Not necessarily, but most inverters (in Europe, at least) aren't designed to function without a grid anyway.
Some models of inverter brands like Victron (which isn't very common outside its niche of self-sufficiency because they are rather expensive and sometimes complex) can form a micro-grid. They have the option of a special circuit breaker [1] that decouples the inverter from the grid if the grid is detected to be down, which allows their use during a power outage.
I bought a 1600Wc + 1.9KWh kit (Ecoflow Stream) for +/- 1300€ last summer. It took us about 2h to install (we had to setup a new plug outside), and I already saved 200€+ since July. I am expecting to save about 350€ per year.
Also, as u/jstch said, it's extremely fun to setup and generate your own power!
The special definition of "balcony solar" is that it avoids most of those requirements. It seems this is usually done by adding a clamp meter to the input to the house, which sends a control signal to the panel inverter over Wifi to reduce output if it would be feeding back.
My guess as a Dutch guy, not 100% familiar with our neighboring country's rules etc):
Yes, exporting to the grids. If a house has an old Ferraris meter, it will rotate backwards or a new, smart(er) meter, that has a separate counter for delivery back to the grid.
Mine was around 4 years and its west south + a tree in the middle. So spring and autom the tree is no problem but in summer lunch hpeak there is shadow on it.
Its my south/west balcony with a 1 square meter panel from some online shop. 400 watts, with an easy to install rail system for my balcony and a plug and inverter for ~400 Euros.
A 10c€/kWh CfD is not strictly speaking a subsidy, at the government will recover the average market price.
That being said, the total cost per kWh could well reach 20c/kWh, which is ridiculous. It's not only not competitive against renewables, but also not competitive with natural gas (CCGT are probably around 10-15c€/kWh).
The average day ahead price in France in 2025 was 6 cents per kWh.
This is with carbon trading starting to make fossil production very expensive, on top of LNG fossil gas. Which will quickly start to diminish as more renewables and storage comes online.
While the CFD runs for 40 years so into the 2080s for all but the first reactor.
On some tasks like build scripts, infra and CI stuff, I am getting a significant speedup. Maybe I am 2x faster on these tasks, when measured from start to PR.
I am working on a HPC project[1] that requires more careful architectural thinking. Trying to let the LLM do the whole task most often fail, or produce low quality code (even with top models like Opus 4.5).
What works well though is "assisted" coding. I am usually writing the interface code (e.g. headers in C++) with some help from the agent, and then let the LLM do the actual implementation of these functions/methods. Then I do final adjustments. Writing a good AGENTS.md helps a lot. I might be 30% faster on these tasks.
It seems to match what I see from the PRs I am reviewing: we are getting these slightly more often than before.
I tried GLM-4.7 running locally on a beefy GPU server, in about 3 minutes it got to 25846 cycles, but then struggled in circles for about 90 minutes without making any meaningful progress, making the same mistakes repeatedly and misdiagnosing the cause most of the time. It seems to understand what needs to happen to reach the goal, but keeps failing on the implementation side. It seemed to understand that to beat the target an entirely new approach would be required (it kept leaning towards a wavefront design), but wasn't seeing the solution due to the very limited ISA.
Not quite accurate anymore. The UK was indeed the world leader from 2008 until around 2021, but has since fallen to second place behind China. China now has over 41 GW installed (>50% of global capacity), while the UK sits at ~15 GW (~22%). [1][2]
Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.
I guess we are. But who are the plants owned by, who built the and where did the components come from, are we also switching them off because our grid cannot handle transmit huge volumes of renewable energy from Scotland to London, and turning on gas power plants to make up for it.
You also have situations, like today, where a German developer has handed back a seabed lease for 3GW of offshore power because they didn’t get a contract for power from government (CFD) and their lease fees are approx £400m/yr if they want to continue developing the windfarm. This is after spending £1B already on lease fees with nothing to show for it.
Their price was too high because it had to include paying back £1B of lease fees that were made as part of another government policy. Comes back to priorities being confusing, if the intention is lower bills why the lease fees, if the purpose is good jobs and independence, why compete on price? If their purpose is national wealth why not partial state funding / ownership?
Why does he need to manually do the tracing or reference counting of all these nodes?
Instead, he could just use the references he needs in the new tree, delete/override the old tree's root node, and expect the Javascript GC to discard all the nodes that are now referenced.
> Then, my plan was to construct a ProseMirror transaction that would turn the old tree into the new one. To do that, it’s helpful to know which nodes appeared in the old document, but not the new one.
So, it's not actually about reclaiming the memory. It's about taking some action on the nodes that will be reclaimed. It's akin to a destructor/finalizer, but I need that to happen synchronously at a time that I control. JavaScript does now support finalization (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...) but it can't be relied on to actually happen, which makes it useless in this scenario.
Same legislation as the non-plug&play inverters.
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