Rick's b.log - entry 2025/05/03

mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu

Profit while you can

Later: I fired up the strimmer and went to a lot of the weeds along the edges. I hurt in plenty of places from carrying that thing. And I had only just packed up the picnic table afterwards when the heavens opened and a lot of rain fell. There was also a big thunderstorm, but it was more noise than anything to look at.

Car service

There were three things that needed looking at. The plastic trim alongside the windscreen had come unstuck. The driver's side was fixed the first time I went there, the passenger side I noticed suddenly started flapping so I fixed it in place with a tiny dab of superglue until it was able to be done properly. If you recall, this car is basically an aluminium frame with plastic bodywork glued to it.

The second problem was water in the driver's compartment in the winter. Apparently it is a "known fault" that water gets in around the door seal. He said there wasn't really anything he could do. I guess if the door design is wrong, or something...?

The third problem was that there was a sharp bit on the door that caught my hands a few times. Some careful action with a Stanley knife sorted that.

In terms of behaviour, since it was a pleasant warm day, I was able to go all the way to Bain-de-Bretagne (what is that, 45km or so?) taking about 1h10m (because several 30kph towns) and when I arrived the charge was reading a smidgen above three quarters.
The battery has a special Bluetooth controller embedded into it. I have seen it pop up on my phone once or twice. At the garage, the man connected to it and was able to read the status of all of the individual cells - there were many. Everything was green, no anomalies.

This is showing that the 48V battery is being charged from 56.21V input (this isn't unusual - 12V car batteries charge from 13.4V up to around 15.6V), and it looks like each individual cell may be 4V. The battery current is 33.86A, and it's about 23°C in the battery and about 26°C in the battery controller. The current charge level (SOC) is 86%, and the total capacity of the battery (SOH) is 99.35% - and that's after ten months of use! I charge it after every day of work when it is freezing, or every 2 or 3 days in warmer weather depending on where the needle is by the time I return home on the second day. Right now, for example, it came back from Bain on a not-quite-full charge, and I went up to the shops this morning just to amble around town as I hadn't in ages (it was nothing special, but I said hello to Tea Lady) and it was around a third remaining by the time I returned home. The BMU tracks this and gives the result of all of this charging as "equivalent full charges". Accordingly, I have made the equivalent of 51.8 full charges. Which means that if you divide the full charges by the distance travelled, I'm getting about 108km to a charge. Though, of course, not only is this highly dependent upon the weather (I would be lucky to get 50km from a full charge when it's -2!), also I don't think I have ever gone below a quarter charge because there's pretty much only one route that I habitually do (work and back) and in town the chargers are either the wrong type, broken, or need apps and accounts to use. Therefore I have to consider my journeys in 26km chunks.
Maybe one day there will be charging facilities at work? I'm not going to hold my breath. There's a socket outside for the company car, and I was able to use it as an emergency, but I would imagine that routine charging would be a pay service, otherwise everybody else would be asking for petrol money...which is fair enough, but if it requires an account and an app...

We need to talk about something

An AI generation of something I hope we won't ever see.

As I'm sure you know, Spain and Portugal recently suffered a massive electricity failure. There are many theories: Russian hackers, too much green energy, or cable fatigue due to vibrations induced by the wind blowing a certain way. It appears that one line went down, for whatever reason, which dumped additional load on other lines which tripped out, and it all collapsed like a house of cards. Pretty much the same situation that blacked out a huge chunk of Europe in, what was it, 2008 or something? Some bridge in Germany? I don't really remember but it was, likewise, a massive cascade failure.

Unfortunately the fervent media coverage has highlighted three major issues. The first is that a lot of the grid is running at capacity, so when other conductors are expected to carry additional current, they simply can't. The second issue is that the system appears to have a serious design flaw where cascade failures can even happen. If there's a fault, trip out the grid section that is faulty, the end. If a broken wire in Galicia, for instance, can take out two entire countries, then it's bad design. If a failure or overload on wires crossing a river can take out half a continent, then it's bad design. This would be like your floppy drive fails to read a sector therefore your computer immediately turns itself off.

And thirdly, perhaps more importantly, and the reason for the AI art, is that the media coverage has highlighted exactly how much chaos a grid failure can cause. Nefarious people, malicious hostile-state actors, whatever, could stick an explosive onto a leg of a high tension pylon. It would be pretty easy to do as those things aren't monitored and are often in weird semi-remote places like marching across agricultural land or a cleared strip through a forest.

When that goes off, it won't be a fireball like in the picture, but if it's enough to bring down the pylon then there's a few hundred thousand volts with, suddenly, nowhere to go. Boof! Boof! Boof! Boof! The county, the region, the area, the damn country. Darkness. Silence. People stuck in lifts, rotten food in freezers, no traffic lights, no internet. Important places will be able to switch to generators, but most homes and businesses won't have such things.

Now if a nobody like me can imagine such a thing, you can rest assured that those who mean us harm have also thought of it.

In the push for green, the EU wants us to transition to electric cars. France wants to reduce - and at some future point probably ban - wood fired heating (particulates), they have already banned open fireplaces. There is very little oil fired heating (CO₂) still in use - probably the price - and I don't think other fossil fuels (like coal) have been a thing in a long while.
At any rate, the push is to make everything electric. All of our eggs in one basket. One weak point upon which so much of society will depend.

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