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The double point angst of her majesty confused youths. (9)
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Teenagers
angst
er - her majesty
ee - double point
confused - anag
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Well, that was solved faster than I thought it would be. You're up tomorrow.
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Though far from being a youth, I am still a little confused by your clue. The solution given by pkfox makes perfect sense except for the bit about "her majesty" = "er". Could you perhaps enlighten me?
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ER = Her majesty, the late Queen Elizabeth the 2nd (21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022). ER stood/stands for Elizabeth Regina (Regina is Latin for Queen).
<edit>Add 'Her majesty' into the explanation as it was part of the query
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Thank you. I am no longer confused - still far from being a youth though. 
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The answer could be "QUEENBEE", as "her majesty" could refer to a queen, and "double point" could refer to the letter "B" (which looks like two points stacked on top of each other). "Angst" could be an anagram indicator for "youths", which when rearranged spell out "BEE".
So, "The double point angst of her majesty confused youths (9)" could be a cryptic clue for "QUEENBEE".
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Queen Bee is two words and 8 letters
How does B look like two points ?
How is angst an anagram indicator for youths ?
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Did you try and solve this clue with ChatGPT? That looks like the type of answer it would give.
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Tomorrow, from 11:00 until midnight (and it probably continues on Thursday, but prices for Thursday are not yet set), we are being paid for consuming electric power. Not much, though - around a quarter of a cent per kWh.
The total cost is not below zero: The power cable company charges for bringing the power to our homes; it is the power itself that has a price tag below zero.
This is the up and down sides of green power. Right now, Europe has got more solar power and wind than we need (and high mountain hydropower basins filled to the rim). When it is cloudy and no wind and the hydropower basins empty, a kWh may cost a dollar/Euro.
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Well, yes. But in Norway, the adoption of electric vehicles has been influenced by various factors, including government subsidies and the country's electricity prices. It's worth noting that Norway experienced record-high electricity prices in 2022, as highlighted in this article on SSB (Which is the Norwegian government's statistics bureau)
Rekordhøy strømpris i 2022 – dempet av strømstøtte[^]. Poor implementation of these subsidies gives some people money for using electric power, but this is not the general case nationwide.
To get a better understanding of the current electricity prices in Norway, you can refer to the Nord Pool website. They provide market data, including day-ahead area prices, which can offer insights into the fluctuating prices of electricity in different regions where the actual sales price on the market is given hour by hour: Market data | Nord Pool[^]
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The negative electricity prices I was referring to was those from the Nord Pool website, not at all affected by the state subsidies but the raw spot market prices. Spot market prices will be negative most of tomorrow as well.
I live in the central part of Norway, the 'Trøndelag' region. We have hardly received any electricity subsidies at all - almost all of that was routed to the the southern part of Norway. Subsidies are taken from our tax money, so it really is just a way to route your electricity bill through the state finances, hoping that is cheaper paying it through taxes than paying it directly. Well, it raises the taxes even for central and north Norway people, who receive next to no subsidies, so that we central/northerners will pay part of the power bill of the southerners.
When we complain about 'Record high electricity prices', it is like a well-known phrase-of-mouth, 'World famous in Norway'. We claim to have extremely costly electricity that will bring our industry to collapse unless the state puts in heavy subsidies, any time that there is a single region outside Norway with lower prices, ignoring that in lots of other European countries, the prices are maybe 2-3 times those 'record high' Norwegian prices.
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Ah, I see. The providers will pay you to use electricity. How does that happen?
At any rate, if you have a fixed price deal with your electricity provider you could have been paid to use electricity for quite some time:
Fastpriskunder tjener penger på å bruke strøm – NRK Rogaland – Lokale nyheter, TV og radio[^]. Another fun fact is that the government owns the largest power provider in Norway, so it can be viewed as just giving back a minor share of the profit and not as a tax. Even substracted for the deflated price, the power company made a huge profit.
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Kenneth Haugland wrote: f you have a fixed price deal with your electricity provider you could have been paid to use electricity for quite some time
This is a crazy effect of the crazy way the subsidizing is implemented: You receive a refund that does not scale with the amount you pay for the power, but what you would have paid if you were on a spot price contract. With a fixed price contract, you were not at all affected by the rising power prices last fall, yet you received compensation for it. It is the craziest subsidizing scheme I have ever seen anywhere!
The majority of Norwegian domestic customers are on spot price contracts, and for many years, that has turned out to be the cheapest alternative. Last fall was the first time period ever when the extra price you pay for having a "predictable" power bill returns in a lower total cost. That is for the winter we have been through - and with a fixed price, you have no benefit of wind and sun bringing the price down below zero.
The power line company reads the power consumed by you every hour. This amount is multiplied by the Nord Pool spot price and summed up, so when the Nord Pool price is negative, the total sum is reduced. Your power provider usually adds a tiny, kWh-fee on top of the spot price.
On top of that sum comes the bill from the power line company, composed of a fixed cost per kWh, and a monthly fee set by your peak hourly consumption (the maximum of 3 hours on separate days).
So to actually reach a zero or negative power bill in total would require lots of days with very negative spot prices, so much that it covers up for both the power company's surcharge and the power line bill. That won't ever happen. There is only one below-zero factor in the calculation. It is the same factor that was at NOK 7-8/kWh (70-90 cents/kWh) last winter, and it does make a difference!
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Is it call green power because it makes others, who are paying a small fortune for power, green with envy? 
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Don't they have huge battery banks that could use some recharging for when the sun doesn't shine?
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I would hope not.
I doubt battery banks are an effective solution to storing intermittent green power generation for large scale electric utilities. There are other methods that I would like to think are going to be better at doing that when the TOC is computed.
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But batteries are high fashion nowadays. They are politically correct.
