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Phanatic posted:If you ignore baseload. Which you probably shouldn't. Existing power plants that have generally supplied baseload power such as coal or nuclear are more expensive than wind and with large integration of nondispatchable generation sources the baseload power required is constantly decreased and is even nearing zero in some grids. So what exactly is your point?
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Dec 30, 2016 07:36
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Speaking of solar, anyone hear about France having a small segment of solar road that costs like a million $ for just 50 feet or something.
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Dec 30, 2016 08:01
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"freezepops" [/quote posted:So what exactly is your point? If you dont have baseload you will get blackouts. The extra cost required to make renewables "baseload" is extreme and is generally not included when wind and solar is costed.
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Dec 30, 2016 14:37
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BattleMoose posted:If you dont have baseload you will get blackouts. The extra cost required to make renewables "baseload" is extreme and is generally not included when wind and solar is costed. You're missing the point entirely. The old model of the grid, where big expensive to run power plants run 24/7 because they can't stop without losing money is being replaced by a more flexible grid where more peakers, demand response and smarter power electronics allow for a vastly more adaptive grid. The 1950s model of the power grid is outdated. This article has a great video explaining why the old model of the grid is outdated: https://cleantechnica.com/2014/08/08/rmi-blows-lid-baseload-power-myth-video/ quote:Lovins very effectively debunks the myth that a reliable electricity supply from renewable resources will need either giant “baseload” power stations or yet untested cheap mass electrical storage. He reviewed this at the international nonprofit Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) 2014 global conference in Vancouver, Canada. (The original talk is scheduled for a TEDTalks release. In the meantime, RMI issued its own interim recording. It’s brilliant.) *i personally detest TED but my love of Lovins overwhelms my dislike for the style. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Dec 30, 2016 |
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Dec 30, 2016 15:02
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Trabisnikof posted:You're missing the point entirely. The old model of the grid, where big expensive to run power plants run 24/7 because they can't stop without losing money is being replaced by a more flexible grid where more peakers, demand response and smarter power electronics allow for a vastly more adaptive grid. The 1950s model of the power grid is outdated. Where is the article getting 10% down time for nuclear plants from? Most plants try their best to run for 12 to 18 months and then shut down for a 1 month (or less) outage. The occasional trip/scram does happen but 10% seems high. I would think 5% is more reasonable.
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Dec 30, 2016 17:51
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quote:Ninety-nine nuclear power plants operating in 30 states posted an estimated average capacity factor of 91.9 percent, based on preliminary 2015 data compiled by the Nuclear Energy Institute. It was down around 86.7% in 2012, an abnormally low year. Over the last five years the average has been right around 90%. Trabs: "We will replace the old grid with a new, smart grid" is the new "fusion is 10 years away".
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Dec 30, 2016 18:17
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Phanatic posted:If you ignore baseload. Which you probably shouldn't. I think what you mean is "If you ignore the need to have a substantial quantity of dispatchable generation sat idle for most of the time in order to run when the climate isn't allowing your wind farms to produce enough energy to meet demand. This dispatchable generation needs to make back its build cost and operating cost over relatively restricted running regime, which means that it either charges a frankly obnoxious price for the power it does generate, or it is provided with a subsidy for providing the ability to generate when required. This is true for all generation types to a certain extent - even the traditional 1950s Grid model had plant sat spare, ready to spring into action. Wind is worse, however, as calm weather across a substantial region (such as a high pressure system sat directly over you) could cause generation across a huge range of plants to fall down to low levels, while it's highly improbable that (short of a type fault) lots of nuclear/gas/coal plant would stop generating all at the same time.
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Dec 30, 2016 18:37
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RDevz posted:I think what you mean is "If you ignore the need to have a substantial quantity of dispatchable generation sat idle for most of the time in order to run when the climate isn't allowing your wind farms to produce enough energy to meet demand. This dispatchable generation needs to make back its build cost and operating cost over relatively restricted running regime, which means that it either charges a frankly obnoxious price for the power it does generate, or it is provided with a subsidy for providing the ability to generate when required. That's kind of an obtuse sentence, so an example would be saltwater desalination plants or something exotic like H2/O2 generation plants. Instead of turning on power stations at peak, shutting down these industrial plants at peak would a the grid management solution more adaptable to non-constant power loads.
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Dec 30, 2016 19:56
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Is there a reason H2/O2 separation wouldn't be an ideal industrial energy storage solution, especially since you could "charge" it during the off hours?
