Tim Worstall

4 responses so far ↓

• 1 SimonF // Aug 27, 2012 at 11:18 am

  Super computers and other critical systems are housed in data centers with all sorts of backups and always will be as the grid will never be that reliable.

  Fair point on the other industries..

• 2 Matthew L // Aug 27, 2012 at 2:27 pm

  Today, in rhetorical questions…

• 3 PaulB // Aug 27, 2012 at 2:42 pm

  There well be a valid point to be made here, but the article as written doesn’t make it.

  Even when grid operators are off by just a few percentage points, voltage in the grid slackens. That has no affect on normal household appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and coffee machines. But for high-performance computers, for example, outages lasting even just a millisecond can quickly trigger system failures.

  A fall in voltage is not an outage. Supercomputers run on low voltage DC and their power supplies are insenstive to variations in the AC supply voltage. (Your laptop power supply will work just as well in the US as in the UK).

• 4 Nick Luke // Aug 27, 2012 at 3:17 pm

  This harks back to the old Slough Estates model. There a power station was at the centre of the trading estate and all the occupiers were able to draw their power from it. Their rent was adjusted to allow for their use.
  Companies will, perhaps, draw together around shared & reliable power plants, leaving the rest of us in the mediaeval cold and damp that the greens want us to adopt.

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