologies, they just need to be implemented properly to avoid supply/demand mismatch.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    If it's a low resistance path to ground, it'll get very very toasty! If it's a lousy ground though, then it won't...but it also won't consume any power, so it's not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.

    A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that...well...you can guess what will happen! (Let's hope you have proper circuit breakers.)

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (4 children)

    That is not how it works.

    When you short something to ground, it's everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what "sending it to ground" means---it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that's what it'll try to do.

    You can't just "dump power on the ground." That's not how it works.

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  • [–] 133 points 7 months ago (95 children)

    This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there's a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can't just dump grid power


    it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.

    There are of course solutions, but that doesn't mean it's not an engineering challenge to implement.

    Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I have a keyboard hotkey to take the copy/paste buffer and display a QR code on screen. Straightforward to implement on macOS, and presumably Linux too.

    macOS: pbpaste | qrencode -t ANSI

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  • [–] 23 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    You can/could also find Coffee HOWTO in your distro's HOWTO package. (I found a reference back to v0.5 of the document in 1998.)

    Has simple schematics to get you started for the hardware, using the parallel port to toggle relays.

    It's a very neat little document, and inspired me to write a simple kernel module so I could echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/whatever/coffee0 to turn pin 0 high on the parallel port. (This is silly, and it's much easier to just do things in user space!)

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