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Dec 30, 2016 20:02
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Is there a reason H2/O2 separation wouldn't be an ideal industrial energy storage solution, especially since you could "charge" it during the off hours?
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Dec 30, 2016 20:08
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Infinite Karma posted:The other option (which practically requires a lot of horizontal and vertical integration) is to have time-insensitive industrial uses sucking up past-peak power generation, and then shut off those industrial power sinks when the peak power is required. Don't you want to be operating those plants 24/7 though? This only could make sense if the intermittent sources of electricity are so cheap compared to the other electricity sources that you want to take advantage of the inexpensive electricity.
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Dec 30, 2016 20:18
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silence_kit posted:Don't you want to be operating those plants 24/7 though? This only could make sense if the intermittent sources of electricity are so cheap compared to the other electricity sources that you want to take advantage of the inexpensive electricity. I believe the idea is to transfer the difficult-to-store electricity into something easier to store and still useful, like fresh water. If you start to run out of water you can reduce its usage as already happens during droughts. If you start to run out of electricity you can't just slow down how fast you take it out of the reservoir. You would ideally like to run them 24/7 but you don't need to because water handles elastic demand more easily than electricity does because you can store it in big holes in the ground.
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Dec 30, 2016 20:21
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PhazonLink posted:Speaking of solar, anyone hear about France having a small segment of solar road that costs like a million $ for just 50 feet or something. If by a million for 50 feet you mean $5.2 million per kilometer, then yes. Unfortunately, normal asphalt roads are loving expensive anyway. Comparatively speaking (and this info can be found elsewhere than this article): quote:Construct a new 2-lane undivided road – about $2 million to $3 million per mile in rural areas, about $3 million to $5 million in urban areas. 274% of the cost, I suppose. They don't really know how long it will last. Comparatively, asphalt is expected to last around 20 years. I wouldn't say it gets that old before it's poo poo to drive on in Oklahoma, though. Still probably a bad idea: https://twitter.com/percytwits/status/548754743557128192 Evil_Greven fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Dec 30, 2016 |
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Dec 30, 2016 20:21
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Evil_Greven posted:If by a million for 50 feet you mean $5.2 million per kilometer, then yes. I can't help but feel it would have been cheaper and better to build the road then put solar panels over it on sticks. Then you have solar panels that don't get driven on and a road that doesn't get rained or snowed on.
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Dec 30, 2016 20:23
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Evil_Greven posted:If by a million for 50 feet you mean $5.2 million per kilometer, then yes. Uh, dude, according to that article, it's a kilometer long but only 30,000 square feet of solar panels - that means at a full kilometer long it can only be 9 feet wide or about 2.8 meters wide. The pictures in the article support that, it's only actually covering the middle portion of a single lane. That's not even wide enough to count as a full highway lane in most of the US or Europe. If we take that price as a baseline, then at minimum you need to spend $10.4 million per kilometer of actual two direction road with very narrow lanes, more for lanes of a sane width. That means the solar road is at minimum 5x the cost of a normal road, to achieve no real benefit.
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Dec 30, 2016 20:31
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The list of reasons why solar roadways are a retarded loving idea is long and voluminous. Normandy's at 49 degrees latitude, this is like putting solar power in Maine. It's actually worse than Maine: Maine gets 101 clear days and 2500 sunshine hours per year on average, the values for Normandy are ~60 and 1760. You can't angle a roadway to face the sun, so right there you take a huge efficiency hit, even before you get to the point that a chunk of solar power that's in shade because there's a traffic jam sitting on top of it isn't generating poo poo. I'm not sure whether these projects are a result of clueless administrators sincerely wanting to appear green, or cynical scammers taking advantage of the ignorance of the former group, or a combination of both. But there is literally no reason whatsoever to build a solar power plant that also has to support cars and trucks driving over it. Of the issues with solar power, "Where do we find enough space to put the panels" is not one of them. Evil_Greven posted:
And that's a loving *bike path*. Even the most optimistic bullshit about that solar path shows what a bunch of nonsense it is: http://www.sciencealert.com/solar-roads-in-the-netherlands-are-working-even-better-than-expected quote:"If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70kwh per square metre per year," Sten de Wit, spokesman for SolaRoad, the group behind the project, told Tarek Bazley at Al Jazeera. So just imagine the potential if we covered all our roads in the stuff. 70 kilowatt-hours is 252 megajoules. 252 megajoules per square meter per year. That's under 8 watts per square meter. Your typical 15-kilowatt solar roof system in Phoenix, 90 square meters, will generate 222 kilowatt hours per square meter per year, or about 25 watts per square meter. Costs a shitload more, generates a shitload less, what potential! Phanatic fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Dec 30, 2016 |
