There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity. Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
I also wonder what the contribution of domestic solar and on-site industrial generation is? I'm a dev in a large manufacturing business and two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells which power a lot of our operations. Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too. Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?
(Edit: added "being posted", "welcome" and "(neutral?)" for clarity)
> There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and increased importing of electricity
Right – those things aren't great. What's so amusing or outrageous about pointing that out?
> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
The Telegraph-esque outrage in the comments here is explicitly people complaining about the idea of rationing their electricity, which as you point out is not suggested by any part of the article.
To be fair, the people who think it believe that smart meters are how it will happen, so their existence would be all the evidence they actually need that it will.
One possible reference to rationing - that is actually not a reference to rationing - does not infer that the thread is loaded with Telegaph-esque rants about rationing.
You're doubling down on the misrepresentation.
There are zero references to rationing on this thread - and yet the top commenter calling this out as some kind of 'Telgraph-equ' nonsnes.
'Intermittent availability of power' - is absolutely not a reference to 'rationing' and if it were, it wouldn't be any kind of basis for hyperbole over 'rationing'.
I gave evidence of two examples of govenmental policies around rationing, and it's definitely not via 'power outages' - that's absurd - rolling blackouts only happen during emergency situations.
You've stated that the conversations has tilted to 'rationing' is 'trivially falsifiable' and at the same time haven't produced any evidence.
[1] gives different numbers. About 3x decrease in industrial energy consumption since 1970. Steel production decrease is about 3x ([2]). Chemical production has shifted from bulk production to pharmaceuticals.
That’s a different metric - “million tonnes of oil equivalent”. That’s not the same as electricity consumption - that’s the total amount of energy used in all kinds of industrial processes.
The data across the board supports the notion that reduction in electricity is an industrial phenomenon overall, there is no data to suggest this is a 'consumer green activity' phenom - not even the link you provided.
All of think links here, the person you are responding to, mine (above) and your own directly point towards reduction in industrial use.
Dont think this is the right way of looking at it.
Two things were happening at the same time: deindustrialization and electrification. Industries and the economy used to depend more on machines and oil. That was getting replaced by reliance on electricity. If electricity generation was cheap enough, we might have seen the total energy usage get transformed one for one into electricity usage. But that didn’t happen and energy usage overall went down. That’s deindustrialization.
Of course it could have other reasons like labour costs and so on.
No, literally the evidence you provided does not support the 50/50 thesis, moreover, the data does show that residential reduction is a marginal - and you're probably failing to take into consideration the UK has grown by more than 10M people during that period aka this is 'per capita' - not aggregate.
This government data is must more substantial than that link, and it puts the ratio at 70% reduction in electricity due to deindustrialization.
Moreover - the OP's comment was a blatant misrepresentation (lie) - by ignoring deindustrialization, the primary factor as stated in the article (and in reality) - plus a bit of a thrown slander aka the 'Telegaph-esque' nonsense.
It comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use, a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades, even for fossil fuels. It's well established that the cheapest additional capacity is efficiency. One of the reasons I am not so concerned about the AI energy needs, especially because the US has a lot of wiggle room.
There's a lot of HN and YC-aligned people who don't believe this, despite the empirical evidence of the last few decades.
To take the stupidest version of the argument (not going to sugarcoat it, I think it was embarrassingly stupid) there was Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto where he called for a 1000x increase in energy production from nuclear fission and fusion. I quote directly:
"We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well."
Driving energy costs to near zero drives down the cost for literally every other process, manufacturing or extractive or services. A 1000x increase in energy practically lets you extract so much material for cheaper that the cost of materials, and the associated logistics, goes down.
The point of using energy is not to use energy. What matters is the services that energy delivers, be it a hot shower, a drive to the grocery store, a new house, a squillion tokens of AI computation. If we can get the services we want more cheaply by energy more efficiently, this is a good thing, not a disaster for humanity.
For completeness, I acknowledge that there are people for whom energy usage is inherently bad, which is equally silly. What matters are the downside impacts of the energy use, not the energy use itself.
My point was that even if you drive costs to 1000x, you're not somehow magically going to reduce consumption. Human output will match those efficiency gains in other forms. Imagine things like synthetic diamond jewelry being the norm, thermal pyrolysis of methane and CO2 into plain carbon, mining deeper underground for precious minerals, etc. A person in the 1890s could not have envisioned the things that would happen just 30 years later, enabled by cheap electricity.
And my point is that life has gotten better for 30 years despite Energy Line Goes Sideways, and what we care about is the life getting better part, not which direction the line goes.
If you want to see true evidence of this, look at the rebates power companies offer.
In all the places I’ve lived there are generally large incentive programs to convert air conditioners and old heaters to heat pumps, and other efficient appliance replacements, install better insulation, etc. because that rebate dollar stretches a lot further than building new power plants, transmission lines, etc.
If you cannot understand how a huge increase in energy might be useful you should probably not go around calling other people stupid. We are not going to get carbon removal and desalination at scale to fix the already baked-in consequences of climate change by making our water heaters more efficient. Efficiency is good but there is more to life than the status quo.
I am aware of the need for carbon removal and (some) desalination, but 1000x-ing our energy production is ludicrous stuff. The waste heat from energy production on that scale would render Earth uninhabitable.
That's incorrect. It's in the order of 25% of the heat reaching the Earth's surface, or maybe 35-40 watts of heat per square metre.
That's roughly ten times the warming effect of doubling CO2.
Now, I don't have a climate model handy to simulate this in detail but I would suggest "render the Earth uninhabitable" is a close enough approximation to the actual effects to suggest it's a terrible idea and anyone seriously proposing it should be laughed out of the room until they've done their homework.
Well given that cheap energy follows Jevon's paradox, it makes complete sense. If each unit of energy becomes cheaper to produce (which renewables are driving today), then you should see more consumption of that cheap energy into economic activity. Economic progress is easily coupled with increased energy use.
The US has a lot of wiggle room wrt energy consumption because it has ceded the role of being the world's factory to China. At the same time, the US is the world's data center and software development hub, and the world's finance hub, and the world's bank. What does the UK have in comparison?
The numbers today in the developed works don't back it up. It's Jevons Paradox btw, the person that came up with it was called Jevons, not Jevon.
The US has a lot of wiggle room because it uses almost 2x electricity per capita than e.g. Germany. People don't need electricity, they need light and cooling. If you do the math, that is hundreds of GW of free "new" capacity just by getting the same value for less energy. Obviously you can't do 1/1 comparisons, a lot of people in the US use AC whereas they don't in Europe. But overall the US could get more efficient in energy use. People buy new appliances all the time, make them be more energy efficient. Or don't and let the market sort it out. "The solution to high prices are high prices".
Same with AI. It is becoming much more efficient and cheaper. This will result in a much, much higher demand. Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.
That the energy demand is sinking is based on the fact that most industries got outsourced to China.
No, it is not. For example, gasoline use per capita in the US peaked in 1978 and the economy went up around a gazillion percent since then. There are now millions of EVs in Europe and electricity use has declined in the last twenty years and this has nothing to do with the hand wavy "deindustrialization". Why would it not? The light bulbs I have today use 10x less electricity, the induction stove I have uses significantly less energy, I bought a fridge last year that uses 3x less electricity than the previous one, the TV died three years ago, the new one uses an estimated 50kwh per year of normal use, and the old one used 200. The EU has new standards where the devices on stand by are not allowed to draw more than 3kwh (I think) etc. And obviously manufacturers will not make efficient stand by devices for the EU and then make inefficient ones for the rest of the world in purpose. The same is true for other forms. My building replaced the gas boiler used for heating and warm water in general. The winter was tougher than the one before, I switched to working from home and heated a lot more. My gas use stayed flat.
When your logic collides with hard numbers I would stick to the numbers and reconsider the logic. Here is an idea: will I run my dishwasher 3x more often just because it is now 3x more efficient? Will I run my fridge more often because it is more efficient? Difficult, it already runs 24/7. Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?
So as you see although there is obviously some validity in the OBSERVATION that is Jevons Paradox, it is not a hard rule. There comes a point where it stops being true.
„Economic Growth Is Closely Tied to Energy Consumption“, Slide 3:
“This rather strange situation arises because the standard calculation misses energy embodied in imported goods.”
"Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?"
Nope. But now you have a computer, maybe two, a cell phone, an ebook reader, a tablet, take international flights and use Bitcoin and AI.
Your anegdotal evidence falls on its face as well: I have two TVs now instead of one, and my electricity consumption went down. This includes moving mid year from an office to work from home. So one laptop charging every day, and one monitor. I even bought a printer which I did not have previously. That's because the two TVs combined, made 2023 and 2025, use less electricity than the one I had before. The addition of a laptop, monitor and printer were negligent compared to the savings I made with my new fridge.
It's not a good look that the UK seemingly isn't installing air conditioning, decarbonizing heating, or adopting electric vehicles. Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first.
What makes you think that the U.K. isn't adopting electric vehicles? I can tell you from direct visual observation that people are. The little green numberplate rectangles are fairly common, now.
EV adoption in the UK is huge right now, heat pump adoption is happening (though could be faster).
Air conditioning is a weird one, because it’s only been necessary in residential properties for a couple of years, and really still only necessary for a couple of days a year, so a fixed installation isn’t cost effective. Portable units are becoming more popular.
AC has been a requirement in most commercial premises for years. Decades, perhaps.
Air conditioners are heat pumps. Not all heat pumps are air conditioners.
Common installations reuse the wet systems we have and are air to water, which was until recently the only thing the grants covered (and now it’s still lower for a2a).
UK typically uses air-to-water heat pumps with convection radiators. The passive radiators are useless for cooling, and condensation on pipes in walls can be a problem.
Look, I know that actuuuualy and technically it's the same type of technology working on the same principle. The thing I have ( Daalderop 5G WPU) mainly works as floor heating (and great at that), but it's the size of a fridge and has it's own utility closet and a pipe underground for whatever thermal medium it uses and it's own separate meter (for reasons of regulatory kind). And it's a district wide deployment where I don't even own the thing.
Most importantly it's not the same in the way of me not feeling the chill. It's stupid, as I know the house is cooler than the outsides, but the actual split system delivers the cold air right to where I feel it and this thing just makes the ambient temperature down to 25c without me even noticing.
I don't want to know what it costs to install (I got it with the house), but split system costed lol nothing in eastern european dollars and took some guys less than half a day and zero permits to install too. For better or worse the heat pump doesn't live in the same locale I had that.
A water/water heat pump is absolutely not the same thing the other commenters are talking about. They're mostly talking about an air/air heat pump, where it's literally all the same parts but has a reversing valve so it can either be hot/cold or cold/hot among the coils with fans blowing through them.
This is more like what they're talking about, but they do come in a lot of shapes and sizes and can be more or less integrated into central systems.
I have one and it is? We keep our house very cool in the summer using it and it works just as well as an in window AC that we use in the bedroom. Maybe what you have is different somehow.
So is a refrigerator; all the other considerations make saying "I have a heat pump therefore I have AC" in this context a bit like a Mexican saying "I am American".
Like, sure, but the word has a specific and a general meaning, conventional use is only the specific meaning.
With a heat pump asked central heating system run in cooling mode condensate can form at your pipes in the wall and your radiators or floor when using under floor heating. So you have to limit its cooling power to prevent that.
With an AC the advantage is that the condensate is forming inside the AC when cooling the air.
Most British homes haven't been built to support AC. Retro-fitting a heatpump for heating is relatively straightforward, as the heating delivery mechanism (pipes to transmit hot water to wall-mounted radiators) is already in place.
Although you could pipe cool water through the radiators, it's an ineffective form of cooling compared to blown-air systems, and retro-fitting a blown-air system is much more costly than a heating-only heat pump.
You can't just pump the cold water through the heating elements, because of condensation. The correct installation, requires special heating, cooling elements that include fans (it helps with the cooling) and drainage for the condensation.
I have "cooled floors", so basically heated floors but you can reverse the circuit in summer. Condensation really isn't an issue unless the temperature difference is massive, say room temperature being 28 degrees C and then kicking the system into high gear trying to get to 20 degrees C.
Once room and floor temperature match, condensation doesn't occur anymore as long as you keep it running.
You need a radiator with a built-in electric fan, this will all but eliminate the condensation.
However it will not cool like an A/C unit, only something like 5°C reduction. This can be enough to get a decent night's sleep during a summer heatwave.
We're talking about retrofitting to existing typical UK radiators. If I was buying new radiators (and paying an electrician to run electricity to them!) then I would want a better return on investment than cooling from 35C to 30C.
I visited a building once that had "cold panels" covering about half of the drop ceiling. Supposedly they made a difference in summer but I suppose they needed the massive surface area.
I've had a cooling/heating heatpump fitted. Adding a couple of wall units bumped the price by about £1500, although the whole thing was softened by the grant for getting rid of an oil fired boiler.
While our house is relatibvely small and we kept the units (which also do heating as well) confined to the main living space, it wasn't especially burdensome. The bulk of the work was installing the behemoth of a hot water tank!
Did you consider going with instant hot water at the sink/basin/shower/bath? My house is also relatively small and has little room for a huge hot water tank.
Original comment mentioned £ so they are in the UK. It's possible and not super uncommon to have electric showers in the UK because the 230V provides enough power for water heating unlike the US.
I'm currently investigating options for kitchen sinks and such. It feels quite silly to have a long length of pipe leading from a central source for a small amount of warm water to wash my hands.
They can be, and in many places that get both too hot and too cold they're built that way as standard, but in places that are usually too hot or usually too cold, they're often built one way to save a bit of complexity.
This is only the beginning. Soon people will realize that a mini-split install isn't that much more expensive than a portable AC, but is a lot more convenient.
The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.
> decarbonizing heating
What does this mean? More renewables? If efficiency reduces energy demands then it directly results in less carbon.
> electric vehicles
Aren't people already adopting electric vehicles? Do you think that the government should introduce a scheme to persuade people to buy electric vehicles? Does the availability of charging for electric vehicles need improving?
> Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first
Efficiency means saving money. In what circumstance could efficiency be bad? The grid responds to demand, unused electricity means higher prices for consumers. One of biggest issues right now in the UK is cost of living crisis, so raising electricity prices would be universally hated. How does making the grid less efficient increase growth?
I believe this refers to switching to high-efficiency electric heaters like reverse-cycle AC units (also known as "heat pumps"), rather than oil heaters or ducted gas heating.
The majority of UK homes are heated by gas-powered boilers that pump hot water through radiators in each room. Often hot water is heated by the same system.
Decarbonisation usually means replacing that boiler with a heat pump which uses electricity to heat water.
I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid. Buildings are engineered to trap heat, so the heat doesn't dissipate at night and every day the indoor temperature rises, and rises...
At least they removed the need for planning permission recently. The problem is that the places that need AC the most (flats) will probably not be able to get it until the leasehold system has been abolished.
> > decarbonizing heating
> What does this mean?
Presumably it means heating using electric heat pumps rather than gas boilers. This also solves the AC problem. I don't think this is viable for most people. Heating was never the problem anyway, at least in the south winters are mild.
> I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable
well, i live in lincolnshire and used to live in london. i usually have a fan on for a few weeks over summer, but that's it. where in the UK did you live that the summers were so unbearable?
That's only a few weeks a year. The UK isn't Florida yet. And besides modern AC is incredibly efficient. The stuff that's cleared to sell in Europe has incredibly high standards.
It's fine if temperatures get lower during the night, but 25°C at night and 35°C during the day leaves little for cooling the infrastructure (roads, buildings), and constant warm temperatures are unbearable if you cannot even get in the shade when you want to cool off. Then, 35°C is also very hard to manage with high humidity.
I think you're right, and in addition to that there is also a lot we could do other than AC. Just having some shade from trees already helps a lot. Modern cities can be a man-made hellscape with regards to heat. But we did that to ourselves.
> UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid.
Not to be that guy, in the last 20 years, 27 was considered a heatwave.
> Buildings are engineered to trap heat,
I mean Victorian buildings were engineered to let in light, and have good ventilation. Hence why each room has a huge sash window, an airbrick and a fireplace.
A common scenario is to have unshaded solid walls exposed to afternoon sun. Without insulation the inside of the house can be high all through the night. A good effect of insulation in summer is to prevent that effect. Important to note that it would be standard to allow cooling airflow in the morning.
> The more insulation you have the less the indoor temperature is affected by the outside temperature.
Insulation isn't magic, over many days of hot weather eventually the building will reach equilibrium with the average outside temperature. This means it will be cooler indoors than outdoors during the day, and hotter indoors than outdoors at night.
