Interesting Links for 16-04-2017

[andrewducker]

This Video Made $2,418 at Auction. How Ads Work on YouTube.

(tags: video advertising youtube )

Police body cameras need strong guidelines to make sure they're used well.

(tags: transparentsociety police cameras )

What possesses young travellers from the developed world to ask people in poorer countries for money?

(tags: inequality poverty OhForFucksSake travel )

Scottish council elections 2017: How things stand and how they might change. (Very glad we use STV for voting)

(tags: scotland voting )

Want to make land use sustainable? It’s a wicked problem

(tags: environment )

Mindfulness just as effective as CBT for a broad range of psychiatric symptoms

(tags: psychology cbt mindfulness mentalhealth )

Washington state’s new 8 megawatt-hour flow battery is the largest of its kind

(tags: batteries electricity )

The last remaining person born in the 1800s has died

(tags: death time )

Church attendance in Scotland down 50% in 30 years

42% of those remaining are over 65. I wonder how sustainable this is.
(tags: Scotland religion )

Kazakhstan spells out plans for alphabet swap from Cyrillic to Latin

(tags: language kazakhstan russia )

Fearless Girl vs Charging Bull is more complicated than you'd think

(tags: art remix money advertising finance banking )

internships are acting as a barrier to social mobility

(tags: jobs work UK society )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

In my mum's village in Cornwall there is a church where the congretation became too small to sustain the minister and the building and eventually the central organisation cut it. The difficulty for them being that the building is listed and up a narrow lane and so very difficult to convert to an office or flats etc.

I think more of that sort of thing to come.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, at some point the church becomes too small to sustain itself.

I'm not sure what reserves it has at this point, or how bad its financial position is, but if it halves in size again over the next 20 years as its elderly population dies then it's going to be in real dire straits.

[danieldwilliam]

I wonder how much of its cost base is fixed.

You need one minister and one church per congregation. In cities you can knock congregations together, sell off the buildings and invest the capital in income bearing investments.

There may be an exciting opportunity for some financially driven entryism to come in about 15 years.

[andrewducker]

I would pay good money to see the Socialist Worker Party infiltrate the Church of England.

[danieldwilliam]

Looking at the Washington State battery I think (unless my mental math has deserted me, which is always possible) that

there is approximately 15,000 MW of wind power installed in the UK. This battery pack with 20 shipping units can take 2 MW (for 4 hours for a total storage of 8 MWH). Or 10 shipping containers per MW of capacity. So about 150,000 shipping containers to take the whole output from the UK's wind fleet for 4 hours.

Sadly, I'm having difficulty visualling 150,000 shipping containers.

I feel like I ought to be able to get 5 in to my flat and my building would be five stories of these high. So we'd need 6,000 of my block of flats worth of volume. Ish. I think.

[andrewducker]

Assuming we're talking 20ft shipping containers each one is about 18 cubic metres. So that's 2.7 million cubic metres in total.

Or about 60 Dinorwigs.

Any idea how many Dinorwigs we'd need to hold the same capacity?

[danieldwilliam]

I think Dinorwig can store about 9,000 MWH. That would require 1,125 systems with 22,500 shipping containers with a volume of 405,000 cubic meters.
Are you sure about the volume of Dinorwig?

Dinorwig

[andrewducker]

I went back to basics on this one, after I realised I got the size of a cargo container wrong!

Volume of a 20ft cargo container is 33 cubic meters. So 150,000 of them is 5million cubic meters.

Volume of the Dinorwig surge pool is 80x40x14, for a total of 45,000 cubic meters.

Of course, Dinorwig takes up much more space than that once you include the turbines, etc.

For a maximal size of Dinorwig we could use the excavations, which were 12 million tonnes, and about 4 million cubic meters. Which means you could fit most of those cargo containers in there, but not all of them.

I got my data from http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container#Specifications

Re: Dinorwig

[danieldwilliam]

I think the most appropriate like for like comparison is between the total excavation and the volume of the containers rather than with the surge tank.

The problem with having 60 Dinorwig is that it's difficult to find somewhere to put them. I think shipping containers are probably easier to keep around the place.