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Dec 30, 2016 20:32
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fishmech posted:Uh, dude, according to that article, it's a kilometer long but only 30,000 square feet of solar panels - that means at a full kilometer long it can only be 9 feet wide or about 2.8 meters wide. The pictures in the article support that, it's only actually covering the middle portion of a single lane. That's not even wide enough to count as a full highway lane in most of the US or Europe. If we take that price as a baseline, then at minimum you need to spend $10.4 million per kilometer of actual two direction road with very narrow lanes, more for lanes of a sane width. I don't think it's a good idea anyway, but I had overlooked that it was a (partial) single lane. I was thinking less than 300% the cost seemed low, but didn't really investigate it. So, 548% the cost... really not worth it at all. Looks like a foot or more on either side of the panels in the images, plus the centerline obviously is still asphalt. Evil_Greven fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Dec 30, 2016 |
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Dec 30, 2016 20:33
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OwlFancier posted:I believe the idea is to transfer the difficult-to-store electricity into something easier to store and still useful, like fresh water. Or oil/gas. My point is that those plants which are only running when there is excess electricity are running at partial capacity and are producing more expensive water, oil/gas, aluminum, steel, or whatever. This kind of system only makes sense if intermittent electricity sources are so cheap when compared to other sources so that it is preferable to run your plants at partial capacity to take advantage of the inexpensive electricity. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Dec 30, 2016 |
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Dec 30, 2016 20:40
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Phanatic posted:What? I mean, I guess falling to #3 in oil production behind China and Russia after being #1 in 2015 might be "not very good," but the US is #1 in the world for natgas production in 2016. Fracking is amazing. Trabisnikof posted:US natural gas companies would describe 2016 as a bad year. Same for oil. And that's not even getting into coal's terminal decline. Prices on oil have been falling globally for some time now, and isn't seeing the usual associated increase in consumption/demand. So economically, that's not a very good year. King Coal's been dying for some time now, and even China's use of it is leveling off. Article is from April 2016.
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Dec 30, 2016 22:24
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I can't even argue against solar roads/sidewalks anymore, I've had the same argument with proponents a thousand times If someone brings it up as a cool idea they really support steam just shoots out of my ears and I turn red and start screaming/crying.
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Dec 30, 2016 23:05
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Trabisnikof posted:You're missing the point entirely. The old model of the grid, where big expensive to run power plants run 24/7 because they can't stop without losing money is being replaced by a more flexible grid where more peakers, demand response and smarter power electronics allow for a vastly more adaptive grid. The 1950s model of the power grid is outdated. I didnt miss the point. I understand the argument you are making and I think it's just wrong, can't be done. Maybe it's possible but absolutely no where near the proposed costs for wind/solar power.
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Dec 30, 2016 23:11
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Hmm what about putting solar panels on the roofs of tunnels to catch all of the headlight beams? It's completely untapped energy, just going wasted every day. I estimate we lose out, as a planet, on 3 trillion joules per year in headlights in tunnel energy. Think of the savings! We'll start building tunnels just to have them.
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Dec 30, 2016 23:12
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In what world does it not make more sense to put solar panels next to the road?
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Dec 30, 2016 23:18
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:In what world does it not make more sense to put solar panels next to the road? No you see we need to build roads and solar panels are good, therefore we need to build solar panels as roads. If you put it next to the road nobody would do it, what you need to do is make the road multiple times more expensive and also worse, it'll be amazing! Everyone will want one! If there's one thing that's at a premium in areas with massive road networks, it's space! Putting them next to or over the road would take up too much space!
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Dec 30, 2016 23:27
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:In what world does it not make more sense to put solar panels next to the road? Funnily enough that's what most of the installations end up being: they're bike paths or short sections of sidewalk. One of them replaced a bit of concrete tiling that was in front of the public toilets in some small town's town square. They still have the problems of "since they're flat on the ground, the solar energy achieved remains lesser", but they don't get as much damage as they would otherwise (though as shown, that Dutch one already got wrecked by the relatively mild winters of the Netherlands).
