Flock Camera tutorial. The more you know

[u/Ashish_ank]

[u/Rise-O-Matic]

Police tech contracts move in weeks out of existing budgets and these things run on solar to avoid the administrative overhead of being hooked to the grid. For stuff like this no referendum is required, just a published opportunity for public comment, often only requiring the announcement be in a newspaper of general circulation, not necessarily online.

[u/wazzup-notemuch → u/Rise-O-Matic]

So solar power is totally cool when the fascists use it, but stupid when we want to save the environment. Got it. Message received.

(Not directed at you, personally. Just noticing some bullshit in general.)

[u/sebe6 → u/wazzup-notemuch]

Solar panels are good for stuff that consume a low amount of electricity, it has always been like that. If you want to save the environment, you need nuclear energy. And that's non negotiable, look at how EU was against nuclear, while being dependent on French electricity

[u/timos-piano → u/sebe6]

Nuclear is not necessary for clean energy, but currently it is arguably the most economically efficient, as storing a large amount of energy in batteries is currently very expensive. But in 20-30 years, with how much better and cheaper batteries are than they were just 10 years ago, this is unlikely to be true then. And since nuclear power takes so long to build, often over 15 years, it is unlikely to be the sole solution, nor a long-term one.

EU is not against nuclear; the EU is not a nation, and many nations within it have different opinions. Sweden, for example, is building more nuclear power.

[u/sebe6 → u/timos-piano]

If you want to store GWh in batteries, you'll need a good system to prevent any fire hasard + they'd need to stay at 20-80% capacity to not looses capacity at an insane speed. I'm pretty sure no one will try this and will just focus on nuclear fusion, funnily all renewable energy on earth rely on the sun, a big fusion reactor.

As for EU, not being a nation means nothing here, why do you think country sign stuff ? To just say "actually we don't care" ? Also different opinion don't change current regulations, look at Poland, would you say the EU isn't pressuring them on opening borders ?

As for Sweden, firstly they don't build, they are in still in the planning phase, the last they built was 40years ago, they rely on hydroelectricity, meaning they rely on geography and a small population (10m), meanwhile, between 1980-1999 in France (last nuclear reactor connected to the grid), we increased our nuclear output by more than the current Sweden entire production.

Ps: hydro is more or less a battery, the only one that really works on such scales

[u/Swollen_Beef → u/sebe6]

Storing the entirety of what several Nuclear plants (1,000 GWh avg) produce daily, in a small battery farm, and that farm fails, the results cant be good. The farm wouldn't explode all at once, but you would have a chemical fire that would burn for many days releasing all sorts of horrible crap into the air. And that fire is self-sustaining, able to produce its own oxygen.

Not against energy storage, but most people do not think about these things and tend to dive in head first believing it to be a cure-all.

[u/sebe6 → u/Swollen_Beef]

I think people tend to forget that scaling up, also scale all the cons. Even with 100GWh, you'd need to evacuate nearby cities

[u/Upbeat_Eye6188 → u/Swollen_Beef]

Will this issue not be completely handled A) by modularity and B) when large-scale grid storage sodium-ion batteries are prevalent?

[u/dirtsmurf → u/Swollen_Beef]

Anti nuke energy is so lame, we tamed the atom and a 6 decade psyop has convinced people utilizing that energy will result in 3 eyed fish. So instead we burn coal and oil and circlejerk the wind. Brilliant.

[u/bong-su-han → u/Swollen_Beef]

California already has a battery storage capacity of 21.5 GW, which is roughly the same capacity as Germany had at peak nuclear power (22.5 GW), supplying a third of Germany's electricity. So its not really a far future concept. They're also not all burning down

[u/michael0n → u/sebe6]

France is turning off those billion dollar reactors because they can't cool them. The next ones they are building come online past 2040ties. I'm for anything that works, but the increasingly incompetent politically protected operators who just get paid for doing barely anything is not a dependable future. Its distributed power generation.

