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grid · load-shedding · kayole · fusion · nairobi
Six nights and no siren in Kayole — I want to write down what that sounds like before I get used to it
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator2124-08-15
This is not a mod note. I am putting the tag down for one post and writing as somebody who lives in Kayole. The siren on our feeder used to go at about twenty to eight most evenings, and you learn to hear it the way you hear a kettle. My mother starts the rice at half six so it is off the ring before the cut. The neighbour two doors down runs an oxygen concentrator for his wife and keeps a hand torch on top of the machine; that torch has lived on top of that machine for four years. Six nights now, no siren. The rice was late twice and it did not matter. On the third night I watched him carry the torch back to the drawer, and then I watched him take it out an hour later and put it back where it lives, because nobody believes six nights. That is the whole report. Grace Wanjiru, who supervises our feeder and is not a woman given to poetry, put the limit on it herself before any of us could get carried away: one machine bought this district its evenings back, it did not buy the country a new floor. The corridor towns downstream on our same line are still on the rota. I noticed that while I was enjoying the quiet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise just because the quiet is mine.
BK
baseload_kestrel ↩ gridghost_pax2124-08-15
gridghost_pax, I traded that machine and I am not going to be coy about it. I had the sync inside my posted range of dates, I had the probability out in public before it printed, and the reconnected book paid for it. I can tell you my entry, my basis, and the exact hour the spread collapsed. I can tell you that Okonkwo saying past 31 percent moved capacity forwards about as much as I priced and no more. What I cannot tell you — and I have spent an afternoon trying, which is not a sentence I enjoy typing — is which feeder my share of that curve actually landed on. The market clears at the interconnection. It does not clear at your neighbour's drawer. Call it 84 percent that your corridor towns are still on the rota when the heat comes round again, and I would not want the other side of that bet at any price, which is a way of saying I think it is nearer certain than I am comfortable printing. Enjoy the six nights. Somebody bought them for you and it was not the market, it was a queue you did not stand in.
OW
offgrid_wren ↩ gridghost_pax2124-08-15
I am glad for your mother and I mean that without any edge in it. But listen to what you just wrote: six nights and the man still puts the torch back on the machine. His body knows what the press release does not. A thing that can be given to a district in a week can be taken from it in an afternoon, and the taking will be a scheduling decision made by people whose evenings were never on the rota. That is not a grid, it is a tenancy. And the corridor those towns are waiting on is worse — the desalination plant that fills it eats about a third of the power it takes just to make the water, so the same machine you are all celebrating is upstream of your thirst as well as your light, and now both of them arrive by permission. My second sowing of beans is up and the barrel off the north roof actually took water this week, and neither of those asked anyone for a schedule.
TO
tidewrench_oksana ↩ offgrid_wren2124-08-15
offgrid_wren, the number is wrong and I am going to give you the right one because you will use it better than you will use the wrong one. A modern reverse-osmosis train makes a cubic metre of fresh water on roughly three to four kilowatt-hours. It is the moving that costs — over a long inland spur the pumping is frequently the bigger half of the total energy, which is why the corridor engineers argue about lift and pressure schedules and nobody outside the trade ever hears about it. Source: my own commissioning reports for two stations and the corridor's published pressure schedule, which anyone can pull. So your point survives, it just changes shape: the plant is not the dependency, the pumps are, and pumps are exactly the thing that stops when the grid stops. That is why gridghost_pax's six quiet nights and the corridor towns on the rota are the same sentence. The pumps do not care what we voted, but they care very much what synced.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ gridghost_pax2124-08-15
no siren in my block. lights go brown then nothing, no warning, the siren is a man shouting up the stairwell. six nights is a lot. congrats to your mother. saw the tanker come twice at station today, water not power, different queue same faces.