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Dec 30, 2016 23:35
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Solar Roadways is going to set their thing up as a sidewalk somewhere in Missouri. I kinda wanted to see how those glass tiles would work out when pitted against trucks and other heavy loads 
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Dec 31, 2016 00:31
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I hate to use an alt-right buzzword but solar sidewalks are 100% "virtue signalling" by the city/authority putting them in. It's greenwashing mixed with the worst sort of TED Talk "simple disruptive new technology that's going to change things for the better!!" sort of mindset.
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Dec 31, 2016 00:40
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Trabisnikof posted:You're missing the point entirely. The old model of the grid, where big expensive to run power plants run 24/7 because they can't stop without losing money is being replaced by a more flexible grid where more peakers, demand response and smarter power electronics allow for a vastly more adaptive grid. The 1950s model of the power grid is outdated. Lovins says that we don't need to solve the expensive problem of energy storage because he has swapped it for the expensive problem of long range energy transmission, and then he points at places that still rely on "outdated" baseload sources to support his suggestion that we don't need baseload sources. Yes, we can effectively choreograph renewable energy sources together with more traditional sources of energy. But his implied conclusion at the end is that we can easily just switch to a 100% renewable energy grid. He probably doesn't state this outright because he knows that this is not supported by his model and would require a huge investment in the US electrical grid, which is even less likely to happen soon than a breakthrough in energy storage
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Dec 31, 2016 05:06
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It's always daytime somewhere. Solar roads in arizona can power china at night, and solar roads in the Gobi desert can power the US at night. Baseload is a myth solar roads everywhere.
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Dec 31, 2016 08:13
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Baronjutter posted:It's always daytime somewhere. Solar roads in arizona can power china at night, and solar roads in the Gobi desert can power the US at night. Baseload is a myth solar roads everywhere. source your quotes please, i'm assuming braindead reddit post but i've been surprised before
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Dec 31, 2016 08:49
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Baronjutter posted:It's always daytime somewhere. Solar roads in arizona can power china at night, and solar roads in the Gobi desert can power the US at night. Baseload is a myth solar roads everywhere. I agree with this premise so long as it's limited to a YA syfi branded novel.
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Dec 31, 2016 13:05
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It's really only a matter of time until Russian malware just completely kills the US power grid.  Just don't say we didn't warn you about this. We've got a house of cards that could come tumbling down.
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Dec 31, 2016 16:34
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Three-Phase posted:It's really only a matter of time until Russian malware just completely kills the US power grid. Cant wait til Trump orders some nice juicy HVDC cables laid across Alaska so that you get some of that clean Russian and Chinese energy
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Dec 31, 2016 18:13
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I'm not going to lie constructing a massive intercontinental tie is a fascinating idea. The economics and politics would probably be just as complicated as the engineering requiredz
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Dec 31, 2016 19:26
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Three-Phase posted:It's really only a matter of time until Russian malware just completely kills the US power grid. Last year I heard about large scale emergency simulations, involving I believe the entire WECC, that was (as explained to me) focused on basically what-if everything digital stopped working. However, I never was able to find an after-action review or lessons learned or anything.
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Dec 31, 2016 19:31
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That there's no AAR saying everything went fine is probably answer enough
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Dec 31, 2016 19:58
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Three-Phase posted:It's really only a matter of time until Russian malware just completely kills the US power grid. Didn't the US do some sabre rattling about doing this to Russia recently(before Nov. 8)? Seemed kinda weirdly hawkish to publicly say "hey stop it or else!", but that is poltics and goes well beyond the scope of this thread.
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Dec 31, 2016 20:11
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Eh there's always been some kind of political connection to the energy business when you really think about it. High altitude nuke (say from a satellite) or a major CMD would likely be worse. However with electrical systems there are "tricks" that can seriously damage equipment under the right circumstances. (Aurora attacks.)
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Dec 31, 2016 23:52
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ohgodwhat posted:That there's no AAR saying everything went fine is probably answer enough How could the result ever be "everything went fine" though? Having fully redundant, entirely mechanical systems that are sufficient to control everything in the system isn't possible. Many power plants can't meaningfully be run with non-digital control systems in any form other than going for a safe shutdown, which is going to gently caress the grid pretty hard. (I'm thinking particularly of nuclear plants). It's like asking for a plane that continue flying to any destination it might have been going to when the engines blow up. You can get a glide factor and make an emergency landing, sure, but you're not getting across the ocean on that!
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Jan 1, 2017 00:15
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Yes, you responded to exactly what I meant. Thank you for your insight.
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Jan 1, 2017 00:45
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