tomo,
Yeah, it would be interesting to start with a nice solid rotating generator then hook up a bunch of inverters synchronised with it, then take away the generator and see how the inverters behave. If they were all particularly dumb, it'd probably fall to positive feedback with frequency going way off in one direction or the other. But since the inverters probably all have sanity checks and actions built-in, some subset might push back, another bunch might withdraw, etc. How would it settle out?

The DPF regen stuff as shipped certainly seems pretty agricultural: pump raw fuel into it and hope it burns it all away. Avoids city particulate emissions, but a big boost to billows of sooty smoke on the expressways.

It's ok to have loons in the wheelhouse as long as the wheel isn't connecting to anything.

The solar "crisis": meh, it's only a few factories. At least the climate crisis will be averted thanks to cheap solar panels in Europe (manufactured using lots of loverly coal-fired electricity in China).

A stuck accelerator is scary enough in an old boneshaker. Bet it's quite an experience in one of those Cybertruck things.

Good address by Bridgen to a near empty chamber. Truly is outrageous on several fronts. Probably the worst is the ONS changing the excess deaths calculation. I suppose there's a syllogism of sorts in play: The truth will set you free, therefore: We must hide the truth.

Was worthwhile listening to Brendan O'Neill talking with Martin Kulldorff on the consequences of pandemic folly. He's a Swede, and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Was pleasing to hear that Sweden's Prime Minister (in sharp contrast to all the sorry offerings in our two countries) was a welder. Good to have a steady hand at the tiller. If we can just schedule a bit more climate change I'll consider moving to Sweden.

tomo,
DPFs seem to be a frequent trigger for scrapping vehicles of a certain age. I think I mentioned a Peugeot DPF problem here a while back. When I looked into it, the firmware would issue a non-critical warning that the DPF needed attention. The car continued to be driveable, but the ECU would no longer schedule any regens/burns/whatever. If you didn't get onto it within a few thousand miles, the car became undriveable, and the DPF was not economically reparable. With more expensive cars like Jags and Landies, it might be that the economic alternative to scrapping is legal action.

Dubai should probably let Venice keep its stranglehold on gondolas.

Solar to the grid video was very well done. I hadn't thought of all the inverters *adding* strength to frequency deviations, but that looks very plausible. Just the opposite effect of a nice big flywheel.

I was intrigued with one of the comments. It's by a linesman. Here's the meat of it:

... when we open the switch to de-energize the transformer supplying a neighborhood (in our case an average of 150 households/transformer) with a lot of solar, on rare occasions it will remain energized, backfed from the households solar production. This happens because in the right conditions the solar panels will produce the same amount of power as the households consume, so there's no current flow through the transformer.

MikeHig,
I've heard the charging of lithium ion batteries likened to filling a balloon. I don't think it's a wonderful metaphor, but you can picture the balloon getting saggy after it has been stretched a few times. I think it also conveys the fuzziness of an "absolute limit" when it comes to charging. You only learn a balloon's limit by the bang that comes from going beyond it, and it will change depending on previous inflations.

It's a bit of a new thing for car drivers — each time you fill your tank it gets smaller — but it's something one could adapt to.

I think James May put his finger on it in that video posted here recently: range is not the problem, what drivers suffer from is recharging anxiety. If recharging were as convenient as refuelling, even an 80 mile range would be tolerable. That's a chicken and egg problem which the manufacturers cannot solve. The best they can do is offer ever-bigger batteries. A very mixed blessing.