Power companies in France have found a way to make money with energy saving strategies: just in a strange way. In France there is a company that enables you to switch off unneeded, powerful devices in peak times automatically. This means that power companies don't have so many problems with peak usage (and could spare some investments) and you could spare some money.

Saving energy in peak times will save much more in the future, when prices may change with the time of the day for "normal" consumers as well.

But the regulatory commission ruled that Voltalis should pay the power company because "its service would not be possible without the producer maintaining production."

NYTimes

Apparently power companies don't want to sell less energy to the consumer in future. So they asked for money for the saved energy.

In my opinion the ruling of the regulatory commission is just ridiculous. I really hope that this will not stand in front of a court in Europe.

Will we see markings on new devices in the future, saying "Hey, you save 100 W compared to ancient technology with this device. Please tell your power company. Your contract may need adjustment."?

On Twitter this would get a big #fail from me.

Now all what’s needed to resurrect this has been done:

• moved everything to a new server I have complete access to
• exported all old entries including comments from the old, no longer fully working, nucleus cms and imported it into movable type
• started adjusting the style
• installed iMT the iPhone interface, which is really great!

There are a few drawbacks, though:

• Old links will broken. Currently I don’t mind too much and won’t fix this. Google will find the content in the new places soon anyway.
• I still have to work on the style. This may take a while.
• I miss pagination and haven’t found out how to achieve this, yet.

Why I switched from nucleus? Well lately showing a single entry didn’t work. As I didn’t have complete access to the server, I didn’t know why this happened. Further I wanted to switch to a more supported platform anyway. Many people might have switched to Worpress instead, but somehow I don’t like what I hear about Wordpress (too many holes). Further development on nucleus seemed to have stalled for quite a time.

Movable Type is quite fun. The only thing is, that the plugin repository is hard to browse. Too may too old plugins, which won’t work on the version I use anyway.