However, the nights are specifically when you want a residential building to be cooler, assuming the inhabitants are not at home during the day. So the insulation actually makes the building hotter from the perspective of the inhabitants.
Very few places "need" air conditioning but it doesn't take very days where it's 80+ outside and hotter inside to convince me that the per-day cost of AC is worth it. And that level of heat is nothing new.
It can be considered a medical necessity for people with certain conditions like anhidrosis, asthma, COPD, kidneys disease, or cardiovascular issues. It's also a huge medical benefit for people with terrible allergies who wouldn't be able to open a window even when that'd normally help cool the house.
> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.
We are? It’s becoming more common and we had a few bad summers and earlier this year too. The heat wave a few years back killed my dad.
Given there’s a push to swap heating systems for more efficient ones, air con units are being looked at a lot more.
> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it?
We had 6 heat waves this summer. Parents were booking hotels just to keep their kids cool
We also had heatwaves in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018. 2024 wasn't bad but was still the 4th hottest year on record.
You can absolutely bet the better-off middle classes are installing aircon. I know many. If more people could afford it they would get it
It's the humidity too not just the heat. And how after 3 or 4 days of high temps, our houses just do not cool down at night because they act like radiators. Humid 25c+ nights suck for us
People overestimate the energy usage of EVs. Average usage 2-3000 kWh/year, but there's about 1 car per 2 people in the UK, so EVs would not reverse the trend even at 100% adoption, and they're currently at about 20-25% of new cars sold and 5% of miles driven in the UK (in comparison, to say, the US, where it's 5%/1%).
I can't speak for the UK, but A big thing is that in the last 20-25ish years at least in a US home the big ones for me as far as efficiency improvements are
- CRTs got replaced by LCDs, and LCDs even 25 years ago were maybe around half the wattage
- CFLs and then LED Light bulbs replacing older filament bulbs.
- The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.
With the smaller thought of:
- Set-top appliances like rice cookers and air-fryers that tend to be better for smaller everyday cooking than a full-on oven or stovetop.
And it's fun to think about, e.x. I remember when I had to move back in 15-ish years ago my parents (very politely!) complained about the power bill increase until I went ahead and did the one-time cost of switching all the bulbs I could to LED. That change alone managed to cover the PC, monitors, and TV I had at the time.
Realistically, your average citizen is using less power than they were even 40 years ago, even with all the additional technology they have.
In terms of computing efficiency the big gain is that people use their smartphones drastically more than they do a personal computer at home, on average. And smartphones are hyper efficient compared to personal computers or laptops. An average use laptop will use ~30-60 times more energy than a once-daily charged smartphone across a year.
That also goes for people watching things on their smartphones instead of a 65" television.
Yeah, I forgot about the smartphone shift in that comment.
Even people who have laptops, the shift to smartphones and tablets for much (maybe most? IDK I'm still a laptop person at minimum when I write this so it's hard to say) of their computing/communication is another order of magnitude change for sure.
As another side note/anecdata, I still remember the amazement where the aftermath of a nasty (mostly wind) storm in 2017 caused major outages in my region. I had just moved into an apartment and due to the lagging maintenance around makeready/treetrim it took the better part of a week to get power back. Thankfully however, I had a fully charged, fancy-ish APS Backup unit [0] that was able to keep my Surface Pro 3 and 4G Hotspot charged enough to at least not feel totally in the dark. It was crazy to see how even with both charging the 'time remaining' indicator said I could have used both way more than I even needed to.
In the 90s I’d change bulbs all the time - about once a month. I don’t remember the last time I changed a bulb. I don’t think my teenager has ever had the opportunity to.
I have a bunch of third generation Philips Hue bulbs, from around 2016. They weren't cheap. But I've had them all this time, and I brought them along when I moved house.
Haven't burnt out a single bulb yet.
I understand that this has caused some challenges for the Philips Hue division. They had extremely satisfied customers but not many repeat buys.
It costs 6 euro. I'm _fairly_ sure that incandescent 100Ws didn't cost six cents. I bought a few of these (actually a cheaper non-dimmable model which is no longer on Ikea's confusing website, from a cursory search) in 2016, when I moved. They're still working fine.
I used to buy incandescent bulbs 4 for a dollar shortly before they were banned.
Throughout the house, I need to replace a regular screw-in LED bulb probably every other month or so. I don't know what brand they are, they are light bulbs I picked off the shelf at Target or Walmart. Life is too short to worry about light bulb brands. Until now.
Depending on the quality you can get a LED bulb ranging from 1 euro to 5 for the best one. The incandescent bulbs did not cost much lower, and adjusted for inflation, did cost almost the same, but you had to replace them much more often.
To me computers doesn't really have an effect on the data (for how much a computer costs, and how little time in the past it was used, considering the internet was dial-up and was the real cost of using it that made sure you weren't always online).
To me the difference is that we moved to more efficient ways to generate heat, more specifically from electric resistive heating to heat pumps. Both in home heating but also appliances (e.g. cloth driers).
And of course there is climate change, not only we generate heat more efficiently (an heat pump uses at least 1/3 to the power to generate the same amount of heat) but also the climate is less cold, thus less heat required. That is the big difference, not bulbs or computers.
Of course for nations that are more hot in the summer (e.g. my, Italy) the reverse applies, that is more power used because of air conditioning, that 30 years ago nobody had and now it's required since last summer was 25/38C outside for 2 months straight.
> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
If I search for "retail electricity price trends uk" I'm starting to see reports coming out of the UK like "UK electricity prices are now among the highest in the developed world." and "Household electricity prices have risen by almost 150% since 2010, and business electricity prices by nearly 175%" [0]. And now we see things like they've dropped below their 1970s per capita consumption.
That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much. It doesn't sound like an efficiency gain. Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff. It looks like they don't have enough energy and people are getting squeezed. I'd expect to see political instability in such an environment but the last time I checked only one of the major parties seemed to be in the process of collapsing (down from 2 in April) so they are doing better than expected on that front; I would expect riots in the streets with these sort of trends.
> Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff.
Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
Most appliances don't see much increased use from efficiency. And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency; other factors drive use changes there.
Somehow you’ve missed the drastic intensification of street, parking and building lighting at night not to mention headlights. People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.
Street lighting already had very efficient bulbs so I think that's caused by other factors. And headlights seem like other factors too. Building lighting I'm not sure but that's more like a doubling.
It's tough to say the exact multiplier but I've walked around at night a lot for years, and there has been a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights, as well as a move away from motion sensors toward permanently on.
It's the same here in Germany, and I very much dislike this development. We used to get so much beautiful fireflies in the summer here. Now they're mostly gone, and that's probably only the most visible damage.
True, but besides insecticides and habitat destruction it is possible that the strong nocturnal lighting, which disorients insects, has contributed to this. Wherever insects are abundant, a strong white lamp at night will accumulate quickly dead insects around it.
Where I live, in Europe, when I was a child there was a great abundance of insects of many different kinds. If I did a walk around my home I could see insects from perhaps at least 10 different orders.
Nowadays, the only insects that are still abundant are the true bugs (Hemiptera) why all others have mostly disappeared (a few, like mosquitoes, may still be seen from time to time). I do not know the reason, but I assume that the true bugs might be more resistant to insecticides.
And locally a lot of harm is done through leaf removal. Fireflies lay their eggs in leaf litter, if that gets raked up & removed those firefly eggs don't survive.
> a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights
I think the number of lights is about the same at least where I live in the UK, the big change is the light is now bright white not the yellow of the older sodium vapour lights.
I kinda miss that but mostly because it wasn't as bright and is what I grew up with, you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.
> you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.
IN fact white light is MUCH MUCH less effective. Red light doesn't affect your night vision, and yellow isn't much behind. White light means you can see very well where the light it, but you can't see beyond that radius and so more light is needed. I don't need to see colors at night (where white it good), I just need to see the dangers in time to avoid them, and so white is much worse for the goal.
Just to make it worse, it takes nearly an hour for your eyes to fully adjust to dark after leaving white light. So if the lights go off or you have to leave the place where they are shining you can't see as well.
White light is only good when you have enough of it that everything you want to see for the next hour is fully illuminated. If there is any exception to that, then you shouldn't have white lite.
> drastic intensification of street, parking and building lighting
We got an increase in lighting whether we like it or not but for lower overall consumption.
> not to mention headlights
40 years ago the highest powered headlight halogen bulbs consumed 80-100W per bulb. so you were looking at 150-200W for low/high beams. A pair of modern laser headlights now gives you 5 times more light for a fifth of the electricity. The limit is safety in traffic. A misadjusted 200W laser headlight will leave you short of 2 retinas.
> People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.
They consume so little that even wasting is still cheaper lower consumption than in the days of incandescent lights.
You concluded rationing before having evidence of real demand in the sense of need or even desire from the people. The less data you have, the more potential answers fit in the gaps.
Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it? Or do they already get more but with less electricity? I get twice the light I had 20+ years ago with a third of the electricity consumption. I get way more computing power with less electricity too. Same with my TV, my fridge, etc. Excluding the switch from gas powered kitchen appliances which drove my electricity consumption up, everything else went down in consumption while giving me more.
Do I mathematically want or need more? Am limited by the price of electricity, or by the price of the bigger/better product? Maybe I'd want a walk in fridge or a 3m tall TV but the electricity isn't the limiting factor. I need an extra room and taller ceilings first. Do I want more light? No. Do I need any of the things I mentioned? Also no.
The increase in price could equally be the providers extracting the maximum value from the consumers. Current consumption could be exactly as much as the consumers want or need to consume, and the providers sell for as high as they can before that demand drops. We need more data to answer this and we don't have it now. So your answer is your bias put in words, not the certainty you want to make it sound like.
The biggest consumers which dwarf the stove are industrial ones. And there the drop is real. Manufacturing moved abroad and electricity production moved with it. This is what the numbers of the article shows and it's hard for consumer demand to compensate, except maybe with mass EV adoption.
What is obsession with the light, that's like lowest consumer of electricity, also telly doesn't use much unless it's a really big one. Heating, cooking and appliances use the most, and people are definitely careful when using those, especially heating during the winter. Seems like you don't live in the UK.
Because the comment triggering this branch suggested improvements in efficiency must imply wanting to consume more. Light is one of those things, where the rule doesn't automatically apply. It's not the only thing I mentioned, you just chose to skip the others to make your job of arguing easier.
> Heating, cooking and appliances use the most
Even there you get more for less. Induction stoves are way more efficient than the old heating elements but do you want to spend more time in front of the stove because the electricity is cheaper? Some times, but not that common. Heat pumps are way more efficient than a boiler but it doesn't guarantee that you want hotter shower water or warmer room. But more importantly, most heating isn't electric. Natural gas, oil, or wood were always far more common. In the UK today almost 75% of heating is gas. Electricity is less than 10% [0] so it contributes little to the topic of the article.
Now let's get to the confounding factors which go down the pit of ignorance. Natural gas was always subsidized almost everywhere in the world whether you know it or not. District heating is more of the same. Where I live there are still "heating electricity" plans so people get a better price if they happen to use electrical heating because the provider knows that small number of people will suffer compared to others.
Another confounding factor, the push for extreme efficiency. Heat pumps have some big limitations that nobody wants but choose to live with for the sake of efficiency and self sufficiency. Because people also install solar panels on their roof and power their appliances without anyone ever reporting how much more heating or cooking was provided with 0 load on the grid.
In reality the biggest consumers which dwarf cooking appliances are industrial ones. And there the drop is real. Manufacturing moved abroad and electricity production moved with it. Maybe mass EV adoption can push the demand/production line back up.
> Seems like you don't live in the UK.
You are correct, I do not. This shouldn't prevent me from having an informed opinion though. Much like how I can write to you in English without living there.
It is historic, electric lighting was the first major application for electricity in households.
"
Electric lighting is highly desirable. The light is much brighter than oil or gas lamps, and there is no soot. Although early electricity was very expensive compared to the 21st century, it was far cheaper and more convenient than oil or gas lighting. Electric lighting was so much safer than oil or gas that some companies were able to pay for the electricity with the insurance savings.
"
> Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it?
Well, yes? That seems somewhat uncontroversial? There are a lot of people out there who need more electricity and can't afford it. Electricity is one of the most fungible forms of energy, with infinite electricity we could all live like kings. It'd be very comfortable. The limit on use is the supply-demand balance represented by prices and if price were low enough people would up their living standards.
That is also the explanation for a lot of the issues your post goes to. If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead. And the way the math shakes out is it'd normally be economically optimum to increase their access to a good standard of living by giving them more energy than you gave up. These effects are over the entire economy.
And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd. If I were relying on HN comment threads I'd believe households in the UK were composed of nothing but light-bulbs and consumed nothing but the same given how much of a focus they are of the energy policy.
Yeah, if electricity dropped in price by 50% I don't think my usage would change in any significant way. There's no way in hell I'd use over twice as much and trigger Jevon's paradox.
Thinking about what happens when prices approach zero makes it hard to make realistic predictions. Yeah infinite power would change everything, but for realistic price shifts there are very different price elasticities for different use cases.
And one person changing their power use doesn't do much to the price, and a large group gradually changing their power use doesn't do much to the price either. So the idea of "If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead." is misguided. The person who's struggling is going to see basically the same price either way. If we want to help them, conserving power won't do the trick outside of specific supply emergencies, we need other measures.
Also roenxi I mentioned things other than lights, but lights happen to be a super clear example of Jevon's paradox not happening over a very significant amount of power usage so of course they'll get brought up.
Cheap electricity would change your usage in indirect way:
Cost of electricity is a significant part in aluminum production. Cheap electricity, cheap aluminum, more cars made from aluminum instead of currently cheap steel.
Cheap reliable electricity would enable cheap hydrogen production, which could replace many uses of fossil fuels. Cheap hydrogen, cheap ammonia production, cheaper nitrogen fertilizers.
Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand. You just focused on arguing weaker interpretation of what I said, discussing infinities, and obsessing about why people bring up lights.
> And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd
I think you want to distract from not making your point. But easy, light used to consume a lot. By some statistics [0] just a few decades ago it was ~10TWh, close to 15% of household consumption, which in turn was higher than industrial consumption (1.1:1). So lights consumed ~8% of UK electricity. Is 15% in a household or 8% for the country so insignificant that mentioning it is ridiculous?
Personal anecdata, I can use more energy but I realistically (not in "infinite energy" world) want and need exactly as much as I use.
> Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand.
Supply/demand and prices are rationing. Prices represent the limit on how much of a resource someone can use before there is reason to believe they should stop. It's happens to be best form of rationing we have, the other methods tend to lead to disincentives to improve the situation (consider, for example, how the market rations out limited supplies of RAM right now - prices go up and people who pay get the RAM and all the money going to RAM producers gives them resources and incentive to build new capacity to produce more RAM). There isn't a limit on demand for electricity other than the price, it does literally everything. At the extreme case, if it were somehow cheap enough, we'd be able to use it to fabricate new matter. But every step of the way there are population-level opportunities to use more energy to get more comfortable if there is enough of it.
Yes absolutely more electricity is kind of the cornerstone of industrial production and comfortable living. If you make it cheaper you have more goodness
There are diminishing returns on more. My life wouldn't be better if I was using more electric for the things I already do. Sure I could leave my lights on all day, but by turning the lights off I save more than enough money which I can use for something else as to be worth the effort to flipping the switch when I leave the room.
All the things I see that would allow me to use more electric are not worth it - I'd rather spend my money on something else. My life would be better for an electric animated sculpture in my front year - but not by nearly enough that it would be worth building and so I don't have it.
Again though, diminishing returns. My life would be better if Bolivia puts in better transit to in their mountain villages - but not by much since I currently believe I will never go there and so it is a just in case. Even for the people who live in those places the population may be so small as to not be worth the investment even if energy was free.
You said: "Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff."
And that doesn't happen at all with light bulbs. The cheapness caused a mild increase in lighting, but people are using way less electricity on lights now.
I mean, sure. They might use more electricity for lighting or less. How much electricity gets used for lighting isn't really the point here. More electricity gets used.
Seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox has a pretty good explanation. This isn't a new effect, it's been an established consideration related to energy efficiency since the 1850s.
If light bulbs get more efficient, and someone uses more electricity on something else, that's not Jevon's paradox, that's a coincidence because there's a million things using electricity and some go up and some go down. There's no significant causal relationship between the two. (Mostly little fluctuations in electric prices that even out over the years as supply is built to match demand.)
