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Can somebody explain how if you plug a solar panel into your plug socket energy goes back into the grid? Does that just work somehow?

Electrical flow is reversible.

The key there is 'flow' (alongside electrical pressure). All that happens is the co-mingling of different power sources e.g. panels, batteries and grid with the grid topping up what the other sources don't provide for the total load you are using.

So MattW states that in Germany these are limited to 800W. That's not much energy when you have the kettle on, but if you are out for the day and the only electricity being used in the house is for appliances on standby, and the fridge, then I'd have thought there would be an excess that would find its way onto the local grid.

Potential problems start to crop up as the amount generated by home solar systems increases.
A single panel is fairly immune from any of that.

As the amount you can generate increases (unless it's completely off grid), the procedures needed to connect into the supply become more complicated (under 3.68kW doesn't trouble anyone much).
Details are here, I think:
https://www.energynetworks.org/assets/images/Resource library/G99 Type A Final 2020.pdf

It's only really a problem if there are a lot of panels on a lot of rooves, such that (during peak insolation) an area is 'exporting' power. Home batteries solve a lot of these problems.

Roofs

Roofs.

The Greens and Reform are underrepresented on PB. The header explains why. Greens and Reform are the parties for people with few assets and little chance of obtaining them. Most on here have plenty of assets and are happy to keep them, if necessary at the expense of those without. The term that used to be used for us was boomers. A few, such as @OldKingCole, @Foxy and @NickPalmer think of the wider population, and are those at least considering the Greens. Probably not coincidentally, they are posters that seem to take more interest in the views of their families.

The data in the header doesn't indicate that Reform voters are unusually poor. 41% of them are financially comfortable compared to the 43% in the general population who are. That's not very different. But point taken re PBers. We are mainly top quartile (at least) in wealth. Least that's my impression.

I wonder how they assessed 'financially comfortable' btw. I wouldn't totally trust a self-select on that. People tend to shy away from saying that about themselves.

Nicking a line from Steven J Gould, The Median is not The Message. That's especially true for Farage Followers. Some are the properly Left Behind, and it's a blot on the records of all governments in my lifetime how much that was just allowed to happen. But very many are extremely comfortable materially, and their discontent is more cultural. Some of that is just that they're getting old, and the cultural caravan is moving on without them. Some of it is not liking the conseqences of their votes and personal spending decisions. (Yes, your High Street is crumbling, but that's mostly because you have spent years not buying things there.)

The first group were often historically non-voters, and who can blame them? The second tend to cluster in the posher bits of unposh areas. How you analyse those is a problem for analysts. How you simultaneously please them both is a problem for all the Reform councillors about to be elected.

Farage-ism like the Zhadovshchina it apes in many ways, is an intellectual dead end.

Even if they fluke an election win, which would be funny, then what? We've seen the Fukkers in action in local government now and have an idea how it will go when reality is more complicated and intractable than a Facebook post.

Their key priorities have captured the zeitgeist. Smoking in public places and reintroducing foxhunting are at the top of everyone's priority list surely?

It's hard to imagine the Conservatives being in power after 2029 except as the willing junior partner in a Farage government. Badenoch and Farage don't seem miles apart in their political outlooks, so that fits too.

Which is precisely their dilemma. If you support Reform, you vote Reform, if you don't then you don't vote for a party who would be the junior partner. The Tories have two routes out of this, which could be worked together:

1) Be so brilliant that the polling shifts so that by the end of 2027 the question is reversed. Not 'Will the Tories support Reform' (Kemi's dilemma) but 'Will Reform support the Tories' (Farage's dilemma).

2) Make it clear that the Tories are One Nation Centre Right and won't touch Reform with a bargepole.

The only other option, inconsistent with (1) and (2) is an electoral pact with Reform. IMO that is the only way the Right of Centre might possibly actually win in 2029. Hopefully it won't happen. Scorpions in a cage and all that.

I'm not sure the Tory Party could survive a pact. It would be the centre right equivalent of the SDP (or the old Liberal Party) evolving (I know there were centre-rights in the SDP but it would not have happened without the longest suicide note in history)

Their best chance of survival, a state by no means guaranteed, is to be brilliantly effective in opposition, and to have brilliantly coherent, honest and comprehensible policies, well communicated, to resolve the biggest elephant in the room problems such as debt, borrowing, inflation, NEETS, benefits culture, sickness culture, social cohesion, housing, defence, equality of opportunity (but not outcomes!), the process state, unfairness in taxation, student loans and a long list more.

Since no-one else is doing it they have the field to themselves, and since this is what parliament and government exist to do really well, they might as well have a go.

The problem with all this is simple. They had 14 years in government, during which they were at liberty to tackle any or all of those issues, in pretty much whatever way they saw fit.

They chose to zigzag between doing nothing and making the problem worse, interspersed with some fine sounding speaches about how they were going to fix all the issues, but which always turned out to be hot air.

They can make all the right noises in opposition, just like they used to make all the right noises in government. But how can they convince anyone that they've changed, and will actually *do* the stuff they keep talking about?

I've very little time for Starmer, but when he stands at the dispatch box and bellows "14 years" to every question at PMQs, he does have half a point.

And this isn't a problem that can be solved by changing leader - bin Kemi and replace her with who you like, and the same central charge is still the same: "Why should we believe this time it will be different?"

My mother in law is so fat that 6 smaller mothers in law orbit her

Wouldn't hear that sort of gag at a Stewart Lee show (unless delivered ironically as a joke on the joke itself). I went to see him recently (first time) and he is very skillful. You get plenty of laughs but - key point - all the time you are laughing up not down and you know everyone else is too because they share the same sensibility. Nothing smug about it, it's just an uplifting communal experience that you feel better for being intelligent and enlightened enough to be a part of.