Just like solar panels to provide electricity for home heating, disregarding that solar heat pipes collect at least 4 times as much energy as heat (which is what you are after!) and are far less sensitive to orientation, occasional shading etc.
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jschell wrote: I doubt battery banks are an effective solution to storing intermittent green power generation for large scale electric utilities.
Isn't that pretty much what Tesla's batteries are said to be doing for Australia's power grid?
Mind you, I'm paraphrasing some headline I've read and never bothered reading the actual article.
[Edit]
Here, the first article that came back when googling for it... Do with that information what you will.
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dandy72 wrote: Isn't that pretty much what Tesla's batteries are said to be doing for Australia's power grid?
Well comment in the article would not suggest a real solution to me.
"But how can a strictly backup power source that supplies power for just an hour make such a huge difference?"
Wind/solar must be able to deal with outages much longer than that.
Just a brief look at the rest suggests that it isn't even trying but is rather just to provide smoothing for surges.
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dandy72 wrote: Don't they have huge battery banks that could use some recharging for when the sun doesn't shine?
They would have to be SUPER huge, at an enormous cost (and consumption of raw materials).
There are a few thermoelectric (read: very slow adjustment of power output) power plants that use battery banks for handling fluctuations in power demands - faster than what the plant itself can handle. The capacity must be sufficient to handle the fluctuations, not the base consumption, typically over one day, from a single power plant.
Do some back-of-envelope how many battery cells you would need to conserve any significant amount of electric power! For a small example: The most popular Li-Ion cell today is the 18650 (it is used by a large share of electric cars). The better variants can store 10 Wh. A cell weighs 50 g. Say that your Canadian rivers are overflowing in summer, so you let your 150 GW of installed power run at full speed, saving half of it by charging batteries for the winter season. 75 GW effect produces 75 billion Wh per hour. You would need to supply 7.5 billion 18650 cells, at weight of 375 tons, per hour to handle this amount. That is 180 billion cells at 9 000 tons a day, 5.4 trillion cells at 270,000 tons a month. This is for saving half of Canada's installed capacity from spring/summer for use the coming winter.
Batteries are suitable for small scale use, up to (at most) road vehicles. In power production, they may possibly be suitable for handling fluctuations. For the latter: The number of charge cycles will be high, most likely a minimum of one cycle a day. If you want to use it with tidal power, you have four cycles a day. It seems like if you restrict Li-Ion cells to the middle 60% capacity, never discharge below 20% and never charge above 80%, they can survive more cycles than the early estimates indicated, yet in a tidal power station taking them though 1500 cycles a year, you should budget a significant sum of money for cell replacements.
Tidal power is a kind and well behaved energy source - 100% predictable, both in time and volume. For wind, you never know how many cycles your batteries will have to take in a year. You can't tell when they will be sucked completely empty, nor when they will overflow. While Californians may think that solar energy is predictable, it certainly is not here in Norway. And in any case we would require seasonal energy storage. Although I am living south of the Polar Circle, the sun is so low (both in altitude and hours) for 4 months a year that the radiation has no value as an energy source. Almost half of Norway's area is north of the Polar Circle: The towns and villages along the northern coast of Norway have a polar night of around 60 days.
Batteries are not the solution for huge (call it "town sized") long term storage of electric power.
If you've got a thousand meter tall mountain in your backyard, you may of course learn from those talking enthusiastically about pumping water uphill to be used as hydropower downhill at a later stage. So let us dig up another envelope  To save 1 kWh of electricity, you would have to pump 400 liters of water up on that 1000 m peak. You have to build a basin at the peak, and a basin at the foot of the mountain to collect the water, to have something to pump up for the next cycle. At winter time, my house consumes not 1 but 50 kWh on a typical winter day, so it would take 20,000 liters (or let us call it 20 cubic meters) of water, per winter day. Every house down the street, and all the neighboring streets, would require 20 cubic meters per winter day.
Not everyone has a 1000 m mountain in their backyard. If the nearest hill is 100 m above the plains, it would require a basin capacity, up in the hills as well as down on the plains, of 200 cubic meters per day, or 6000 cubic meters a month, 24,000 cubic meters to serve a single home for a 4-month winter season. Lots of pumped-water-storage never made that simple calculation!
A final proposal for energy storage: Cut a cylindrical shell of rock, five meters across, one meter thick walls. Fasten permanent magnets tangentially on the surface, all the way around. In a shell around the cylinder, mount electromagnetic coils to pull on those permanent magnets, to spin up the stone cylinder. Note that at the exact moment when the magnet is passing under the coil, you have to reverse the polarity of the coil to push the magnet (and stone cylinder) further along. When you want the power back, you let those spinning magnet induce a current in the the coils; this will gradually brake down the spinning cylinder.
Given a 5 m across, 1 m thick cylinder shell of density 2.5 stone, spinning it up 20 rps, would store slightly below 300 kWh per meter of cylinder length. I guess you would need a few extra magnets in the bearings to lift it up - the weight would be 31.5 tons per meter of cylinder length. Make sure to point it to the Northern Star, unless you want it to dance around like a spinning top.
Note that making a solid cylinder rather than a cylindrical shell would indeed increase its energy storing capacity by almost 12%, and its weight by 60%; the weight/capacity ratio goes up by around 40%. (If a capacity of 200 kWh per meter is sufficient for you: Shave down the walls to 0.5 m thickness, and the weight drops to 17.7 tons/m.)
This is just a crazy idea. In my eyes, it is no less realistic than using batteries or pumped water for storing huge amounts of energy that can be extracted as electricity.
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trønderen wrote: This is for saving half of Canada's installed capacity from spring/summer for use the coming winter
That just seems like the wrong problem to try to solve.
But clearly, you've given this a lot more thought than I ever have.
And I appreciate that - not trying to be sarcastic.
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