Jevon's paradox is when a specific use case gets more efficient, so you do more of that use case, so much so that the extra use overwhelms the efficiency. It happens in many situations but definitely not all. You have a curve between how much you use and how much value you get, and the steepness of that curve decides Jevon's. For lighting in the past few decades, there's no Jevon's. The changes in light bulbs have caused a big reduction in electricity use. If we were stuck on incandescents we'd be using a lot more electricity total.
And then the article discusses that even if Jevons paradox doesn't hold, we'd reasonably expect more efficient energy use to lead to more energy consumption. Energy is an absolutely classic field where it improvements in efficiency isn't a likely cause for dropping use. There isn't any reason to use less energy; if there are efficiency improvements then all else equal it makes the most sense to produce the same amount of energy and trade the excess into higher real living standards. Economies are good at sniffing that equilibrium out.
The UK doesn't look like it is experiencing an efficiency utopia; it looks like it has a relatively poor population among the developed countries (per capita) and they're suffering from an advanced energy shortage. The costs appear to be going crazy, they're deindustrialising. That isn't efficiency. It looks like they ran out of coal and are suffering from an energy squeeze.
On the other hand more stoves are electric now rather than gas, new builds frequently have air source heating where they would've had gas or oil boilers, more cars are electric; all of which are huge percentages of a household's total energy consumption compared to something like lighting.
Not necessarily. In the bad old days folks would draw a continuous kW or more in the evenings just for lighting. 8kWh for an evening of lighting, or 1kWh for dinner, and 1kWh for lighting.
As for gas or oil boilers - oil is uncommon except in rural areas - gas is far more common but not as ubiquitous in the past as you’d think - many folks heated their homes with resistive electric radiators or IR heaters - so a heat pump is a huge efficiency win.
1950: Lighting was 30% of total electrical demand [1]
1993-1997: 112 TWh, 9% of demand [2]
2020: 81 TWh, 6% of demand [3]
Couldn't find total used in 1950 but the point remains: Lighting used to be a major source of consumption and now it's pretty minor, and at least the trends in the last 30 years have been driven by efficiency gains, particularly following the energy crisis in the 70s.
> And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency;
I mean not really.
Old aircon was off/on which mean that at temperatures near the target efficiency drops. (as in turning on for a few minutes, it takes a while to move the settle heat around)
Moving from fixed speed ac motors to "inverter driven" (brushless motors) means that AC can be run at a speed other than 100% or 0%. Yes, CoP hasn't increased 6x, but newer aircons have higher CoP over a wider range of temperatures.
moving from Plasma TVs to LED/oled is about a 2-3x improvement in efficiency.
Laptops are anywhere between 2 and 10x less power than desktop (caveats apply)
then double glazing has a large effect on heat rejection/storage. Non-coated glass lets in something like 1kw/m2 of heat, coated glass can reject anywhere up to 70% of that.
An old 100 W incandescent bulb produced about 1500 lumens, and now a LED bulb of 12 or 13 W can produce slightly more than that.
In the now distant past, I used only 100 W incandescent bulbs, all of which had been replaced more than a decade ago with 13 W LED bulbs, so I have benefited from this 8x reduction in energy consumption.
The other significant reduction in electrical energy consumption happened when I replaced a many-decades-old refrigerator with a modern high-efficiency refrigerator.
Compared with a half century ago when I was a child, now I consume additional electrical energy with some computers, one or two of which are almost always on, and with a microwave oven used for cooking, but the additional energy consumption is normally less than what is saved by modern lighting and refrigeration technologies.
What I don't get though is that with increased household efficiency and presumably an increase in population (i.e, density which usually lowers cost), and the benefits of efficiency improvements to generation and distribution... why is household energy spending is UP, even accounting for inflation?
Households use about 20% less electricity today than in 1985; per person kwh is also down. But household expenditure is up by 20% in real terms and cost per kwh is up by 50%
40 years of technological progress and prices went up :(
In 1970 the UK domestic electricity grid and generating plants had been state owned since 1948, and was basically run by civil servants. This lasted until 1990-91 when it was all privatised by the Thatcher and Major governments (both Conservative).
Now in 2026 the main generators are EDF (French state owned), RWE (German), and Scottish Power (Spanish owned). These companies tend not to publish executive pay, but back in 2012 the CEO of EDF in the UK was being paid £1.2 million a year.
I would submit that all this has some bearing on why the prices have gone up.
In the US, it's due to the cost of the grid, the part of the utility bill that PUCs allow utilities to charge a fixed rate of profit. So if utilities take 20% on that grid "maintenance" project, the utility drives up the price as high as possible.
This is why distributed solar is actually cheaper than utility scale solar all-in: you need less of that very very expensive grid, even if you pay 3x on the initial install costs.
>Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
I want more than 6x as much light as I had in the incandescent bulb era. Indoor lighting is usually very dim compared to outdoor lighting, and that makes it harder to see things. As I get older and my eyes degrade I expect I'll want even more light. People running offices understand this and provide more lighting than typical for homes. See:
Even air conditioners have improved as we've moved away from having multiple leaky window air conditioners to mini-splits and central (though I would still think that's an increase in overall energy use).
which is why i think looking at raw electricity usage doesnt make much sense in a globalized world.
Consumption of final products, and exports are what make more sense to look at to see if lives are better today than the 1970's, which the article implies it isn't.
It makes sense to look at electricity usage. It tells the full story of the UK’s deindustrialisation policy starting under Thatcher and continuing under all governments, and recently under Theresa May’s net zero policies (also supported by all governments). There’s no reason aluminium smelting can’t come back to the UK with a proper energy policy of expanded nuclear power, more fracking, more renewables etc
We import very little Al from China; it turns out mostly to come from the UAE, which will have absolutely terrible CO2 emissions, as well as greener countries like Iceland and Norway.
It looks like we need to invest in local recycling (which, yes, needs cheap energy, but not as much as primary Al) in order to make more of a circular economy rather than just exporting vast volumes of scrap.
Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization. And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.
It's just an immense right wing noise machine which makes it impossible to actually focus on finding solutions. We're back to people who want to improve electricity per capita by decapitating people.
People hate electricity prices, but they hate electricity infrastructure as well. They hate pylons, they hate renewables, they hate nuclear. People hate pollution and hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity). Every solution will encounter angry blockers, often angry about things that aren't even real (anti-5G lunatics). And they want to blame everything on foreigners. Absolutely childish behavior of our """elite""", the dead hand of which sits on our media and most of our parties.
I think everything that needs to be said in this thread probably already has been by someone. Re-litigating the same issues.
> hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity)
Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.
And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.
Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.
Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.
Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!
There's also a huge racial undertone to the whole London anti-ULEZ 'debate' as Sadiq Khan is a muslim
Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Despite anti-ULEZ folk claiming it's hugely unpopular Kahn convincing won the next mayoral election including some boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ zone expansion
I think you overstate this. While there are wingnuts on Twitter who hate Khan for who he is, massively more people hate him - any politician, not just him - for dipping into their pocket and taking their money. "For the greater good".
Even the most beloved politican on the planet will become the most hated as soon as the propose increasing taxes, or increasing household costs. Which is why they're always looking for the sneakiest way to do it.
> Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Alternatively, the central authority with all the money (Johnson's government) tells the devolved authority (Mayor of London) it doesn't like handing out free money, so what if our lockdown has decimated your cashbox income... so in exchange for money now to keep the lights on during this pandemic, I demand you make more of your own money in future, by fining people and by driving up public transport usage in your area. Also, I know how unpopular it is, which is why I delayed it when I was Mayor of London, so good luck at the polls ha ha!
Diesel cars/vans. In 2001, the government cut yearly road tax to £20 for cars/vans emitting less than 110g/km of CO2. Many car/van diesel engines can meet this but few petrol engines can. The road tax normally costs £180-£300, so a £160+ saving every year.
So a lot of people moved to diesel cars/vans from 2001 onward.
Then in 2019, the Ultra Low Emission Zone was set around central London, which issued daily fines to:
- petrol cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 4 standards (most vehicles pre-2006)
- diesel cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 6 standards (most vehicles pre-2015)
This didn't bother that many people, because central London already has a daily congestion charge, so anyone taking a vehicle in there already had business to justify it. Most people get around central London by train/tube/bus/taxi, it's the best served city in the UK for public transport. There was also a scrappage scheme offering up to £9500 for replacing the vehicle.
What bothered a LOT of people, though, is the widening of the ULEZ area, first to the inner London orbital in 2021 and then to the whole of Greater London (9 million people) in 2023, regardless of whether they went to central London or not. The outer boroughs, aren't as well served by public transport as central London is, and car/van ownership and use is much higher than central London. And of course, the scrappage scheme was cut down to a maximum of £2000, which is not a lot.
You can perhaps see why there was so much opprobrium.
There wasn't 'much opprobrium', there were a bunch of radicalised mainly white men opposing it who made a lot of noise backed by right wing newspapers who want to criticise Kahn for Tory government policy
Kahn won the next election including outer boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ expansion
Reduced fuel duty for diesel came in in 2001 (25yrs ago) and was removed following the scandal of manufacturers cheating the emissions tests in 2015 (11 yrs ago)
Social media is a catalyst that only works because material conditions are bad. If everyone is happy, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they just laugh it off. If everyone is angry, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they burn down a mosque.
It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.
Considering the number of people involved in the hotel arson attacks who have "previous", including domestic violence convictions, I think you can say that they themselves are unhappy, but that's not quite the same thing.
> fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves
I think we can agree on this. It's not that the UK is in any way a poor country in total, but it is an unequal one. And open to the negative effects of inequality from the outside - see the involvement of UAE oligarchs in Man City fraud, for example.
The establishment view is that riots and racism are right wing agitators and foreign power influenced. The people look to rival immigrants and conspiracies, united by anxiety and fear.
They are both looking for scapegoats. This has unfortunately lead to so many atrocities in history.
I question to what degree people are riled up over economic difficulty being scapegoated onto immigrants like the comment chains below seem to claim.
This explanation seems to ignore much more obvious motivations. Most of the recent violent protests were triggered by concerns about immigrants committing violent crime and sexual offenses or harassment, often following concrete incidents.
Public safety seems like the clear primary motivation here.
One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.
However, I think that glossing over the primary concern to claim that the outrage is essentially engineered or purely driven by economic factors and living standard, will not convince the public. At least that's my opinion.
Because some of the worsening life conditions are caused by migration.
On other fronts it may provide a benefit but people need to get their head out of their ass if they don't think some qualms are legitimate.
To what degree? I'm sure migration is statistically responsible for some percentage of worsening life conditions, but I doubt it's the biggest cause for anything specific getting worse. The far bigger cause is the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent extraction by the powerful.
If migration is responsible for 5% of an issue, and other causes are responsible for 95%, it's far too easy to make the population imagine the numbers are swapped.
I can't respond to your point about problems in big cities, since you don't specify what they are, but rural areas have a whole host of problems that cities don't face, so I'm gonna need more than a vague assertion.
Though it still won't help your argument, because 1) correlation != causation, and 2) there are literally thousands of comparable correlations, so why is it immigrants, and not any of the others?
Except that most evidence points against that. The people who don't live next to immigrants are generally much more angry then those that do. And the general places where people are angry about living conditions are former industrial economic heartland that have de-industrialized for reasons that have literally zero to do immigration.
Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.
And we ration busy trains with pricing. We have some of the most expensive trains in the world (and an inability to build any new tracks at a sensible price)
Water, too, because our water infrastructure is dire. I imagine we have some of the most expensive water in the world too
I was once taking a trip from Canterbury to Glasgow. The train ride to Stansted airport cost more than twice the flight to Glasgow. Also, it's crazy just how cheap the flights are in Europe. How do the airline companies make any money?
People can indeed change their consumption patterns. You don’t hear about it with electricity as often, but with natural gas spike after the Ukraine war, it was all over the news that many couldn’t afford heating and were leaving their houses cold in the winter. But it’s not just poor people.
Low margin industries probably contribute a lot and are more likely to change electricity usage patterns (by moving to a different country or being outcompeted).
A lot of it could probably be brought back to consumption patterns or present day issues with war and outsourcing.. but.. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ is worth a (re-)read since I gather this is more of a more macro-structural outcome as opposed to a sudden thing.
I think you miss the point that power is a global market. In the UK we pay international prices because otherwise our state/corporations/establishment would sell it overseas. Yes, electricity is linked to natural gas, just because they can.
The UK population is generally docile, we don't really riot even when things are bad (unlike the French who barely need an excuse).
Our elites are pretty bad at running the country but actually quite crafty when it comes to managing dissent and channeling it into things that don't threaten their hold on power.
So the regime can get away with a lot, there is no organised violent resistance
There is a lot of anger in the UK because their (our) environment and life conditions are measurably worse than in the past (even 10 years ago). This anger is masterfully directed (by political orgs but not the actual government) against immigrants, drug addicts, and other groups whose ousting is positioned as an "easy fix" to these problems. So there's not much meaningful action taken against the actual perpetrators.
There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.
Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.
>> There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.
It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up. Good luck proving your Brexit counterfactual.
>>Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.
When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true. Also, given that you can get a "skilled worker" visa for working in a kebab shop or a corner store [1], "skilled" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence [1].
Immigration is one of the primary factors in the decrease of life quality in the UK. The only mistake here is that being angry with the immigrants isn't going to change immigration policy.
>That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much.
With the massive extra "pro" of plausible deniability so all those who's interests are served by it can lie up down and sideways about how it's a good thing.
A lot of things are like this. It's really hard to overstate the cost of laying unpopular things bare.
Actually, I always found it so weird how often America is talked about on not only British social media, but on your state propaganda channels such as BBC and Channel 4 as well, who are taxpayer funded.
Almost every British person I've ever known has kept up with and has an opinion on American politics, but when I try to talk to Americans about British politics, they don't even know the names of the parties.
Which is to say, the UK is far more obsessed with America then America is with the UK. This has been true since WW2, where Britain was 'obsessed' with getting America to come save them from losing the war.
To be fair a lot of parties in the UK have appeared or changed names since around Brexit. I think "labour and tories" might have been simpler for American audiences than Reform vs Restore vs Rehab or whoever is up now
It is very strange to see how many nations gave up energy independence and basically exchanged a temporarily lower price of energy coupled with deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation. Money seems politically easy to spend raising defense expenditures by a few more percent of GDP but energy independence through decentralized renewables would be a much higher defense value imho. And it would actually propel more economic activity.
>>deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation.
They are only deep geopolitical dependencies because our politicians are too stupid to actually let us drill for it in the North Sea or frack for it on the mainland.
The article claims that gas prices are set by international markets that are willing to bid up prices and the small added contribution from the North sea is not going to swing prices significantly. The US is going through a similar delusion that they produce enough domestically to protect is Diesel prices - they don't and the oil companies are not going to forgo international markets
>> The article claims that gas prices are set by international markets that are willing to bid up prices and the small added contribution from the North sea is not going to swing prices significantly.
Argue what you like, but it's hard to think that increasing the supply of a commodity won't make the prices go down. Will it be major? Probably not compared to the massive amount of tax on fuel, but I'd still take it.
You've drawn the wrong premise from the data you've looked at. There is no rationing.
UK electricity prices operate in a broken market where the price is fixed to the most expensive on-stream generator in that moment, so in the auction of wholesale prices that happens dozens of times a day, if a single gas generator is online, everyone is setting the price around gas generation even if most of the supply is much cheaper wind.
Last week the PM announced that this broken market should get fixed in the next parliamentary session, because he - and his party - know that reducing energy prices has material impact on how people feel about the economy.
You should also understand that demand has changed shape considerably in the last 50 years.
There's been a pretty devastating deindustrialisation in the UK since the 1970s - there's only one steel forge left operating, and that required nationalisation this year, for example. As the UK moved to a knowledge economy, we found that most of the workforce moved to needing nothing more than a laptop to add to GDP.
But the home has also changed shape: you can't buy an old fashioned light bulb any more, so dreary wet winters are illuminated exclusively by LED lighting at ~10% the power consumption used in the 1970s. Heatpumps have replaced storage heaters, and while electric cars are popular even they do not use as much energy as the factories and ship yards used to.
There is literally just less demand. And the pricing is pegged to gas, unfairly. If that market breaks, I doubt consumption would go up, but maybe new industrial opportunities would open up - if we end up with cheap, abundant energy as a result, we might attract more energy-intensive industry to the UK, but I don't think it's fair to define current state as "rationing"
Well, there's a difference between "This is just marginal pricing" and "This very specific market with marginal pricing is the only one possible"
I would like to think that National Government is considering choices which would still be marginal pricing but change other elements to better suit our present reality. Two examples:
1. Regionalize. Today the price for 1MWh of electricity in Portsmouth is exactly the same as for 1MWh of electricity in Dundee but if the UK is making so much electricity in the far North on a windy January night that's not the real price to deliver the electricity, getting it to Dundee would be far cheaper. Prices can reflect that, and if they do that new energy-hungry factory makes more sense in Dundee than in Portsmouth even if it would be slightly more convenient to build it in Portsmouth.
