A ten-year old natural gas power plant in California to be shut down!

But wait a minute! Don't we like natural gas plants?

The problem is that the plant was built with General Electric 7H gas turbines, which take FIFTEEN HOURS to spin up - it was designed as a baseload power plant, that is, to run continuously. And it can't compete with solar and wind. And with a 15 hour spin-up time, it can't function as a peak-load plant to take up the slack when solar and wind suffer dips. GE now has a gas turbine called a 7HA which is air-cooled and spins up much faster, and when used in conjunction with a big battery backup, makes for a great peak-load plant.

But that's not what this plant is, so after a decade, it is going bye-bye. That's going to be a heck of a write-off, it was supposed to run for 30 years, so there's no way they're remotely close to having recovered costs.

It apparently is going to be sold to a battery plant and turned in to something like the monster Tesla peak-load plant that they built in Australia that is very popular. After all, the site already has all the electric grid interconnects and nice big buildings.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/in-california-a-young-natural-gas-plant-closes-down-as-renewables-get-cheaper/

Movies Seen, January-March 2019

I should have gotten this up a couple of months ago!

01/17 Mary Poppins Returns
01/27 Tag (vod)
01/30 Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (vod,rw)

02/03 Bumblebee
02/14 Alita Battle Angel
02/20 The Kid Who Would Be King

03/12 Captain Marvel
03/13 How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

ETA: Eight movies in three months: not a good start! Bodes ill for anything resembling one a week by the end of the year! But you never know. The big problem now is that my job has me working 1-5, and an early bedtime makes it difficult to get out, when I'm on a regular schedule of 4-7 in the fall and my wife can meet me after work for a movie, then it'll be a bit easier.

Not a lot seen in the first quarter this year, partly because of not much interesting being released, part because of my wife wanting to avoid (figurative) plague wandering around the area. And part because we started watching Midsomer Murders on DVD when I started borrowing them from the library! So two video on demands, one rewatch.

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This is all kinds of awesome: NASA restored and preserved the Apollo Mission Control Room!

This is super cool! It was restored to Apollo 15 and subsequent mission standards, which was the final 'standard' when NASA stopped launching manned missions. That level was chosen because it was the best documented and frankly looked the coolest. The light bulbs behind the switches were painstakingly replaced with LEDs wired into a control system, the CRTs were replaced with LCDs that were messed with to look exactly like CRTs: they duplicated the IBM 360 mainframe font! They meddled with the focus, caused interference patterns, etc. The photos, and there's something like four galleries(!), look wonderful.

If you have any interest in the space program, you really ought to read this article. And if you're in the vicinity of Houston, you really ought to take the tour - it opens to the public on Monday!

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/behind-the-scenes-at-nasas-newly-restored-historic-apollo-mission-control/