WEBVTT NOTE Transcript 2024-04-12 from FLAC by https://elvery.net/prototypes/transcribe/ on my MacBook Air M1 on maximum quality setting. NOTE Body edited. 00:00.000 --> 00:02.000 Diarycast 00:02.000 --> 00:07.000 [INTRO MUSIC] 00:07.000 --> 00:17.000 Hi, I'm Damon Hart-Davis, and welcome to Earth Notes podcast on all things eco and green and efficient at home! 00:17.000 --> 00:30.000 14th November 2021. A brief scoot through the last five months at EOU Towers since census mid-June from Covid to low wind to storage upgrades. 00:30.000 --> 00:41.000 Coronavirus persists in the background with my daughter isolating at home in June (during exam week, annoyingly) through "Freedom Day" in July lifting most of the social-distancing [legal] restrictions, 00:41.000 --> 00:47.000 both children getting a single Pfizer vaccination dose in October, to another free flu jab for me. 00:47.000 --> 00:53.000 The abnormally high electricity usage of lockdown is clearly visible in my graphs too. 00:53.000 --> 01:00.000 More positively, yesterday's COP26 concluded with some useful (though insufficient) progress. 01:00.000 --> 01:05.000 7th July: yes, "demand pickups" are still a thing on the GB grid... 01:05.000 --> 01:10.000 Substantial demand pickups were reported by the GB National Grid ESO: 01:10.000 --> 01:20.000 #ENGDEN saw our control room register steep half and full-time pickups of 1400 MW and 1300 MW 01:20.000 --> 01:24.000 (the ad breaks meant fewer people staying put during half time). 01:24.000 --> 01:27.000 We also saw a third pickup at extra time. 01:27.000 --> 01:31.000 16th July: the first 'summer' day this year in my humble opinion; 01:31.000 --> 01:39.000 sunny all day, I sat out in a pub garden in the evening sun in a t-shirt without shivering, and slept under a sheet rather than a duvet! 01:39.000 --> 01:45.000 Also my hair is now long enough to form a short ponytail and mere ten-ish months in. 01:45.000 --> 01:53.000 24th July: we took a week's holiday in Herne Bay, and I recorded some ambience for an earlier podcast episode. 01:54.000 --> 01:58.000 [gulls and sea] 02:23.000 --> 02:31.000 15th August: I put the bat detector at my study window this evening for the first time in a long, long time, and heard a couple of passes. 02:31.000 --> 02:34.000 I haven't spent enough time with bats this year. 02:34.000 --> 02:39.000 1st of September: I recorded some ambient brewery noise today. 02:39.000 --> 02:47.000 I took a relatively uninterrupted stretch, excluding for example the parts when people were asking if they had to mind their language because of the recording. 02:47.000 --> 03:36.000 [brewery noises including clanging of metal barrels] 03:26.000 --> 03:36.000 A lot of storage upgrades happened in September and October, off grid and grid connected. 03:36.000 --> 03:44.000 3rd of September: I replaced the off grid battery storage 12 volt battery bank as the old one had done about 10 years and was flagging. 03:44.000 --> 03:54.000 The new 'bank' is a single 220Ah 12V unit which I think will be a better match than the old one for the energy available and the load. 03:54.000 --> 04:06.000 15th of September: the Enphase grid-coupled storage was doubled to what I thought would be a sensible maximum for 16WW after lots of analysis and beard-stroking. 04:06.000 --> 04:18.000 28th of October: the Enphase storage was doubled again to about 5kWh capacity and 1kW peak power after an offer of some second-hand units. 04:18.000 --> 04:24.000 Though connected physically on the day, it came online fully on the afternoon of 1st of November. 04:24.000 --> 04:28.000 Expect analysis and even sonification in due course! 04:28.000 --> 04:45.000 The GB grid suffered in August/September from something like a 70-year low in wind, and the resulting drop in wind generation combined with very high natural gas prices, and a fire in the IFA1 French interconnector, caused a certain amount of excitement in the electricity system. 04:45.000 --> 04:51.000 Our electricity unit price rose from about 25p to 35p. 04:51.000 --> 05:02.000 6th of November: 16WW central heating went on today noon-ish, so better than our default 1st November target, but not up to last year's 1st December record. 05:02.000 --> 05:12.000 7th of November: some Twitter-based peer review resulted in significant improvements in the REutils project GB carbon-intensity tweets! 05:12.000 --> 05:18.000 The static image has been removed from the tweet, and the tweet text now starts with the computed intensity. 05:18.000 --> 05:26.000 There are lots of links in the episode page at Earth Notes, and more diary entries and images in the show notes too. 05:26.000 --> 05:38.000 There's more on my Earth Notes Web site at Earth.Org.UK.