2. Retail pricing can have a significant social policy element distinct from "What the market says this costs". Technically an old lady living alone who uses 50kWh per month and a wealthy family with two EVs and a swimming pool chewing almost 10MWh per month are both "connected to the grid" but maybe the 40p per day "standing charge" to cover that connectivity could be 10p per day for that old lady and 80p for the wealthy family. Again, the market says that's wrong because the connection doesn't cost more money if you use it - but it's a social policy decision.
Edited to Add:
By the way I assume regional pricing is a reason sometimes the UK is both buying Electricity from France and selling Electricity to France, over different links. Presumably the prices are different and so we are effectively arbitraging their electricity.
Yep, line congestion is a pretty big problem - lots of wind generated in Scotland - industry down south have large demand so we end up curtailing wind and spinning up "peakers" to support regional demand. This is a bigger problem in Germany.
Regional pricing is something being looked into - comes with it's own problems - but more solve-able with modern data processing pipelines.
IMO stick a battery in every house, and you have a nation-wide buffer for smoothing out renewables is a good idea. Large battery bank projects are being rolled out which can help with this too.
In terms of social pricing - that would still need to be anchored to "something" - which currently is the price derived from the merit order.
There are also a lot of projects around improving transmission infrastructure. It's a very interesting time.
The UK doesn't have basically any "peakers" (Open Cycle Gas Turbines) and I'm surprised to hear they're a thing in Germany,
Combined Cycle costs more to build but is far more efficient. So OCGT is basically a bet that fuel is cheap forever, or at least for so long you've made your money. I know that bet doesn't work in the UK and I would not expect it to pay off in Germany either.
>>There's been a pretty devastating deindustrialisation in the UK since the 1970s - there's only one steel forge left operating, and that required nationalisation this year
Nationalised because high energy prices made it unsustainable commercially.
Increasing market prices aren't rationing. They should encourage more people and companies to consume less and produce more electricity. Of course if regulation is too complex that might not happen easily (I'm thinking of German solar power regulations right now).
That's even more outraging IMO. How could demand fall for the closet thing to the literal transport of physical work.
"Electricity oh that's the thing the runs the telly and kettle"
There is something very concerning about this complacent attitude towards the stagnant QoL of citizens. Demand only reflects current prices and conditions, if we saw a 100x increase in usage (in the UK or America) since the 70s rather than a flatline conditions would be much better.
The outrage is real, because production is less than half the story.
In the past 10 years.
The supply margin (declared capacity - demand) has reduced by half.
Electricity prices have increased 250%(edit: from 0.11 to 0.25).
And the 9-fold relative increase in imports (1% to 9%) definitely contributes to that increase.
Before you say it's all inflation, I believe inflation is not that high over the same period, and consider the role that electricity price hikes have played on inflation.
The main policy failure was the conservative government banning onshore wind for five years. There's less critical issues with pylons and planning that I would actually blame the public for rather than the government.
Other than that, not a lot of other options. People mentioning nuclear will be referred to the build time of Hinkley C.
Europe in general has failed to adjust to the then obvious risks of natural gas and fossil fuels in general that have now come to pass.
The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014. The geopolitical risks were crystal clear back then.
As far as nuclear goes there is a western failure to innovate on design presumably due to ossified regulatory requirements and possible contractor malfeasance. In China new clear plants take 5 to 7 years.
> The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014
Hmm, I wonder what hugely expensive and distracting project the UK engaged in after that time instead? Ah yes, Brexit, which turns out to have been promoted in part by the Russians (with a lot of help from the UK press and local dodgily-funded actors).
Part of the higher per capita GDP than France is the anglosphere dividend. There is a great deal of preference in all the english speaking world to do business with english speaking countries for obvious reasons.
That's a strange comment. Electricity provision is a small part of GDP. So of course doing something great in one part of your government doesn't magically mean you have the best overall economy.
That said, its also wrong to measure benefits only by capita GDP.
It's estimated that embedded generation - behind-the-meter solar and batteries, CHP, and diesel generators used for backup or to avoid peak pricing - was about 23% of the UK's total capacity in 2024, and almost certainly a little higher now.
I would have expected that this can only be possible through economic downturn. Sure, the more efficient light bulbs can slightly flatten an ever rising graph, but we should not have any illusion that humanity will even use less energy than yesterday. That would only happen if a severe crisis of some form hits us.
And sure, if steelworks and chemistry is moved abroad, the country will use less energy on the whole. But then you have to calculate the indirect usage through imported products as well to have an honest "energy requirement" value for a region or country.
Not saying you can skip efficient light bulbs, but we need to stay realistic about future energy requirements.
It is a wonder isn't it? The absolute determination to debase ones own country. It does, however, make complete sense when you consider the incentives at play (and that is where British governance is genuinely on the back foot).
Industrial sites are almost always connected to the grid with backfeed. And even if they can't push out their entire wattage, in accounting terms, that power is priced the same as you get from the grid.
> [...] two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells [...] Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too.
And increasingly, batteries are also coming to such sites. Would be very interested in learning more about the study's analysis/impact regarding this trend.
It's interesting to look at the all time demand at the bottom of https://grid.iamkate.com and see that demand has one dropped from 36GW to 30GW since 2012
I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).
But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants.
If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.
There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.
Literally everything but specifically air conditioners and electricity to run the air conditioners. Better if production is skewed to productive equipment rather than consumer end goods but it isnt strictly necessary. More productive capacity will always do better against change than less.
There's two things that are simultaneously true: 1) improving efficiency of electricity use is often the most cost effective use of a dollar. Better insulation, more efficient appliances, etc. are choices made purely on financial merits. 2) We're going to need to greatly increase electricity consumption in order to decarbonize.
People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a completely different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.
I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.
Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there are politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.
Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.
This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online? Because it's expensive? Or because we let oil companies and land owners make the rules?
Making peoples lives worse to save money is a capitalist mindset and I don't understand why so many left wing people believe in it. The promise of socialism was always higher living standards for the working class (99 percent) at the expense of millionaires.
Today's leftists seem to not have any coherent philosophy at all. It's not better on the other side. Everything seems to be about grievances and assigning blame rather than rationally discussing practical solutions.
There's a significant misanthropic sentiment on the left stemming from, among other things, the mid-century environmental movement. It creates for a maddening incoherency, but I guess that's typical of all politics at scale.
The misanthropy is infused in popular culture, and specifically in the way ecological sciences and history (for additional reasons) is taught in schools. I not infrequently have to discuss this with my kids when they recite something they've learned in school and I can hear the misanthropic cynicism in the framing and intonation.
It's quite eccentric to suggest the left is misanthropic when the right majors in racism, violence, short-sighted selfishness, and contempt for the weak, poor, and unusual - none of which are particularly humanitarian.
Making your own planet less ecologically stable is certainly an interesting choice, but probably not the best long-term bet for anyone's kids.
This particular misanthropy does not seem to have a particularly strong affinity for either conservative or progressive groups; it is an opportunistic predator that attacks the weak and stupid in both camps, and has for generations.
Be wary of anyone who argues the poor should go without food or protection from the elements, regardless of what flimsy justification they give for their cruelty; the most dangerous to each of us are those who appeal to our own beliefs.
Sure if they're actually saying the poor should go without and that's not a dumb strawman. The idea of consuming too much isn't usually focused on the poor.
Y’all are equally incomprehensible to us. Drastically reduced immigration, ineffective policies for incentivizing pregnancy, and no cash incentives for having multiple children (the one intervention that has been found to have a real, albeit modest impact on TFR). Degrowth under those conditions is all but certain.
> Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online?
I'd argue there's more ecologically sound ways to supply the desired energy demand in combination with shifting some of the load away from peak times. I don't think that strictly correlates to "a lower standard of living" so much as "there's minor behavioral changes that would more efficiently use existing resources."
> Making peoples lives worse to save money
This is exactly the mentality that I'm surprised by: I suggest shifting high energy use slightly and your reaction is "that will make my life worse." Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight for your towels/sheets/whatever if it meant 50% cheaper power?
If you live in a small house or condo it's still going to be loud enough to wake you up in the middle of the night when it starts. It's a bit more difficult than making a quiet dishwasher (which I'd still find too loud to start running in the middle of the night) since a dryer has to move a bunch of heavy, wet clothing around and run a fairly strong fan to avoid starting a fire.
Seems weird. Dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers are the epitome of "white noise" to me. I love sleeping with those things, drowning out all annoying noises and ensconcing me in a pleasant ocean of peaceful wooshes.
The last time I had in-unit W/D, it was right outside my bedroom. Never bothered me in the least. Certainly not compared to the neighbors' dogs, pot-smoking, screaming arguments, etc.
Time of use plans generally have lower rates starting late evening. There's no reason to run the dryer or dishwasher in the literal middle of the night. An hour before most people's bedtimes will still be during a lower tariff period.
You seem to be missing the human element in your calculation. It's not just power plants and the machines that use the electricity from them. The machines are built for humans, who want their clothes washed today so they can be folded today and ready for tomorrow. They want the dishes washed today so they can be put back on the shelves before tomorrow's breakfast.
And, by the way, grime on dishes gets more difficult to remove once it has sat drying, waiting for the machine to start.
We also want everything in single use plastic containers and to drive big cars a mile down the road to buy groceries, but there's better solutions for those things that people are buying into more and more.
I'm not saying human convenience should entirely take a backseat to machine efficiency; to your point, the very existence of these things is to make human life easier. My frustration is that Western approaches to these problems seem uniquely resistant to ever altering behavior for the sake of reducing ecological impact.
(Dishwashers were a poor example for me to use anyway, they're remarkably efficient; a better one might be water usage: it's best to water plants in either the early morning or late evening, so the water doesn't evaporate as much, but people often prefer to do so during the day, which coincides with high household water usage for showers/laundry/whatever. though, I routinely run my dishwasher overnight and have never had issues with grime, so long as I prime the hot water feed.)
Then they can pay the higher rate for energy during the day, and if enough people want this it will be practical to build infrastructure to support them. This issue is they want it and they don't want to pay for it.
People want all sorts of things. Somewhere there’s a limit to what you can actually get in a finite world so that your kids and grandkids aren’t left with a lower standard of living because they have to pay for your externalities, never mind all the other damage to the ecosystem. Washing dishes when you want is probably okay, but dishwashers are remarkably efficient and really a red herring, or a motte-and-bailey type argument. Wanting to own, say, a massive F150 for the convenience of having your own personal tank and feeling better than others is probably not okay.
Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences. It's how we progress from 0 climate control and lacking clean drinking water to how we live today. Here's a good article on the subject: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-roy...
It turns out that small minor improvements compound long term, and there are relatively few examples of massive step-changes that were centrally planned. Here's a good book on the topic that you may enjoy: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency
> Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences.
That's a uniquely American perspective.
Japanese homes often don't have space heating. The Swiss often keep their homes at 20°C in the winter.
Most of the globe doesn't travel everywhere by car. Arguably it's the intention to remove pain as much as possible which resulted in the opioid epidemic.
There's a point at which trying to get rid of inconveniences becomes harmful.
20C in wintertime is quite cool for North America, in my opinion. I think 23C is commonly considered "comfortable," but obviously that will vary significantly by individual.
Wow. Obviously there are humidity differences during different seasons, but 23°C is probably the limit of "this is uncomfortably warm" for me if I set my thermostat above that.
For me, it depends on outside temp. The main advantage of AC is dehumidification. So if it's 95 degrees and humid outside, 78 degrees inside feels great, and keeps the AC running often enough to keep humidity down.
If it's in the 80s outside, I'll probably drop the inside temp to 76, again to keep humidity down. I rarely set it below that. 74 feels cold in my normal summer attire of shorts and a tee shirt. If we have an 80 degree day with low humidity, I'll open the windows.
Me too, but my husband and guests are clearly uncomfortably cold at my preferred 66/67, and my sister with poor circulation just about has her hands go numb.
I don’t think your thought is as insightful as you think it is. You simply fell for the American Exceptionalism propaganda thinking that Americans are some special breed of humans. America is the richest country in the world. And for most of the 20th century average Americans had the most disposable income and the largest consumer base of all countries. Of course they led the way on adopting luxuries and reducing discomfort. The rest of the world followed as the price became attainable and their purchasing power increased.
50 years ago hot middle eastern countries had no AC. Not because they had some sort of symbiosis with nature and the summer heat. It was because the average AC costed the sum of 8-month of average income. As AC prices dropped, and the average income increased, having an AC became the norm.
Of course the richest people, richest economies get their first and to a non inquisitive or surface only thinking, it’s some how a unique was on discomfort or lust for luxury, when it’s just simple economics. You can see rich Asian countries and cities leading the “War on discomfort” now a days as their economies have developed and stabilized, but they face unique discomforts that previous rich nations didn’t.
In absolute terms, yes. But per capita there are quite a few richer countries, like Switzerland, where people genuinely seem to brave the elements as part of their culture.
Sure, everyone adopts conveniences, but I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
The per capita numbers are more recent as opposed to be throughout the 20th century but even still the size of the Swiss market (in absolute terms) is tiny compared to the size of the American market. Unless the per-capita wealth or disposable income is 30x to make for the population size difference, the "reducing discomfort" goods market will still favor the larger (overall) richer and bigger markets then trickle down to smaller ones. I highly doubt the Swiss endure through cold winters by wearing more layers in doors and drinking lots of hot tea.
> I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
Sounds more like observational or cognitive bias tbh. For example, the Japanese market is notorious for building gizmos and machines for far less grand inconveniences that the weather or long-distance travel. They eat a lot of rice in Japan, so it makes sense they invented the rice cooker. To many Americans (today) who don't eat a lot of rice having an entire appliance for just cooking rice might seem like a crazy war on discomfort and too much of adopting convivences. What's next? a machine just for Turkish coffee?
> "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house"
The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and most
likely in the world. [0]
Roughly 30% of the stock is single-skin, without a cavity. While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons. The same goes for the roofs of these houses; although you will find many companies willing to spray your roof with foam or other forms of thermal sealing, those roofs were never designed to be insulated, causing other potentially catastrophic problems once it's been done.
Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses, but no matter; the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps, despite them being incompatible with the existing pipework and radiators.
How exactly would a heatpump be incompatible with existing pipework and radiators? I see them installed into all kinds of houses, summer cottages and whatever no problem.
Having 8mm pipework (microbore, which was fairly commonly used when central heating was being retrofitted) connected to standard sized radiators with a flow temp of 35 degrees is unlikely to actually heat a building.
That said, most properties in the UK don't have this problem. They _do_ likely need bigger radiators which comes with a cost, but a lot of these houses would benefit from just upgrading from their single panel rad with no fins.
Older houses might need higher temperatures, but insulated ones might be fine with 40-50. My house is slightly over 20 years, and most of the time, we are completely fine with the radiators just lukewarm. If it's like -10 outside, they need to get warmer.
Many old-style radiators only work with high water temperatures. Uninsulated pipework can "waste" a lot of water temperature before you even reach the radiator
I'm not sure any of that makes heatpumps technically impossible, but it makes them more expensive and less efficient
What the other comment said, but more technically, the amount of heat transferred is proportional to delta-T. So older radiators have less surface area, relying on hotter water to transfer enough heat energy to make up for the heat loss of the building.
Meanwhile the efficiency (COP) of a heat pump drops the higher its temperature differential is. So trying to keep the water loop temperature the same is a non-starter. (The same problem can happen with high efficiency condensing natural gas boilers which have much lower flue temperatures)
(From an American perspective although I'll convert the units) - older radiator systems were designed for water temps of around 80C, room temp around 20C, so that is 60C (60 K/Kelvin, really) delta-T. Whereas if a heat pump wants to put out 50C water for half the delta-T (30K), you then need twice the amount of radiator surface area to transfer the same amount of heat. The system will work fine in the shoulder seasons when not much heat is required, but at the coldest nights design temperature it will not be able to keep up and your indoor air temperature will then drop despite the heat being on.
(Pipe sizing enters into it as well but isn't as straightforward to explain)
We're about to get a heatpump (in the UK) and our pipework is fine but we need to replace pretty much all the radiators, both the old ones, about 45 years old, and the newer ones, about 15 years old, in order to be able to heat the house to a sensible temperature.
Is there reason why retaining radiators is preferable to an air heat pump (either ducted air or mini-split)?