I just vomited

But did you vomit up or down?

I was going through Gillingham at the time, so I’m not sure it matters

Gillingham (to rhyme with gills of a fish) or Gillingham (to rhyme with Jill)? Its an important difference. One has a Waitrose, and probably a Gails...

He was off to Whistable so it’s the one that rhymes with Jill.

I don’t think there is even a co-op in the town centre anymore - actual the old co-op is now a Londis franchise and the Safeway is a co-op

Actually that’s unfair - there is an Aldi at the old TV studios where they filmed Fraggle Rock

My mother in law is so fat that 6 smaller mothers in law orbit her

Wouldn't hear that sort of gag at a Stewart Lee show (unless delivered ironically as a joke on the joke itself). I went to see him recently (first time) and he is very skillful. You get plenty of laughs but - key point - all the time you are laughing up not down and you know everyone else is too because they share the same sensibility. Nothing smug about it, it's just an uplifting communal experience that you feel better for being intelligent and enlightened enough to be a part of.

I just vomited

But did you vomit up or down?

I was going through Gillingham at the time, so I’m not sure it matters

Gillingham (to rhyme with gills of a fish) or Gillingham (to rhyme with Jill)? Its an important difference. One has a Waitrose, and probably a Gails...

He was off to Whistable so it’s the one that rhymes with Jill.

I don’t think there is even a co-op in the town centre anymore - actual the old co-op is now a Londis franchise and the Safeway is a co-op

Actually that’s unfair - there is an Aldi at the old TV studios where they filmed Fraggle Rock

Ah - Fraggle Rock. A much under-rated gem of the 80's.

Meanwhile, an update on Sunday's story:

Transgender girls have been given until 6 September to leave the Guides.

The deadline set by Girlguiding follows the organisation's announcement in December that membership would be "restricted to girls and young women".

The intervening six months give affected members and their families "time to plan, prepare, access support, and decide when - between now and September - they feel ready to leave.

https://news.sky.com/story/transgender-girls-given-until-september-to-leave-guides-13523781

And the only way I can join the dots that makes sense is that they are terrified of being dragged through the courts to extinction.

As with women’s prisons and shelters, the question is simply how many rapes are acceptable, and how many is too many?

That's a very dubious rhetorical device in argument.

Eg, me, if I followed suit:

Assisted Dying: The question is simply how many protracted agonising deaths of terminally ill people is acceptable.

Trans Inclusion: The question is simply how many desperately unhappy transgender people forced to live a lie is acceptable.

Air Quality: The question is simply how much serious ill health due to pollution is acceptable.

Etc.

My mother in law is so fat that 6 smaller mothers in law orbit her

Wouldn't hear that sort of gag at a Stewart Lee show (unless delivered ironically as a joke on the joke itself). I went to see him recently (first time) and he is very skillful. You get plenty of laughs but - key point - all the time you are laughing up not down and you know everyone else is too because they share the same sensibility. Nothing smug about it, it's just an uplifting communal experience that you feel better for being intelligent and enlightened enough to be a part of.

I just vomited

But did you vomit up or down?

I was going through Gillingham at the time, so I’m not sure it matters

Gillingham (to rhyme with gills of a fish) or Gillingham (to rhyme with Jill)? Its an important difference. One has a Waitrose, and probably a Gails...

He was off to Whistable so it’s the one that rhymes with Jill.

I don’t think there is even a co-op in the town centre anymore - actual the old co-op is now a Londis franchise and the Safeway is a co-op

Actually that’s unfair - there is an Aldi at the old TV studios where they filmed Fraggle Rock

Ah - Fraggle Rock. A much under-rated gem of the 80's.

Gobo, Moki, Boomer, Wembly and Red iirc were the Fraggles

My mother in law is so fat that 6 smaller mothers in law orbit her

Wouldn't hear that sort of gag at a Stewart Lee show (unless delivered ironically as a joke on the joke itself). I went to see him recently (first time) and he is very skillful. You get plenty of laughs but - key point - all the time you are laughing up not down and you know everyone else is too because they share the same sensibility. Nothing smug about it, it's just an uplifting communal experience that you feel better for being intelligent and enlightened enough to be a part of.

I just vomited

But did you vomit up or down?

I was going through Gillingham at the time, so I’m not sure it matters

Gillingham (to rhyme with gills of a fish) or Gillingham (to rhyme with Jill)? Its an important difference. One has a Waitrose, and probably a Gails...

He was off to Whistable so it’s the one that rhymes with Jill.

I don’t think there is even a co-op in the town centre anymore - actual the old co-op is now a Londis franchise and the Safeway is a co-op

Actually that’s unfair - there is an Aldi at the old TV studios where they filmed Fraggle Rock

Ah - Fraggle Rock. A much under-rated gem of the 80's.

Let the music play, worries for another day…

Can somebody explain how if you plug a solar panel into your plug socket energy goes back into the grid? Does that just work somehow?

Electrical flow is reversible.

The key there is 'flow' (alongside electrical pressure). All that happens is the co-mingling of different power sources e.g. panels, batteries and grid with the grid topping up what the other sources don't provide for the total load you are using.

So MattW states that in Germany these are limited to 800W. That's not much energy when you have the kettle on, but if you are out for the day and the only electricity being used in the house is for appliances on standby, and the fridge, then I'd have thought there would be an excess that would find its way onto the local grid.

Potential problems start to crop up as the amount generated by home solar systems increases.
A single panel is fairly immune from any of that.

As the amount you can generate increases (unless it's completely off grid), the procedures needed to connect into the supply become more complicated (under 3.68kW doesn't trouble anyone much).
Details are here, I think:
https://www.energynetworks.org/assets/images/Resource library/G99 Type A Final 2020.pdf