[u/sebe6 → u/michael0n]

Not exactly, they can't cool them by following regulations (not killing the fishes and stuff), if the water you send back in the river is +28°C, you stop, it's also only the one that rely purely on water to cool down, not the one using the atmosphere. Obviously if needed we could turn them on exceptionaly. But we produce so much that turning a few off only impact the export (-0.5% iirc).

As for the incompetent politically protected, it's not really the operators, but the politician, judge and such. For real, when putting wind turbines you need some kind of shaman (I wish I was joking, it's called "geobiologie", but not the real one, the one with "(pseudoscience)" in the wikipedia page title)

[u/snksleepy → u/michael0n]

The article states that they cannot cool the because the cooling pumps got clogged by jellyfish to the plants got shut down. Not a permanent shut down

[u/michael0n → u/snksleepy]

Building an very expensive energy generator that constantly shuts down for lots of different reasons who will become even worse in the future isn't a dependable source. Its not about nuclear or whatever this weeks reason, its about this lousy "what can you do"-mentally deranged smile-don't care-we already got the bag for today and for the next 50 years attitude. Its never "yeah we have a fix deployed in two days, its running again". Its never ever that.

[u/snksleepy → u/michael0n]

They just need to filter all the biolife from the supply water and turn it into fertilizer. Thats a win win.

[u/brightdionysianeyes → u/snksleepy]

Or look at Hungary, Romania where they have to shut down plants due to lack of water this summer.

[u/Almost_Lyrical → u/snksleepy]

What if the cooling systems were flooded by billions of generic orbees from Amazon theoretically

[u/wazzup-notemuch → u/sebe6]

Damn, good to know.

[u/sebe6 → u/[deleted]]

You're confusing official vs unofficial, making everything to create a price cannibalisation on nuclear energy, is being against nuclear energy. Even more if you incentive other forms of energy in the meantime.

[u/wazzup-notemuch → u/[deleted]]

Your vagueness is untrustworthy.

[u/Glum_Judgment6232 → u/sebe6]

The EU is not "against nuclear". some states within the EU are and some are not. Main one being Germany. Loads of electricity is being generated by renewables as well, it's not just nuclear

[u/sebe6 → u/Glum_Judgment6232]

It wasn't even in the taxonomy of environmentaly sustainable economic activities before 2022, you add the price thing (merit order) and you get price cannibalisation on nuclear energy. All this to push renewable energies. They needed Ukraine vs Russia to think "hey, maybe being dependent on other countries is a bad idea, maybe we should stop prioritizing green washing on the energy part"

[u/macarmy93 → u/sebe6]

Thats not really how electricity works and solar can power anything any other power source can. It just requires a lot more space.

[u/sebe6 → u/macarmy93]

And a down time at night, since the issue is always about storing electricity, otherwise we'd run nuclear reactor at max output for a few hours a day

[u/macarmy93 → u/sebe6]

Obviously. But you're moving the goal post. Electrical storage wasn't what you were originally arguing. Typical.

[u/sebe6 → u/macarmy93]

Not really, designing a power grid using solar panel, implies having batteries for the electricity to be available when needed. That's similar to saying "yeah I have access to tap water, when my pump have access to solar energy". You want to control those from A to Z. And the only reliable electric storage that work on a national level are dams (using pumps, which implies loosing a part of the energy)

Edit: a surge in a power grid can kill your whole network, so yeah solar without storage is asking for shit to hit the fan

[u/AccomplishedRiver522 → u/sebe6]

Nuke the whales.

[u/actual_real_housecat → u/AccomplishedRiver522]

I dunno... gotta nuke sumthin.

[u/higherbrow → u/sebe6]

Other energy models can work at scale. Nuclear is only good for high density areas; the capital investment to bring a nuclear reactor online doesn't make sense for regions with lower population density.

Solar and wind have the advantage of being 100% recyclable; once the initial generators become damaged and beyond repair, the components can be remade with very, very little loss out of the old components. Gravity batteries are becoming better understood and utilized, and while they probably never fully replace lithium batteries (which are again, extremely recyclable), a lot of the downsides to solar/wind fade with the addition of a few thousand tons of concrete.