I guess it's cheaper to not have to install air ducting or indoor units if you can reuse existing pipes & radiators. But if you need to replace the radiators anyway, the cost might not be that much different? You'd get more precise temperature control, and cooling in the summer.
The roof cavity is not large enough for hidden ducting and the ceilings in older houses low enough that exposed ducting would be a head impact hazard. So you'd end up needing one installation per room. Expensive, especially when the expertise isn't there, and mostly used by commercial users.
> Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses,
Reasonable point, but I feel my case still stands: the population able to make these changes could do so, enabling existing infra (and housing stock) to "go further" before requiring expensive and disruptive overhaul.
> the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps
I agree this is shortsighted, and it's better to incentivize more efficient systems rather than applying punitive strategies to less efficient ones.
>Reasonable point, but I feel my case still stands: the population able to make these changes could do so, enabling existing infra (and housing stock) to "go further" before requiring expensive and disruptive overhaul.
I'm sorry but as an outsider to me this straight up just sounds like kicking the can down the road! Let's get it fixed, build more solar, get more power in the grid, deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc.. Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
It's been pretty clear that globally the grid operators are all very much lazy and would rather increase prices and reap benefits short term than adding more capacity to the grid, even where i live (in Brazil) its very much clear that grid operators too would rather raise your bill and collude to add more taxes if you want to generate your own solar than to get more supply in the grid and make the bills cheaper (we have a minimum bill you have to pay even if you have full self-generated solar AND a thing called a "solar tax" because of course, the sun is the govt's property, gotta pay a tax for using it..).
> Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
I'm not saying _everybody_ must use less AC/clothes dryer/whatever. Grids are remarkably complex machines and are incredibly expensive to upgrade--which we should do! We should have done that ages ago, but the second best time to plant a tree is now. However, that's not an instantaneous process and requires quite a lot of political willpower to achieve, let alone the capex to bring new generation plants online.
In the meantime, as you've noted, people die without access to critical infra, i.e. AC in heatwaves. If the options facing grid operators are "rolling brownouts to keep from blowing up a transformer" or "educate people on time-of-day use re: peak load to reduce grid strain," the latter is often dismissed out of hand when it seems a perfectly sane approach to maximizing the utility of existing systems.
> deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc
Solar has a tremendous to "democratize" access to resources [0], we should absolutely incentivize its adoption as much as possible... but changing regulatory or tax environments is difficult. *We should still do that,* but altering behavior is (comparatively) free, so long as you can get past people being personally offended for being asked to not water their lawn every day in July.
Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers. What is happening is that new builds will have to be built with heat pumps from (if memory serves) 2035. Please don't scaremonger.
Further, it is possible to run a heat pump at high temperatures: some use refrigerants specifically designed to do this relatively efficiently.
> Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers.
Several energy suppliers websites have pages dedicated to this very topic.
The current 2035 target originates in the ministerial Heat and building strategy policy paper (2020):
"Our ambition is to phase out the installation of natural gas boilers beyond 2035."
In the Annex:
Aiming to phase out the installation of new and replacement natural gas boilers from 2035, once costs of low-carbon alternatives have fallen, in line with the natural replacement cycle, including any hydrogen-ready boilers in areas not converting to hydrogen, to ensure that all heating systems used in 2050 are compatible with Net Zero.
Given the energy policy of the UK, which to many engineers makes absolutely no sense at all, it's impossible to predict what will actually come out of the policy sausage factory next.
Eventually everyone will need to switch from gas because as the number of heat pumps rise then number of gas consumers fall and the infrastructure costs for them will become uneconomic
> new builds will have to be built with heat pumps from (if memory serves) 2035.
England: from 24 March 2027
Scotland: since 1 April 2024.
The legislation doesn't mandate heat pumps specifically, it mandates >=75% lower carbon emissions than homes built to the 2013 standards, which effectively requires heat pumps, solar panels, and significantly improved insulation. Build and running costs aren't measured, it's quite possible new homes will cost more to buy and run, and could be smaller to compensate.
... but as far as I know, never enacted legislation to ban their sale or fitting in existing houses. And that aspirational policy has been announced as dropped multiple times, at least since last July, most recently today
New builds are already much smaller than previous generations' housing, to increase margins for developers. Smaller than that, we'll basically be like rats.
They can, but then their COP is like... 2. Which is not great. Coupled with high units costs, need to make math is it even worth it compared to just electric heating.
There has been research into Thin Wall Insulation for this very reason, and that would be a good start for much of the Victorian housing stock (e.g. Cork Spray which is permiable so avoids the problems of sealing up these older buildings).
From a T&M standpoint it's affordable to use external insulation and cladding to safely insulate these old houses. But that runs afoul of planning/landmark laws (some places even mandate single-pane windows!) So some Brits freeze to death rather than hide some history. Their choice to make, I guess.
>This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me.
I assume you're in good health, not poor, in a stable living arrangement, etc. The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer. Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
> Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
Most of us don't. But smart meters are free in the UK, and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat. Same for my dishwasher. Heating is a bigger issue.
You probably want your washing machine to finish when you'll be ready to take the clothes out, rather than leave them sitting damp in the machine.
There should be plenty of opportunity to load shift with other things though, a dishwasher as you mentioned, or a fridge or a storage heater or a charger for your electric car. All can be done with minimal inconvenience to the user.
> and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I think most of these appliances sold today have at least some sort of "delay start" function. We use that to do exactly what you describe. Not even for nght tariff, it's just convenient to time it like that.
Every washer, even basic ones, I've owned that were made post-2000 had a delay start function. Even my most basic one that just had dials to select options, it had a 2/4/6/8-hour delay dial. I figured it was a common feature by now.
A 2-hour granularity delay start would drive me insane. Better than nothing though. And maybe the dial one works with a timer on the outlet too, as the program is mechanically selected.
Yep and I do it. But the point is that if everyone sets it to be done at 8am, you move the demand window to 6-8am. All o care about is that I can put it away when I wake up so if my energy company said “your electricity is cheap between4 and 6, go for it” my dishwasher, washing machine, hot water tank could all go at that time
> The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer.
Excellent point, and I agree, though the vast, vast majority of the pushback I feel I get when advocating for these kinds of shifts are from wealthy/healthy individuals.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario: existing resources should be able to support our current level of creature comforts with minor conservation, even if a segment of the population is less able to support the conservation efforts, but the extremes people demand in turn place extreme load on our infrastructure.
Bit of a logical fallacy. Not avoiding ALL tedious inconveniences doesn't mean that being wealthy can't avoid MOST tedious inconveniences. You can have a weekly cleaner and a holiday house in the south of france and dry your clothes at night.
> Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
That is exactly the people reducing expenses even when they know that will be extremely painful. That is why the poor are poor, because they cannot afford that kind basic expense. They need to choose between heating and food.
"Let's consume more" for the poor. It is a grotesque argument.
> "Let's consume more" for the poor. It is a grotesque argument.
OP was making a fair point that not everybody has the same amount of time and energy (or money) to tolerate shifts in their routine, which in the context of a "personal vs collective responsibility" style argument is entirely reasonable.
By the same token, if only the _rich_ have the freedom to make such behavior changes for the sake of conservation it will only ever have a token impact, and in many cases the "correct" level to make an efficiency pitch at is the community: a decent light rail system will always outperform everyone driving their own vehicle to work/the store/downtown in terms of space and energy efficiency.
...but, to get people to buy into such "collectivist" systems, you often have to get them to contend with some perceived reduction in personal convenience: yes, a train doesn't need a parking lot and uses less gas per passenger-mile, but then you're beholden to the train schedule. It's exactly _that_ sentiment that I find frustrating in advocating for sustainable civic design.
To OP's point: whatever that "collectivist" option is necessarily has to contend that standards of accessibility and convenience are not constant across the population. That doesn't inherently mean "the poor should consume more," but that "hang dry your laundry" isn't an option for everyone in the current dominant socioeconomic structure.
Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward. If you have cavity walls that are uninsulated, it needs to be done right. If you have single skim walls you either do external cladding (and change the outside of your building), or build an internal stud wall and insulate that, which is very effective but costs a decent amount, reduces internal floor space, and requires a full redecoration after.
One measure of progress is not having to think about something. I don't want to have to think about when to wash my clothes or my dishes or whatever. I want to push the button and have it go. I'd be willing to make a concession for an EV since it consumes a lot of power, but it should be automatically controlled and not make me think.
If we're going to electrify everything, we need a clean, plentiful, reliable electrical supply. There is no technical obstacle to having this.
Saying "we can save $1000 per person in capital costs, they just need to deal with 5 extra minor inconveniences per day" is not how you run a developed country.
Then you can pay a bit more for the battery capacity and others can take the discount to deal with the minor inconveniences. It works out for everybody.
You can timeshift your power consumption, but in many cases you can not timeshift industry power consumption, especially heavy industry power consumption. For example it takes few hours to start a big plastics injection plant, it takes few days to heat an aluminum smelter. High quality glass production needs few weeks of uninterrupted power supply. Iron blast furnaces run without interruption for years.
But for example, cement production can be turned on and off quite easily, and is turned on and off on demand by the grid electric operators to help with grid stabilization (cement producers are paid for this grid stabilization service).
It drives me up a fucking wall that you think this is a preferable strategy to just idk, installing some solar or wind? Why is this so difficult. We have the technology for practiciatlly infinite cheap energy but we just wont build it. Are the Chinese the only people that arent too stupid to understand this?
It's not a "preferable" strategy, it's one that can (and should) be deployed in tandem with expanding our renewable generation and doing more "at scale" conservation of commercial resource use.
We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0], _and yet_ we're not even capitalizing on that gain as much as we could because people don't want to tolerate the behavior changes necessary to do so.
My beef isn't with expanding capacity, it's with that being the _only_ solution that's considered to match supply to demand instead of doing anything to manage demand.
> We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0]
no we arent. China added the entire capacity of the US grid in solar in the last 4 years and they are accelerating. That is bananas. We've barely increased total grid capacity in the last 20 years. It should be a national embarrassment. Energy abundance is possible, and one of the greatest ways to improve peoples lives. There are no energy poor countries that are rich.
Half the state of Nevada should be a solar farm at this point if anyone actually cared about climate change, and that would do 10x to imrpve peoples lives than telling them not to use the dryer.
again, the degrowth mindset relies on a fundamental paucity of imagination and will to actually solve the problem.
When fertility rates fall below replacement rate, some amount of degrowth is all but inevitable. Probably multiple generations’ worth, assuming things remain at least nominally normal.
That few in government are readying for that and are rearranging deck chairs instead is not particularly reassuring.
The electricity generation in the article is shown per capita.
Now I'm not saying we should generate as much as humanly possible, because even with renewables that has a cost.
And some things have gotten genuinely more efficient (compare modern heat pumps to heating available in 1968).
But why shouldn't we maintain the levels our parents enjoyed? And use the extra capacity if anything for EVs, grid stabilization, medical research, etc.
So population degrowth is a pretty separate issue.
My mother moved to a brand new apartment. Everything is electric- heating and cooking. Gues what? Her bills went down.
That is the power of modern construction techniques.
Unfortunately this is out of reach of poorer people and it would takes a hundred years before all the old housing stock is replaced. But it's nice progress for the happy few.
It'll be temporary. Low fertility rates are an evolutionary bottleneck. After 100 years all of the people and ideologies predisposed to low fertility will have literally removed themselves and their bloodlines from existence and those who maintained a higher than replacement rate even when confronted with the ills of modern society will have taken their place. This works at the individual level, I'm not talking about race or nationality.
At such a high concordance as to see ideologies disappear from the population? Or is it more likely that ideologies and people's beliefs are from social and environmental feedback?
Given that the alternative is trying to communicate with someone who thinks that the physical-goods aspects of our economy can grow exponentially forever...
I'm going to go with the degrowth, or the steady-state economics guys, they are more likely to be closer to the mark of what is actually achievable in the real world.
Here in the UK the debate around energy is really unbelievably stupid.
It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production.
Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues.
It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad".
Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.
If there's little left, why does it need to be banned? This is like the German argument against nuclear - it's supposedly expensive, and yet it needs to be banned because otherwise there would be plenty of it.
Look you can make an argument that slightly more domestic oil production could have happened. But lets actually be realistic. Even best case you don't get that much and it takes a long time.
And its in no way going to solve any of the actual long term energy issues in the UK.
For example, if you assume limited government resources, massive investment in North Sea fossil is just inherently stupid.
Allowing some private exploration and production would be tiny and barley relevant to solve any problem. The right wing people who advocate this as some kind of 'solution' are more delusional then any 'leftist'.
I sympatize with degrowth. But the measures are wrong.
Take the idea of not being able to wash your cloths when you want. What a step back! But instead get rid of your heated pool or turn down heating by two degrees.
Hah, only an alien species would be of the idea that infinite growth in a finite planet is a bad idea. No, surely we can keep pressing the gas pedal forever, never slowing down sounds like a sound and reasonable plan.
And it's missing the word "monitored". And then you read the methodology:
> The LPI measures changes in the sizes of 35,803 populations of 5,790 vertebrate species (amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles) that have been monitored over time. The latest LPI shows a decline of 73% (73.2%). This means that the size of these populations fell by, on average, 73% between 1970 and 2022.
> This doesn’t mean that there are 73% fewer wild animals in total today than in 1970. The LPI measures changes in relative abundance, not the total number of animals. Changes in small populations with few individuals are averaged with changes in large populations of thousands of animals. Nor does it mean that 73% of species or populations are declining. In fact, around half of the studied populations are stable or increasing – but these gains are outweighed by the greater magnitude of losses elsewhere when calculating a global average.
"progressive circles" ? The whole reactionary movement is essentially just one big self-own exercise in degrowth, just phrased in terms of being macho - like drunks thumping their chests before getting into a fight with the bouncer.
But yes I do agree about the impossibility of communication.
there is some irony in the growth ideology, which is barely more than a century old, to claim that every other species on the planet, ecological thinking and most human life is somehow alien to existence here, when they are more fanatic than just about any religious cult
the logical terminus of the growth fanatics is to literally want to leave the planet so I think we ought to reserve the label 'alien' for them
It's not weird. Not politically. They know since the 80s they can't match growth of a capitalist society, they don't want that kind of society, so instead of considering their priorities, they market disadvantage as advantage. It makes perfect sense if gaining power is the prime concern.
Nothing weird about it. They themselves have all their needs comfortably met, which is what matters. Other people have to learn to just accept their lot in life and not try climbing.
The degrowth mindset has existed for at least 50-60 years on the left, it merely bubbles to the surface more prominently from time to time. It was extremely popular ideologically in the late 1960s and 1970s.
For some on the left, they view humans as parasites. It starts as self-hate internally and expands outwards to encompass humanity more generally ('I love animals, I hate people'). Humans have to modify their environment to exist (shelter, farming, hunting, et al.), so the people that hold that ideology, you will find, they comprehensively hate any modification of the environment by humans, ie they want humans to cease to exist, rooted first in their own desire to not exist (they hate their own existence first and foremost).
The world is at all times overflowing with people that hate existing. They're miserable sad sacks and they desperately want everyone to drown in it with them. Sometimes that gets formalized into projected ideology used as a weapon against the rest of humanity.
Degrowth will need to happen at some point. I believe that people "with a growth mindset" are just hoping that by submitting to growth they believe it won't happen in their lifetime.
Which is a fair gamble to be frank, I don't blame them.
I don't see what is so hard to understand at all, it is mostly ecologically minded.
Human production and consumption (in a broad sense) is generating/leading to ecological catastrophes. Some people believe technology will solve the problem, some people believe the easier solution is to stop producing as much.
Unfortunately, that means letting go of some privileges and not everybody will agree on what to let go.
This is why we should rename them to regressive. They somehow think going back to pre-industrialisation can work while they still keep their smartphones that they use to absorb their latest TikTok fuelled outrage, somehow incapable of understanding that they're not "de-industrialising", they're _exporting_ it to to other countries that are massively industrialising on their behalf, and now have tremendous power over them. Including via TikTok brainmelting slop.
> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I've seen proposals that are less intermittent availability and more incentivized pushing of consumption towards periods of lower demand. We already have all these computers in our appliances, might as well let them do reasonable things ... your freezer probably does a self-defrost cycle triggered by a timer and/or a door open counter, but why not wait up to X hours for off-peak pricing to do it. Or push the set points down a degree or two during off-peak pricing, to reduce energy use during on-peak. Also works for HVAC subject to user comfort, and water heaters if you're careful and avoid high temperatures that cause injury or low temperatures that allow microorganism growth.
