We have solar in Finland as well, like everyone else. Yes, it's useless in winter. Yes, the expansion has slowed down, because there is no storage and limited export options.
The Nordic power market is a mess, and it's not because solar doesn't work in winter but because the grid needs massive investments on all levels and nobody wants to be left holding the bill for it.
Electrification? Sure, I'll buy an EV when the _local_ grid operator makes sure my lights don't flicker when the neighbor uses an angle grinder. The last update was that they plan to replace the old transformer station from the 60's "when it breaks".
Local generation? Can't get rid of the excess generation if I wanted to.
Is Denmark's power grid expansion still geared at selling Swedish electricity to the Germans?
Sweden? No internal transfer capacity so their consumers have constant high prices while power is exported cheaply.
Indeed, and large parts of the reason has nothing to do with geography. The same applies to Denmark and the rest of the Nordics.
Obviously solar will be decreasingly useful as you get further to the pole, but the Nordics aren't worse off than Alaska or Canada in that regard, and both do solar to some extent AFAIK.
It has lot to do with geographic latitude and weather patterns. The amount of electric output per amount solar installed strongly affects the profitability of solar installation (if you don't count of government subsidies).
And summer isn't when you need the power anyway, so its very inefficient since northern winters has barely any sunlight at all, its close to 0 from solar power then. In warmer countries you want power in the summer for AC during the day, so there it matches usage, but in northern countries solar isn't very useful at all.
> but the Nordics aren't worse off than Alaska or Canada in that regard
Nordics are much further north than Canada, most Canadians live further south than Paris and Paris is a lot further south than even Denmark that is much further south than Finland.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
In some countries it's not just "unethical", but outright illegal. Laws and rules vary, but all is equal to the spam button and the whims of those wielding it.
30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.
Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.
The claim above of 30 is not particularly important, the point is to lean on the community. Millions a year would get you incredibly far. Many are already helping for free.
24/7 linux webservers existed already by the late nineties.
"Helping for free" doesn't cut it when dealing with governments. Even if everyone had gone the Linux route 20 years ago we'd still have an entire ecosystem of commercial businesses selling and operating it; imagine what Red Hat would look like with Microsoft actually out of the picture.
We'd have just as many consultancy firms and layers of beuraucracy without Microsoft, and France wouldn't be operating their entire government IT stack, all the way down to individual workstations, that much cheaper than it is now.
The difference is that because of open-source there would be competition in those services. And they could take any of it in house at a discount with reasonably priced govt workers. IOW, they'd have choices instead of handcuffs.
They'd be in better situation on all counts. It pays to think ahead to the future and remove dependencies. Where do you want to be in five years? Still in an abusive relationship?
Finland's fertility rate drove off a cliff in the 60's like in so many other countries. If sauna has an overall effect we wouldn't know as we've nothing to compare with -- going to sauna is rather universal and the tradition is ancient.
> Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal.
Not all power users. Some re-invent the wheel and/or do things inefficiently, and in most cases there's no business incentive to adapt the service to fit the usage patterns of those users, or of other users that deviate from the norm in regards to resource usage.
There is a point to be made about short-sightedness on the manufacturers' part; if the infrastructure needs to be improved then short-term profits should be reduced in order to ensure long-term sustainability.
But yes, at least where I live, there's a major infrastructure problem that nobody -- consumers included -- want to pay for, and for a lot of us EV's aren't an option until said infrastructure has been upgraded.
we were decoding 480x320 MP4 on PalmOS 5 devices in early 2000. Those were single-core in-order 200mhz ARM devices with no accelerators at all. Pentium M outperforms those easily and thus can do it too.
The Nordic power market is a mess, and it's not because solar doesn't work in winter but because the grid needs massive investments on all levels and nobody wants to be left holding the bill for it.
Electrification? Sure, I'll buy an EV when the _local_ grid operator makes sure my lights don't flicker when the neighbor uses an angle grinder. The last update was that they plan to replace the old transformer station from the 60's "when it breaks".
Local generation? Can't get rid of the excess generation if I wanted to.
Is Denmark's power grid expansion still geared at selling Swedish electricity to the Germans?
Sweden? No internal transfer capacity so their consumers have constant high prices while power is exported cheaply.
Norway? Geo-blocked by Sweden.
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