Hey guys,
The title is a joke, so apologies if you came here through Google, expecting to find something actually on the topic of the transmitter. I just thought I’d share a curious tidbit of research that I did which holds no special useful value other than to satisfy a bit of curiosity.
So I’ve been visiting my friend to do volunteer work for a while now. We’d meet regularly on the weekends and kinda combine useful work with what we call “rant therapy”, just talking about recent events and you know, peptalk on dealing with it all.
For many weeks, we’ve been noticing the pattern, that on certain days during the week, people are in an exceptionally bad mood. Like, road rage, customer support being especially difficult or weird, management being ticked off and demanding, etc. And on those same days, repeatedly, without fail, the power grid (the local Slovenian power grid management company has a website where nation-wide power production and demand can be tracked) would record an unanticipated ~300 MW spike in power usage around noon.
This was just around the time when the HAARP youtubes have been making their rounds again, so I ask my friend about this and he’s like:
HAARP?
*conspiracy music quietly plays in background…
🤣
Jokes aside, I was always curious about what really caused that correlation. And so, just out of curiosity I reached out to the power grid management company, if they had an explanation for the power usage spike. After all, it was in their own interest to try to predict when these happen, so that they can ramp production in time. And I suppose though they were under no obligation to answer me, the curious bystander, they might have people who’d enjoy answering me (I work devops and level 3 support and I don’t mind sometimes sharing interesting tech tidbits with customers who are just curious, obviously if I can safely do so).
So, they ended up actually answering me, and the answer immediately clarified the whole thing including people’s bad mood. And no, nobody was using a giant transmitter in the arctic to ruin people’s mood at random days of the week. It turns out that the ~300 MW spike at noon is the absence of compensatory production of solar panels, during bad weather. And of course people are in a shit mood during bad weather.
You see, there are two options on what you can do if you own a power plant (e.g. a solar one): You can either opt to sell the power to the grid, or you can use the power to decrease your power bill. Now selling the power you kinda get the value from the international power exchange, which especially at noon when everyone is getting tons of free power from their solar cells, tends to be extremely cheap. On the other hand if you use it to decrease your own power bill, it doesn’t ever actually earn you money, but the power bill can be a lot of bucks and the sun is free, so it’s a great option. As a result, most solar plants in the country are configured for compensating for local usage. However this also means, that when the sun isn’t shining at noon, all the people who would normally not be using as much power, now do, resulting in the power usage spike.
I assume there are also special situations where people use more power exactly at noon, because power at that time is usually cheaper. But I don’t have this exactly figured out yet. But for the most part, mystery solved. 😉
*sigh* I mean it’s not great that people are this affected by the weather, but I guess if you have the forecast, whether you work for a power grid management company or just any that deals with people, you now at least know what to expect…
LP,
Jure