Of course, that's science fiction... all the communication in appliances is designed to collect data and serve targeted ads. :( So very few appliances know if current pricing is peak/off peak or when it will change.
My utility company does a program where they'll pay you to raise your thermostat a couple degrees when there's the most grid stress and the spot price of electricity is super high. You can also have your thermostat do extra pre-cooling in advance of these events.
People in my area HATE it. They hate giving up control (even though you can still manually lower your thermostat if you get too warm), and feel like the power company is doing some sort of scam even though it's a win/win/win (you make money, electric company saves money, homes are precooled with solar instead of burning fossil fuels).
Yep, it's probably not terribly hard to leave either, most of the one's I've seen aren't.
I dunno how you can make it more palletable, when they're already paying you monthly, it already does pre-cooling (or pre-heating), and you can also override it. And you might not even be home.
Counties tend to use kore power in the day, thus electricity tends to be cheaper at night when there less demand.
Personally I’m happy to. Charge my car at night when it’s 1/3 the price and use the h used capacity rather than pay higher bills to build more nuclear plants.
This is nothing new in the U.K., “economy seven” was a thing 50 years ago.
You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries.
Firstly, that doesn't sound like a particularly hard thing to accept if it genuinely helps. "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
However, regardless of that, this isn't new. There have been time-of-day based electricity tariffs for decades that are aimed at incentivising people to do more demanding things at particular times e.g. when industry isn't using the power. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
It already has made them poorer and miserable. The Draghi report was all about how they were poorer due to these things. Of course they decided not to follow the recommendations.
You'd have a point if those countries had followed Europe in replacing coal with imported gas, but few countries outside of Europe have done that. Without imported gas, electricity is generally cheap.
China burns coal and has still had time-of-use pricing since 1999.
The price of electricity is a function of demand with respect to supply. Even if the fuel is cheap, heavy demand will cost more to supply than low demand.
The UK largely did - there was a "dash for gas" throughout the 1990s, a response to the decline of UK-mined coal and the availability of North Sea gas.
Coal is no longer used, and the remaining mothballed coal power stations were demolished a couple of years ago. North Sea gas is now in decline, and is rapidly being replaced by renewables for electricity generation but we'll still rely on (expensive!) LNG imports to make up the difference until the end of the decade.
It did not. Germany's percentage of gas use for electricity stayed mostly flat. In absolutely numbers it went down because of less electricity use. Energy Charts from Fraunhofer publishes this data [1].
> "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
What the heck? Where is your evidence that using washing machines at inconvenient times is going to destroy the environment?
If your argument is that any use of electricity from fossil fuels is destroying the environment, then nobody should even be charging their phones at night. Time-shifting washing machines isn't going to fix carbon emissions since they're going to be emissions at any time of the day.
I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development. A lot of these moral arguments do not make sense. You said it yourself -- industry is incentivized to convince the public to use less electricity during peak hours so they can pay less. It's pretty much a psyop by capitalists. And for some reason you're shilling for them even though presumably you're paid exactly zero buckaroos
I've been receiving tons of free or negative rate energy for the last few years because of time of day pricing and as a result have driven thousands of miles at near zero fuel cost. It's automated for me so all I have to do is plug my car in.
I certainly don't view the windless day where the price is a little higher than average as a cause not to use my washing machine as on average I win out.
I'm not sure it's useful generalising a continent of peoples political opinions but I see renewables, storage and smart grids as really new tools that society previously had no access to, it's a massive carrot not a stick.
> I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development
Many of us believe that the alternative is a serious risk of severe climate change that would be much more disruptive. Not being able to use your washing machine at night is going to seem like the smallest of minor inconveniences if crops start failing and we don't have food, or cites end up underwater triggering mass migration into neighbouring areas and that leads to large scale societal conflict.
Of course, if you don't believe that those things will happen then caring about climate change seems irrational. But belief in (anthropogenic) climate change is the mainstream view on all sides of the political spectrum in most of Europe.
How do you explain that basically all European countries tax electricity much higher than fossil gas? Countries like Germany and the UK make the US look good when it comes to heat pump adoption.
More ironically, air conditioning is tolerated if powered by oil (like in cars), but not by electricity (like in buildings). At least Europe is better at EV adoption, but still far behind many parts of Asia.
Maybe they should, idk actually invest in renewables at massive scale instead of telling the people of a purportedly rich country that they should have to ration energy like its wartime? Why do people in Europe accept quality of life hits for dumb fake arguments about degrowth when you could literally just build more renewables.
Germany over-invested in renewables and is now reaping what it has sown.
They're going to invest 30 billion euros in direct government _subsidies_ in adding 11GW of natural gas generation.
For comparison, this amount of money would buy 5GW of nuclear power generation. But nuclear power is basically free after the initial capital expenses, and natural gas generation will still require fuel (gas or maybe hydrogen).
I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development.
The evidence for man-made climate change is quite compelling, and taking personal responsibility for your own impact on it isn't hard. I don't really see doing my washing at 6am as 'social and technological regression'. Quite the opposite actually - my washing machine has bluetooth and an app. I can tell it when to start.
The fact there isn't global pressure on corporations to be similarly responsible means my act of selflessness is ultimately a futile waste of time, but that's your kids and grandkids problem. I've chosen not to have kids, so I don't really care. I would suggest that choosing to have a family but not choosing to protect the environment as much as you can is an act of incredible selfishness towards your own children. They're the ones who'll have to live in a world with problems like water and food shortages. There is every chance that your grandchildren will die in a war over resources, and your view that tech is awesome will be little comfort to them.
> The evidence for man-made climate change is quite compelling
Sure
Where is the the evidence for me using the washing machine at the wrong time causing climate change?
As I said, I don't mind people claiming that washing clothes itself is bad for the environment (it contributes a little bit), but the idea that it's bad specifically because I wash it at a bad time? That's insane.
Why is it inevitability? Couldn't we just use our tech advancements to move to cleaner energy, move heavy industry to the moon, and clean up the planet?
Why can't you just summon free energy out of a hat?
Degrowth will need to happen at some point. I believe people "with a growth mindset" are just hoping that by submitting to growth it won't happen in their lifetime.
China is literally summoning essentially free energy out of hat. It actually is extremely trivial. you just install solar panels like you arent living in 1950.
They installed the entire grid capacity of the US in 4 years and they are accelerating. THere is a path to infinite free energy, but youd rather worry about doing your laundry at night.
Because of all the people I've met in my life, I've never actually met someone who was willing to voluntarily lower their standard of living. I've never met someone who had AC in a hot place and gave it up, wanted lower internet speeds, less phone battery, or wanted to go from living in a nice house back to one with a leaky roof.
In fact, I've only ever met people who wanted more things and a higher quality of life. While many green/degrowth political policies are based around convincing people to consume less, I've met consumers and found that's not what they want. It's why most environmental policies fail, consumers want more things at a lower cost, and are willing to import goods from overseas if the environmental regulations at home prevent them from being created there.
For the future, it means degrowth policies will fail. The only solution to climate change is to develop and grow our way out of it. It will be easier to live on the moon than it will be to convince consumers to accept less than they have now.
What's your plan? "Hey claude scrub the entire atmosphere to remove co2 from the past 200 years, make no mistake and use no energy"? "Hey codex send all our industries with razor thin margin to the moon, make no mistake and keep them as profitable as on earth"?
Look at atmospheric co2 scrubbers, the hot new thing, we can just keep polluting and clean it up am I right? Well, let's run the numbers:
We need 1 to 3 MWh of energy to remove 1t of co2
We produced 38.1 billion tonnes of it in 2025
Global electricity production in 2025: 30 TWh
We'd need to dedicate ~100% to 300% of our electricity production to simply offset our co2 production, even if we get it 10x better, and we won't because co2 is very stable and very dilute in the atmosphere (and also because it literally is below the minimum thermodynamic work to separate CO2 from air in ideal lab conditions), it's still completely retarded.
Every single technical solution to climate change completely falls apart when you run the numbers, the only argument left is "in the future we'll invent a magical tech that will save us so we have to accelerate"... might as well pray Jesus for help at that point
> "I was at a conference ... these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease"
For a long time (several decades) electricity demand has been decreasing in the UK, largely due to efficiency improvements. But now days pretty much everyone agrees that electricity demand will increase significantly in the future due to electrification. The UK has been planning for this for some time so if this guy was really from National Grid, he sounds like a bit of a rogue!
> "their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like"
No, nobody is suggesting that the grid will ever cut off power to anybody - certainly not domestic customers. The idea is that in a smart grid, big industrial customers often have the ability to temporarily reduce demand for heat or cooling or whatever. So if there is a signal from the grid that demand needs to be cut, automated industrial systems can (and already do) do that. The same goes for your car charging, water heating, etc. These things can automatically slow down during demand peaks in response to a signal from the grid, and you probably won't notice or care. You'll still be able to wash your dishes any time you want!
This is all definitely a good thing. A huge part of the cost of running the grid is in handling the biggest demand peaks, which might only occur for an hour or two per day a few times per year. If the peaks can be reduced and demand becomes smoother, then energy becomes cheaper.
And domestic providers like Octopus are also incentivising voluntary reduction (e.g. during saving sessions, which were National Grid experiments), or consumption when there is a glut of renewables with free energy, so if people want to save money they CAN load shift.
And with more and more houses installing solar and battery, opting into shoring up the grid for a decent uplift in standard export rates would be of interest to many.
I use Octopus in NZ and I’m a big fan of what they’re doing compared to a lot of our other electricity retailers. Savings sessions in particular are great with a beefy home battery because exporting counts in the comparison average. Those are easy money-making opportunities for us.
Yup. Heating and cooling are 2 things that can be delayed in most cases with little negative effects. A hot water tank set at 60C isn't going to be harmed if it's allowed to cool to 55C due to high power demand it also doesn't instantly empty out with usage.
The same is true about climate control. 1 or 2C from the desired temperature is still pretty comfortable but can make a huge difference in power savings, particularly if it's coordinated.
That said, I suspect that the even better route for power companies to go down is installing more grid batteries. Those can directly address and smooth out high demand. Put them at the various substations and you can shut off the main grid to the substation temporarily under high load.
Of course. The likely scenario is that the water tank has a preset range of acceptable temperatures and uses demand forecast information to decide whether to heat to the upper end of the range or let it cool to the lower end. Nobody suggests that we let them cool to unsafe temperatures.
I'm not saying its impossible to achieve technically, just that there is a whole fleet of installed equipment and the comment I responded to made no mention of unsafe temperatures...
Unsafe temperatures happen at 42C. Pasteurization starts at 50C. A water heater that stays in the 60 to 55C range I mentioned never leaves the safe zone.
But further, once pasteurization has occurred (which takes 2 minutes at 60C), Abiogenesis doesn't happen. A water heater can safely go down to 36C after it's hit that 60C temperature. Not that it would.
So long as your water heater is hitting 60C once a day and stays above 42C, you have very little risk of developing dangerous levels of Legionella in the tank.
Remember the currently common margins account for the fact that you actually use some of the water every now and then. That water in the tank will regularly cross the merely transiently safe temperature range, by design.
Once silicon is in control (which is where responding grid requests to delay consumption is more or less necessarily heading) you could even achieve better (worst-case) safety margins at reduced (total) power consumption. Because the machinery no longer needs to be designed around two "dumb" thermo switches and do a little extra in case layers of varying temperature manifest after two or more spaced periods of consumption. With continuous monitoring in software, you can integrate the worst-case bacterial growth based on time elapsed outside the "practically safe" temperature ranges. Then the tank always knows what is needed, and can both operate on tighter margins and reliably know when reducing or delaying power draw is ok.
They have to be _brought_ to that temperature periodically, but they don't have to stay at it; if they did you'd never actually be able to use the water (as that tends to drop the tank temperature, dramatically).
Here is a recent article about a small town in western Massachusetts. The headline is about the natural gas feeds be at saturation for the town. Buried in the article is a comment about our electricity also being bumping against capacity. National Grid is the electric provider.
I have been expanding solar thermal because it’s free of both of these constraints.
To emphasise your point, this is already happening. It's not theoretical. Data Centres across the world can already get signals from their grid, and will do things like proactively switch to local generators.
Nearly 20 years ago I had such a wonderful debugging experience when the power grid where I lived sent a "switch to backup" message and then milliseconds later a cancellation. The colo's power system got jammed between generator and mains electricity and everything rapidly ran out of UPS backup power and died. I found so many dependency loops between servers that day, took me hours to get things back up and running.
The Tories sold off the national grid, it’s a public listed company now. They don’t want to build infrastructure, they want to maximise shareholder value.
Privatization might be an avoidable disaster, but nationalization is virtually guaranteed to make things worse. See: every time anything has ever been nationalized. There was a reason these things were sold of in the first place.
> There was a reason these things were sold of in the first place.
Privatize profits, socialize costs. That is the main reason for nationalization. Western nations would not be so much in debt if they had assets. All assets were sold during neoliberal policies and the state was stripped from income. That is not going well, is it?
Re-nationalization is the only option to have solvent states.
I hate that as well, it's anti free markets. It will always exist to some degree since infrastructure is necessary, but there has to be more accoutability. But i'm a Thatcherite in that I believe government should be as small as possible. They have no business being employers, owning property etc. Whatever they do own should be justified, and you cannot justify having a major proportion of the population and national industries and companies run by government as was the case in Britain in the 70's and early 80's.
The alternative philosophy, basically socialism and socialism adjacent ideas that all critical national infrustructure should be run by the government imho relies at it's core the idea that it's just and proper for this to be the case since the government is the collectivevoice of the people, and the government owning something is as though the citizens of the nation own it. Which is... for lack of nicer words, major copium.
Then you have the other point, which is connected with the first, that more often then not nationalized industries are terribly run. And that's by design. In some cases nationalizing something may be necessary, but that should always be veiwed as a last resort, something to be avoided.
Government should represent the people. To make it as small as possible just makes the voice of the people the smaller possible.
> They have no business being employers, owning property etc.
What is owned by the state is owned by all citizens. A state that owns nothing is a poor state that needs to borrow money and eventually default and fail.
> more often then not nationalized industries are terribly run
That is not true. Many countries have national corporations that run better and give better services that for profit ones. Look at the USA education system as an example of for-profit failing. The countries that run national corporations badly, are the countries that just plainly run badly, and are corrupt. Their private sector is no better that their public one.
Except that in housing, water and rail they weren't actually terrible run. And for example in rail they were improving a lot. In terms of telecom the British Telecom had a forward thinking plan to deploy a advanced fiber network.
The question is sometimes, were they terrible run or did they just suffer from bad investment?
Because often they got little money but also had universal service requirements.
Badly privatizing these companies made things worse, not better. Just nationalizing monopolizes is a bad idea, as well as just smashing them into 100s of pieces and leaving behind a mess (see railways).
Also those countries that did things well, see Telecoms in the Nordics, or rail in Switzerland often did it state lead.
And ironically, for example rail required more subsidies after privatization. While also losing the amazing research and forward thinking organization that was British Rail.
I would argue improving these national industries would have been far easier and more successful then privatizing them. And ironically often cheaper.
Nationalization might be an avoidable disaster, but privatization is virtually guaranteed to make things worse. See: every time anything has ever been privatized. There was a reason these things were owned by the government in the first place.
I'm making the assumption that by National Grid, you mean the UK's electricity system operator, with National Grid (private company) being replaced by a NESO (public company).
> had in mind that electricity demand should decrease
Does this mean the speaker wanted demand to decrease? The UK forecasts from the Future Energy Scenarios [1] show demand increasing (see page 21).
> intermittent availability of power.
I'm assuming this was related to demand side response. Page 37 of the Future Energy Scenarios pdf contains an overview of this.
I worked at an EV smart charging start up (Kaluza) between 2019-2022 and my experience doesn't line up with a couple of your points:
> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like
During my time at Kaluza the customer could charge their EV whenever they wanted.
> you will have to adapt to when there is spare power,
The customer set their minimum state-of-charge (0-100%) and we would always have it charged to that amount by a specified time, irrespective of demand. We aimed to charge the customer's EV when demand was low (there are UK markets we can sell this ability to - these markets may have changed since I was there), which would save them money, but meeting the minimum SoC was the most important thing.
> This is just a regression in technological progress
Reducing peak demand reduces the amount of infrastructure you need and makes better use of what you have. IMO it's a good upgrade that makes much better use of the assets on the grid.
Vehicle-to-Grid (or Home) charging takes this up a level by feeding power back to the grid. This "What’s next for
Vehicle-to-Everything?" PDF [2] is 4 years old now, but has some good data on V2G and the benefits it brings.