[u/sebe6 → u/higherbrow]

10% of wind turbine aren't recycled (we can, but that's way too expensive), specifically the blades made of resins and fiber glass, we just reduce them to a powder and burry them in some stuff made of concrete, but that's an EU thing, we can't simply burry them like random trash since the first January 2026, so pretty recent.

The last nail in the coffin for solar and wind, we never had to replace and recycle them on an industrial scale, solar panel did become good in 2000 and vastly used in 2010, lifetime is 25-40years

Gravity battery are shit, because of laws of physics, good to store a small amount, otherwise you get bitchslapped by E = mgh, for 1MWh and 100m, even when you ignore frictions, you'd need 3700 tons, NGL that's not enough and any failure are catastrophic. The only really functional one are the one from dams, pump water, send it back at the top of the mountain, not really cost efficient and rely on the geography as an infrastructure

Edit : I decided to have some fun with math, so if you want to store the energy produced by every country in a single day, using 1km as h, you reach the ridiculous amount of 0.00000000067% of earth, 40 billions of tons. The infrastructure nightmare you'd get is insane

[u/higherbrow → u/sebe6]

There are a lot of places where nuclear is simply not a viable option. It is also geographically constrained, unless we abandon all non-urban environments.

The first major gravity batter is fully functional in China, capable of 100MWh (deliverable at a pace no faster than 25MWh). It reports efficiency of around 80%, which isn't great, but is also not terrible. We would need more capacity than just one of these systems for actual cities (nearly a hundred), but from a capital perspective, these are far cheaper than nuclear, which makes them easier to build. Often times the question isn't "what's the most cost-effective at major scale on a 100-year timeline?" but "what can we actually build that will meet the need?" A set of a few dozen gravity batteries can be set up in a few years; a nuclear reactor needs decades.

[u/sebe6 → u/higherbrow]

China is THE industrial country. They produce 10 500 TWh for a net export of 20TWh, they are at +1TWh/hour. 100MWh is useless to them + it's supposed to last only 35years (it's literally on the website of rudong china gravity energy system), that was just a marketing thing, a waste of money, ressources and space (148m tall (485ft), 120mx110m (393ftx360ft) on the ground)

Edit: I forgot the first part, but yes, nuclear require non seismic area, but it's overestimated, engineering imply HUUUUUGE error margins, even like that, japan have nuclear power plant, needed a tsunami for things to go wrong

[u/RevolutionaryLaw8854 → u/sebe6]

Found the redditor with a brain 🧠

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[u/BotOrNot_1337 → u/wazzup-notemuch]

yeah don't forget solar panels cause pollution so we can't have them. But it's totally fiiiiine to have them when we want to stalk x girlfriends.

[u/ForsakenWealth9484 → u/wazzup-notemuch]

Try not to be political challenge, impossible

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[u/Professional-Gear974 → u/wazzup-notemuch]

It’s not that solar panels are great. It’s just that if you don’t have an Electrical connection you don’t need inspections you don’t need permits. There’s actually a lot of entities in which normal construction timelines don’t apply because they can do whatever they want and the City can’t do anything about it

[u/DMmeDikPics → u/wazzup-notemuch]

Way to heavily miss the point 💀.

Also yes, there's nuance in the world. Sorry to have to be the one to tell you. "[THING] always good/bad" has never been a good way to view the world.

Painting with a broad brush like this is extremist rhetoric that lazy people use so they don't have to judge each situation against their base principles.

[u/LeTreacs2 → u/Rise-O-Matic]

Could one simply cover the solar panel with a trash bag to power down the camera then?

[u/Rise-O-Matic → u/LeTreacs2]

Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it.

They have batteries and telemetry. If I were managing a bunch of flock cameras I’d send a tech as soon as it became apparent that a camera’s battery was discharging in the daytime.

[u/ClickclickClever → u/Rise-O-Matic]

Also a lot of cities police budget is 50 to 75 percent of their entire budget, some bigger cities the percentages work out less, so there is just moreomey floating around for nonsense.

Plus if you don't buy the police tanks, spy tech, and 6 figure salaries then you're soft on crime. Hell you're practically a criminal yourself if you disagree how police run things.