National Grid can mean NGED, NGET or NESO, god I love the UK. 2/3 of those are completely cuckoo regarding long term planning so not surprising to hear those comments.
Thanks. We have insane stupid politcians in charge of our energy, like the Tories and Ed Miliband who recently failed upwards into the Foreign Office. These guys couldn't care less about consumers and are obsessed with the enviroment and carbon.
On the surface it sounds like a good thing to worry about the enviroment, but in reality government policy is insane and stupid. As one example, the UK in it's wisdom don't allow North Sea oil extraction, the Norweigans do. And guess who we are buying electricity from? On top of that, the UK's overall contribution to carbon emissions are insignificant compared to China. We just pay more money for electricity for no good reason. Obviously we use less electricity, we can't afford it. And Labour enviromentalists see that as a win.
They are not morons, they simply understand the future better than you do. I don't care when my clothes or my dishes are washed, I am not at home most of the day. This will win out because it's now and will continue to be the cheapest way to produce energy. The way these things will work, they will ve completely automated, it's something you can do today with mainstream consumer appliances.
You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries.
In nearly every case, this is actually "we'll take 35% of your bill if you agree to let us sometimes turn off your A/C and clothes dryer between 5pm-8pm". It doesn't require everyone to take the deal, just enough people who want to save money. You can take the discount and use your own battery if you want, or you can pay full price so the power company can. And some will live with the mild inconvenience in exchange for money (which most of us are forced to do in so many different ways).
This is just charging people the costs of their decisions. That's capitalism at its best.
It’s also about using finer grained pricing periods (an hour or 15 minutes) with the market price visible to the user - so people are aware that running their clothes dryer (or charging their car) at one time is cheaper than others.
The UK introduced cheaper nighttime electricity (and storage heaters that could use it) - economy7 at the end of the 70’s
Part of the ambition is to increase balancing services (such as battery storage) to reduce the reliance on big always-on generators or fossil-fuel-powered suppliers and increase the ability to leverage variable-output renewables like wind and solar.
One of the key challenges is electricity distribution, with a number of key transmission bottlenecks: a notable one is Scotland/England, where Scotland renewables generate more power than necessary, but not all of it can be exported to England as their isn't enough capacity across that transmission section.
Transmission capacity growth is now the key priority for the grid, with policies and plans optimised to address the bottlenecks in distribution.
> Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).
Demand on the national grid probably should; as home solar (yes, even in stereotypically dark and cloudy UK), wind etc becomes more and more viable I think a mix of on-site and grid electricity will be increasingly common.
The grid operators are definitely not saying that in France, in fact they are spending hundreds of billion (€100B each for both RTE and Enedis) to accommodate for a growth in electricity consumption due to electrification, and are lamenting that the policies don't encourage electrification fast enough.
> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like
Curious what was actually said. I can imagine some smarter pricing incentives being put in place to move demand around. If so, you should know that versions of that have been happening for decades.
The decline in energy from 2003-present lines up nicely with the phase out of incandescent lights in favour of CFLs and of CFLs in favour of LEDs.
Lets say a house typically had 5 60W bulbs on for 8hrs a day, now replaced with an 8W bulb. That would be a 2 kWH reduction, which roughly corresponds to the drop shown in the data.
EDIT: actually now that I think about it, 2kWh per-household is probably less than 1kWh per-capita. It's still a good chunk though!
There is also a substantial saving in household appliances from all the EU laws as well that have pretty substantially cut power consumption, including a lot of computers and devices at idle.
The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.
There has been a decline heavy industry and the article says industrial consumption has declined a quarter since 2005. Deindustrialisation is the major driver.
Recently installed a bunch of incandescent bulbs because I had them at the bottom of a drawer.
I was surprised how the small amount of infrared from them makes rooms feel more pleasant to be in. It's a warmth on the skin, rather like having a fireplace going.
If I weren't paying the electricity bill, I would totally fit them everywhere.
This sensation of warmth while being in a nominally cold room can also be created with microwaves. A couple of such systems were designed when microwaves were the new hotness. Turns out it might cause cataracts, though.
the heat rises out of your baseboard just the same. If you’re heating your house resistive electric, you can just leave everything powered on all winter.
Street Lighting. Sodium lamps used 250-500W and LEDs are 50-150W. Councils have been replacing the former with the latter ever since it was possible, as the savings were apparent after only a few years (and, the early investors could sell the old bulbs to authorities who did not have the funds to invest)
You’re leaving out the part where the sodium lights wasted a lot of their lumens by tossing them into the sky. LEDs can be dimmer because they can be directionally controlled.
While it is definitely true that original power drops were due to lower lumens, few things:
- reflective housing is super inefficient (~70% losses on the bounced light off typical material, at the top end expensive stuff still ~23%), still better than just losing the light upwards but not as many lumens on the road as a lab test would show
- Today LEDs are more efficient than sodium
Some math: 100W HPS cobra head lamp prdouces 9.5k lumens, including ballast it draws ~133W from the wall. Lab test shows about 70% of the lamp's light leaves the fixture (with the rest being lost in the housing) leading to ~7k lumens exiting. Roughly 53 lm/W.
LED cobra head lamps get like ~125 lm/W on the low end + fade much more slowly than sodium
You’re right a lot of this will be domestic lighting changing.
That said, UK manufacturing decline also correlates with this as that’s very energy intensive. Also don’t rule out fridges, old 90s fridges were very energy intensive compared to today.
> Improved efficiency is also supporting reduced use in the industrial sector – as has a general decline in GB industry and associated intensive electricity use
> This is part of a larger trend. Demand has been falling by 5 TWh per year since 2005. Improving efficiency (lighting, televisions, fridges, etc.), fewer homes using electric heating, and deindustrialisation all play a part
Let's get this straight: yes, there's been a reduction in demand and increases in efficiency, but electricity is objectively extremely expensive in the UK now. Energy is being heavily imported.
This has disastrous consequences for businesses and the economy. It is the number one biggest problem facing the UK economy after the huge government debt and crippling taxes... although there are a number of other problems I could mention.
Are clothes dryers common in the UK? After moving to Japan it took me a few weeks to get used to not using one, and now looking back I can't help but think of what an enormously stupid waste of energy they are.
To drying clothes!? No, we're much more likely to dry clothes outside than Americans. They dry just fine outside even in mid October; a bit more slowly than that after that, but when I was a kid I remember washing going on the line on warm days in early December.
We do have electric tumble dryers, condenser dryers, washer dryers.
(Indeed, the progressive switch to condensers may be part of power consumption dropping.)
AFAIK The UK's climate is about equivalent to New York State.
They are a stupid waste of energy if you live alone and want to suffer for the sake of environment.
If you have a family of four, the clothes dryer is an ENORMOUS time-saver. I'll never voluntarily live in an apartment that doesn't have one. No way I'm sacrificing my quality of life.
I don't really mind hanging clothes, it doesn't take that long. You still have to fold and stash away clothes, and often they are crinkly out of the dryer, and don't last as long.
What it does save is space that you need to hang clothes.
During winter I also like that it provides some moisture so the air won't get too dry.
edit: so basically we only use our dryer if there's a ton of laundry to hang, plus sometimes for towels or bed sheets/blankets.
Whats so bizarre about non-americans is just how beaten down you are about these types of topics. You are post rationalizing why you shouldnt have access to modern technology. Youre so defeated you just cant understand how insane you sound.
> I don't really mind hanging clothes, it doesn't take that long.
I mean sure, but i still would rather not do it. I could wash my dishes by hand too, its not reallly that big of a deal, but i dont because we have technology. We have solutions to all these things, and your politicians have somehow convinced you that its fine that you cant use them. Bizzaro.
Fairly common in houses with the space for them, but they often come in washer/dryer combos if you don't have the space. These are about as effective as using a hairdryer to dry your clothes and take about 3hrs after the initial wash.
The tumble dryer I had in the US could do a full load dry in about 25-30 mins. Maybe it was significantly more wasteful in terms of energy.
Modern dryers are also far more efficient than the old ones; a heat pump dryer uses about a third the power of a conventional condenser, and even less than that of a vented.
Not sure how you can call it stupid. They perform a role which is valued by a lot of people, especially those living in apartments.
That's exactly why we convert things to money - so we don't use arbitrary measurements. An energy use is not "wasteful", it can only be expensive. Which is worth or not, depending on particular conditions.
I guess I'm just an oddball. Spending 5 minutes to hang my clothes seems like a tiny price to pay to save a ton of energy the way the rest of most of the world does. But I guess the HN crowd are mostly gated community techies who can't be bothered to walk three blocks to a supermarket, either. So I'm yelling at clouds here
I moved to the UK, and also got a dryer at that point.
The weather in the UK can be very humid, and if you don't have much of a garden, it can be impossible to dry your clothes at times. We've had times where our living room was full of clothes for more than a few days, and it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't really dry anyway.
So we've invested in dehumidifiers and a dryer, and it made our life a lot more comfortable.
The UK has huge problems with mould growth caused by damp. Drying clothes indoors is one of the causes. Energy is expensive so people don't heat their homes properly. Those two things combined cause mould which leads to severe health problems.
Dryers output heat, so it is possible to kill 2 birds with one stone here. I know several people who use dryers at strategic times to heat their house.
A dehumidifier solves both problems. Put your damp clothes in a room with a dehumidifier and they're dry by the morning. You can also use it when it's wet to keep the room humidity down to 50%.
Like others said, weather and conditions. During summers here clothes dry in an hour during the day, and they're half ironed to boot. In the winters however... I still remember bringing my jeans back inside as a slab of ice, and having foggy windows due to drying indoors.
They're not really. I only live with my partner and don't have kids, and even then we've got to have clothes airers around the house all the time. If we had kids then it'd become unfeasible to have that much washing blocking the house
The linked iea data shows that the reduction is roughly 50/50 industrial and residential. So the deindustrialisation narrative is part of the story but improved efficiency at home is also a significant factor.
Not keeping up with the developed world is degrowth.
I hope Europeans remember their colonial history because with how they are managing their economies they are going to have it revisited on them in a generation or two.
People from the global south like you forget how far north Europe is. Much of Europe never needed it. Now maybe it does for a week or two per year. Things will change.
Fun fact: while there have been roughly 1,000 deaths this year in France attributed to extremely hot weather during the summer... there were more than 10,000 deaths (ten times as many) attributed to cold weather in the preceding winter.
Northern Europe's main problem, every year, is keeping people warm in the winter. Heat death in the summer is a novelty. Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe, because warming winters will save more people than hot summers kill.
> Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe, because warming winters will save more people than hot summers kill.
Is this informed by studies, or are you just assuming "global warming = higher average temperature = less cold"? Because that's not how the climate works. It's very well possible that global warming increases the number of cold-related deaths in Europe.
Ah, thanks. I feel like there's far too much uncertainty to state "Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe", but I'm not basing that on concrete data, so hopefully I'm wrong.
Financial services, film studios, and pharmaceuticals use a lot less energy than steel and shipbuilding. The UK economy is 80% services, and heavy industry has mostly disappeared, aside from cars and aerospace. The UK is far richer than it was in the 1970s, but it doesn't make many ships.
Your description might be right on paper that it’s richer today than it was in the 1970s but I believe dismantling the industry has been detrimental for the UK and Europe in general. I frequently visit the UK and it doesn’t strike me as a particularly prosperous country(although the rich seem to live well).
Seems generally like a good thing? I know the biggest difference I can think of in my lifetime is just how much better insulated houses are. Not on a par with Scandinavia, but still massively improved from even the peak electricity consumption period in the charts of 2005. I wonder how much that contributes to the overall reduction in demand.
Just an observation, but my first thought was how energy demand strongly correlates with economic growth and wondered if the article could be cast in that light. Might be fun to overlay that graph with UK gilt rates
No? It would be pretty remarkable if the majority of all UK housing was built in a single decade. If you meant to say 'from before the 1970s' then that might be a more defensible claim. But old houses can be upgraded with double glazing, insulation, etc.
I am in my fifties and have only spent 18 months or so in houses built after 1970 (both of which were, well… bad)
Grew up in a house built in the 50s, university dorm was built in the late 1800s, student housing was Edwardian at the latest except two houses I lived in as a postgrad, then a place built in 1720 or something, current place is 220 years old on the ground floor plus an Edwardian bit, and I suspect the first and second were first built in the late 1800s; nobody actually knows and it looks like it might have been substantially rebuilt.
The ground floor of this place gets cold; the upper floors have conservation-area sash windows but also ultra-modern insulation under the tiles.
I am trying to avoid listed buildings for the next place, but I would be a bit surprised if I bought anywhere as new as the 1970s! Kind of want an old interwar bungalow next.
No. The majority of it, still, was built before 1945 (median is 1920 or something)
(The ground floor of my house, which is, to be fair, quite damp, was built 220 years ago; this is not all that remarkable and my neighbours' houses are fifty years older)
1970s houses are pretty energy-efficient by comparison.
But it's worth noting that a surviving 100 year old house in the UK is likely to be warmer than a surviving 100 year old house in the USA; it is not only brick-built but it is also likely to be in a terrace of several houses, so it has some of the heat retention advantage of an apartment.
The "newer" town in my area is a railway town — it is actually a very old settlement but it became a big important town when the railway arrived in the early 1840s. Much of the housing in that town dates back to the 1860s through to the Edwardian era at the latest and is small houses in brick terraces of ten or fifteen houses in a row (usually in staggered terraces of four or five).
These houses are all supplied with natural gas now, and they have increasingly well-insulated roofs (and loft conversion rooms), double and triple glazing, so they have become warmer and pretty energy efficient.
But in the early 1970s, many of them still would not have been on the town gas supply, they would have been burning a lot more coal, and therefore almost all their supplemental heating (cooking, much of their hot water) would have been electric.
Which industries? If you're going to make that claim be specific. The UK has deindustrialised since the 70s which was nothing to do with electricity costs or availability. Any recent industries leaving are not covered by the stats here so would be pretty irrelevant, which means you're not talking about those, you're talking about something else for it to cover the period between the 70s and now.
4,000 people lost their livelihoods in Hull last month with the owner explicitly citing electricity costs as the reason. More or less every single steel producer, and even refineries, are just gone.
Yeah this doesn't answer the question does it. It's not even what this topic is about. Closing something a couple of months ago isnt moving the needle on the post literally talking about since the 1970s, which is the point I was very clear about making to hopefully avoid someones "well last month X happened" argument which as you full well know is nothing remotely to do with the topic at hand, however sad it may be that people have lost their jobs, which is also not the topic at hand.
We have expensive, potentially unreliable (if an interconnect fails we are completely fucked so certainly fragile), energy.
Energy is what allows modernity to function, we have made it so expensive that no one can make anything in Britain just in time for hard power and manufacturing to be really important again.
Chemicals, metals, pottery, glass,fertiliser etc are all basically impossible to do competitively in Britain.
Energy has only been expensive recently, and there has been zero issue with power supply beyond silly tabloid fear mongering. So between the 70s and lets say 10 years ago, the argument for expensive power really does not hold true.
There are so many great companies that were in existence in Britain that were as good as any company in the world. And most of them have folded up like a cheap suit. Note: the Brits aren’t alone. The thing that hurts is that Great Britain had access to the North Sea oil and basically squandered it. Their partner/peer across the North Sea, Norway, had a plan and they executed very well to the derision of many economic purists/conservatives even today because they didn’t give the gentry class the share they wanted.
There are many companies that have folded or who are in reduced circumstances in the United States. Many of them were dominant after the war. And they were on top of their game, but despite being on the top, the management team wanted to set themselves up and just wanted to milk the proceeds and primarily stick them into their pockets.
US Steel, Xerox, Kodak, IBM, Intel Microsoft, Motorola Schaumburg, Illinois let’s be honest, most of these companies stagnated at the top, in many areas of modern technology, being on top isn’t the end it’s just the start. of an endless process on a treadmill for as long as you are in existence, as a company. Which is the main reason why Apple had better take the design and engineering of memory in house the treadmill never stops.
Maybe. Volatility I think, ceteris paribus, forces the clearing price up and wind is extremely volatile so there is only so much you can get with having more of it.
That's fine for residential customers. But if there isn't cheap, reliable excess capacity then that inhibits industrial growth. Low economic growth rates cause everyone to go without.
That's not the only way to go without. Cutting back on your electricity usage because your utility bill is getting too high is another way to do it.
Sometimes that's fine if you're just reducing waste. However other times it could mean that you can't keep your house at a reasonable temperature because you can't afford to run your heater/air conditioning enough. That's a form of going without.
My favourite story is that it was someone’s job to watch for the end of Eastenders to trigger a dam release to generate surplus electricity for everyone to put their kettle on to make tea.
Interesting - I had never associated the rate of energy consumption with jingoism, but based on some of the comments here it clearly is.
I guess it’s sort of a “I drive a large inefficient car and that’s a good thing” kind of situation? Excessive unnecessary production and consumption is a positive trait?
Certainly doesn't help that AI datacenters use energy consumption as a stand-in for scale, so now the "line must go up" market growth psychology is spreading into power consumption overall as a bigger = better thing.
Standard of life and energy consumption are clearly correlated, though in the long-term improved efficiency makes this hard to evaluate.
The fact is, the UK has undergone a nearly complete deindustrialization in that period. e.g 'cars made per capita' is about 1/3 what it was. Domestic white goods are gone. Commercial shipbuilding is gone. Consumer electronics is gone. Domestic textiles are gone. Steel smelting (and nearly recycling) and machine tools are gone. For centuries(decades) these things were quintessentially British.
Offshore wind already under construction should take it back to the peak.
If the Hinckley point C had been on schedule that would account for about one fifth of the gap between the peak and current level. Instead it'll come online in 5 years.
This is around the same time the UK is forecast to become a net exporter of electricity.
This isn't related to demand, but is relevant to the discussion around price. A number of of transmission links are being built to transfer electricity from Scotland to England [1] with the first 2 coming online in 2029.
They will help reduce costs by reducing:
1. Wind generation being curtailed.
2. Gas generation used to replace the curtailed wind (referred to as turn-up).
Based on the GB Transmission Constraints site data the costs as of Oct 2026 curtailment costs 257.96 £m and turn-up is 1,378.91 £m.
The article "Transmission Network Unavailability – the Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain" [3] article provides a good analysis.
Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off.
Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.
One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
Well whatever the hell they're doing on pricing it's not working. Having huge amounts of wind, strong interconnects, gas fields near by and still ending up tied for 3rd most expensive elec is ridiculous. Especially given how good storage is looking relative to gas lately [0].
The main things that will reduce our power bills is a) upgrading the grid to improve transmission and reduce curtailment; and b) adding generation and storage capacity, reducing the amount of high-cost peak gas generation we use.
These things are in progress. A vast amount of generation and storage capacity came online this year and much more still to come. This will gradually take effect, oil conflicts notwithstanding.
Solar is great. I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense.
In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?
There are other reasons to do this, but purely on the financial side, I'd want to see the numbers on this one. Again, this isn't about solar, the claim was about battery + inverter + time-of-use paying for itself.
Grid scale BESS (battery energy storage system) in the UK is growing fast, because it makes financial sense. There's one that just expanded from 100MWh/100Mw to 475MWh/350MW: https://www.pacificgreen.com/energy-parks/energy-park-case-s... . It's easy to run the numbers, easier to make a payback calculator with AI. Take a look at the Anker E5000 / Ecoflow Stream 5000, and run the numbers yourself, I'd be interested to see what the payback would be for you.
> I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense.
Ever? Batteries are 10x cheaper today than they were ~a decade ago. If that trend continues for even a little longer, they'll be absolute no-brainer like solar is today within the next 5 years.
2026 seems to be roughly the break-even point. And whether it's worth it depends on where you live (greatly affects the cost of both installing a system, and buying energy from the grid).
Home batteries are much quicker to pay off than solar at the moment. This is largely due to being able to do strong arbitrage between import and export prices at different times of day, and some high guaranteed consumer export tariffs.
There’s no guarantee things will stay that way though, not least because the more storage added to the grid, the more those arbitrage opportunities get soaked up.
> In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?
Other people have made the point, but: the ability of companies to deploy batteries is limited by planning permission (ie the indigenous British NIMBY). Home solar and batteries are planning exempt, so they can be deployed more quickly and cheaply.
True, but if you get cheap power from solar for the rest of the year, and charge the battery from the grid off peak when there's no solar to charge, you should end up paying less than just the standard rate.
I import more than I export in December and January, but for every other month of the year it’s the reverse by some margin. My annual electricity bill is net negative, and the installation cost will be paid off in 7 years. The numbers would be even better in, say, Spain, but they are perfectly adequate here, despite suboptimal latitude.
Incidentally, the grid only knows about my exports. Self-consumption manifests as demand reduction, so UK solar production and electricity consumption is probably higher than aggregate figures suggest.
It's helped a lot by the fact that solar panels have become very cheap indeed, so the fact that we don't get as much sun as other places doesn't matter so much - it will still pay off, as long as you can actually use that energy effectively (which may require batteries or a decent export payment rate).
Yeah, I bought an inverter from eBay, and a battery from AliExpress. Also signed up to axle energy to reduce payback period. Most people would need an electrician to connect it though. If you just asked an electrician for a new circuit with a simple route to an isolator, it wouldn't be expensive.
The rise of gas central heating means that less electricity is used for supplemental heating.
We've gone from 70% of houses using coal to heat in the 1970s, which meant a lot more electric supplemental heating, to 70% using "town gas" central heating, which means less.
Combined with that, those lethal electric bar fires are a thing of the past, and the ones that remain have been replaced by efficient oil-filled radiators and at least somewhat more efficient storage heaters. Also many fewer houses rely on electric immersion heaters for water.
Houses are better insulated. And it is a lot warmer (actually shockingly so — 1.5C more on the mean maximum daily temperature in winter) so there is much less supplemental electric heating needed.
Cooker hobs are not the horribly inefficient hot metal ring element things they used to be — halogen, induction and gas hobs have replaced them, more use of microwaves etc.
LED lighting.
Solar (assuming it is not included in the numbers).
Even things like electric kettle elements are modestly more efficient (more sealed-element kettles), an energy efficiency drive in the 90s persuaded people to only boil the water they needed.
And talking of kettles, we drink only a third as much tea per person as we did in the 1970s, and while we drink much more coffee, it has not closed the gap. That is a _massive_ amount of electricity consumption; the average person in the 1970s drank around 25 cups of tea per week, now the average is as low as eight (which is frankly weird)
Residential gas and efficiency are big components, but why ignore the elephant in the room - the seismic deindustrialization of the UK since the 70s? Industry was the largest consumer of electricity in the 70s, is more electrified now, yet still uses less electricity due to its dramatically smaller output.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm also not addressing it. I don't know that much about it. I do remember living in the 1970s; I just don't remember deindustrialisation well enough to speak of it (though I do remember I used to walk past a literal blacksmith and a stonemason to school).
I don't actually think the deindustrialisation of the UK is any sort of elephant in the room, as it goes. This is a small, tightly packed country and our physical quality of life has improved radically with the deindustrialisation of towns (and indeed, in this timeframe, the destruction of the last of the appalling housing that it forced on people).
Interesting point of view. The UK was considered the 'Workshop of the World' for generations though, and this was associated at the time with the wealth and relatively very high standard of living (and housing). This all fell apart in the 70s and most agree that housing and standard of living in the UK have not been improving as quickly since when compared to e.g. the new 'Workshop(s) of the World' as in Japan, Taiwan, Korean, now China.
Comparing rates of improvement is a bit silly, isn't it? They start from different places. I live very modestly but suspect my standard of living is still rather more comfortable than the average Chinese person.
The average standard of housing in the UK compared to the early 1970s is night and day different. People were still living in appalling slum conditions when I was young. That stuff has gone. It's just completely weird to suggest that we're stuck back there.
I don't know who the "most" who "agree" are. But if this is going to turn out to be another thing where people use air conditioning or car ownership or drying clothes outside or whatever as proxies to call people poor or left behind… ehh.
Even though I live in a weird, small, mostly 200 year old house which is sometimes cold and a little damp (and share walls with three neighbours!) in a cluttered corner of a fading British town, I would rather live here than in the average American house in the average American town. Quality of life is so much more complex than buildings.
(I would like a little more space when I next move. So I can dry clothes outdoors)
To be honest you seem to want to read a lot more into what I'm saying than I (not an American) intend. I don't think the notion that China has improved in standard of living much more than the UK since the 70s requires citations, but it is fair to ask if comparing rates of improvement is meaningful - probably not really.
I'm genuinely surprised that you view the UK's industrial past so negatively - as the cause and not the solution to slums. It was the national pride and joy at the time and people celebrated it for raising their standard of living (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition). The terraced houses of the 1800's were actually built in part due to government initiative to improve housing for the working class beyond what was possible in comparable European cities. You even state that your own house from the UK's industrial heyday is up to modern standards! That's quite an achievement!
Would you apply this same logic (that industrialization degrades housing) to China - where the replacement of slums by modern apartments is usually seen to be a consequence of the vast industrial capacity?
Of course, the improved material standards of living from industrialization come at the cost of air quality and pollution - but these are likely solvable problems in the long-term.
Slums existed globally long before industrialisation (antiquity). The buildings which replaced the slums were built with the outputs of industry, and were bought by workers earning good wages from industrial jobs.
In Britain people were forced to move into cities due to enclosure - industrialisation saved them from the elite-imposed death sentence (which forced my ancestors to leave). It's an heroic story.
Again, would you say that Chinese industrialisation causes slums in China? Would you say that the demolition of slums in China, to be replaced by modern buildings, is assisted or inhibited by Chinese industrialisation? Would a similar country with less industry (e.g. India) have more or less slums? Would standards be better in Chinese or Indian slums?
Left wing thought is rooted in the idea that industrialisation allowed workers to create vast material wealth but did not give them their fair share. Now we have progressive Thatcherites apparently.
I am referring to the tenement slums that were built in the early industrial era. Vast, vast swathes of awful factory and mine worker housing, unsanitary, full of disease.
These persisted until the labour movements forced by then extremely wealthy industrialists to build something better; railway worker houses for example were usually built better and in smaller terraces (because they needed to be dotted around, rather than concentrated near factories). And then you have e.g. the biscuit factory worker houses in Reading, built by the more enlightened Huntley & Palmer factory.
But much of what was built from the late 1780s until the late 1880s was often of absolutely appalling quality.
The problem I have with HN is this belief that things were bad and then along came industrialisation and everyone had better lives — it is tosh. Dangerously misguided tosh that is being used to support the idea that protests against AI are misguided, that Luddites were only vandals, that the industrial era made everyone healthier and happier and freed them from farm labour.
It took a hundred years before their lives were on average better.
And there were industrial workers houses of appalling quality — the ones that didn't get bombed out in WWII — still in existence until I was eleven or twelve years old in the eighties.
Deindustrialization is a bit of a meme. The UK still makes "stuff", quite a lot of stuff, and quite high value. It's just that it's less visible. Much of it is actually related to electrification, including power turbines. High value small run stuff like satellites or scientific instruments.
It looks less like men with hammers and more like mixed-gender teams in lab coats, and that makes it invisible for ~some reason~.
I realise now I'm arguing with people who actually know very little at all about Britain's industrial history. Britain held a comparable position to current China or the US (high tech and bulk volume) manufacturing for ~100 years despite being about 2% of the world's population (and competing with the US, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, etc).
That sounds ludicrous now - it was ludicrous then too. Yet it really happened, and it really is over.
> mixed-gender teams in lab coats
Women (working-class women) were actually an essential part of the industrial workforce during that time and dominated some of the industries like textile manufacturing. Only as the middle class grew with prosperity did this even begin to change at all. Laws were passed to limit their working hours to 60 a week and prevent them from working in underground mining. There were many lady engineers and inventors too, beginning the in the late 19th (peak) and accelerating with early 20th (WWI).
England was famous not for 'men with hammers' but for highly skilled craftsmen, inventors, and engineers who produced the bulk of the most sophisticated manufactured goods in the world - textiles, steam engines and turbines, ocean liners, scientific instruments, mechanical and then electronic calculators, chemicals and dyes, weaponry, steel and other metals, mining and heavy industrial equipment, electric motors and generators, radios and televisions, radar, photography and cameras, engines, cars, even tyres, plastics, cement. These are all industries with the British created and dominated.
They didn't just 'make stuff' -> they were the 'workshop of the world'. They made 20% of the world's goods while representing 2% of the population
> power turbines
Actually, they don't make their steam turbines, wind turbines or gas turbines anymore (except for jet engines). Steam and gas turbines were invented in the UK and produced there commercially.
> scientific instrument
The UK once dominated scientific instrument making. It is ridiculous now to contend that they are serious player in this field. Optical glass and various types of microscopes, (even flat glass), fibre optics, electron microscopes. All invented in the UK, commercially produced in the UK, and now gone (since the 70s).
> I realise now I'm arguing with people who actually know very little at all about Britain's industrial history.
No, you're not. We know all this stuff (I studied economics at school, and we are taught all about our industrial history again and again and again from the age of about eight onwards).
You seem to suggest that we're somehow oblivious or ill-educated about this. We are not. We just do not think that it is meaningful to pretend that we are not mostly a services and knowledge-driven economy.
It is stupid to keep prattling on about what was lost to very much physically larger countries with more room for every kind of factory complex, poorer workers, poorer pollution controls, corrupt central-planning autocracies, and worse human rights.
Of course technology does that. Of course the expertise eventually collects nearer the manufacturing. Of course we no longer do that kind of work.
But you are not comparing like with like on any level, and you are actually being ahistorical yourself in misleading ways.
It was in fact not ludicrous at all that the early years of the British industrial revolution, that started in the UK, could meet the demand of an unindustrialised world, was it? It's just about being first and having lots of space to grow into.
In the 21st century we now have a services-led economy. And there are dolphins in the Thames again.
At any rate this feels like it is just more HN anti-British sentiment wrapped up in intellectualism. It's tedious and it ignores a lot more about British history than it takes in, while eliding that contemporary progress elsewhere is dependent on human rights often no better than early 18th Century Britain, on planned economies Britain has never had, and on state-corporate corruption that is beginning to put even our worst product, the East India Company, in the shade.
(FWIW there is still precision optics manufacture in the UK, including Taylor Hobson, a company that has been doing this for 140 years, there is still electronics manufacture, we have several firms that make us the leading manufacturers of small satellites in Europe, we are still AFAIK the centre of excellence of microsatellites, we may no longer have ARM owned in the UK but the chips are still designed here. And I think "except for jet engines" is kind of deserving of a particularly hilarious asterisk)
There are lots of factors that feed into this: lots of solar, batteries, more efficiency, improved insulation.
Some others: increase of heat pumps, energy poverty, reduction in industrial energy (both due to good and bad reasons)
Ultimately though, its not about how much energy per capita, its about the sources of energy, and how effectively they are used... my heat pump uses infinity more electricity than my boiler, but far more effectively uses the underlying energy source.
Not unsurprising, excluding grid efficiency and industrial demand, its also just households. More and more places are getting batteries wherever possible, plug in solar is also avaialble. The amount of demand I don't forsee increasing at all unless people start getting air source heatpumps.
Demand was on a constant down trends. From PCs, servers over light bulbs to electric based heating (heat pumps and IR heat lamps instead of "direct" electric heating + better insulation) everything has got _way_ more efficient. But also a lot of high energy need industry has moved of from the UK (or most 1st world countries) for decades by now.
A short (not proper) lookup show that even if you where to replace _all_ cars in the UK with electric cars the total need for that would be 30TWh/y while the UK produces ~322TWh/y so less then a 10% increase (in relation to production, not consumption).
The only thing which has caused a mayor hickup more or less all countries long term plan for electricity production is AI.
But not because GPGPU compute is that inefficient, it has gotten way more efficient. But instead because of how insanely much compute AI needs.
Needs isn’t quite the right term as AI energy use is way higher than the market actually supports.
A large fraction of AI’s energy use is pure bubble me too redundancy. A long list of companies are doing essentially the same training with essentially the same data. When grok dies all that training goes away independent of any use of AI by consumers.
Similarly, by subsidizing usage with VC funds you get a lot of demand that goes away at market rates.
This is a huge positive and not hard to understand.
Massive increases in efficiency across the board. It’s hard to find non condensing dryers nowadays, almost every boiler heats water in demand, and our very old housing stock is increasingly being triple glazed and insulated.
Very high energy costs due to energy privatization accelerated things. People cannot afford to waste energy in the UK.
The US is learning that lesson now for similar reasons. Trump is doing more to drive efficiency than any number of “green” candidates.
Yeah, it's a bit depressing in the UK these days. Growing up in the 90s we learnt we were one of the richest countries in the world. Now we are slowly accepting that's just not true any more. We probably won't be a "poor" country for a while, but we're all having to learn to live with less than our parents had, both relative to the rest of the world and in absolute terms (smaller houses, longer commutes, more traffic, more pollution, more noise, less nature, worse healthcare etc)
This is directly correlated to prosperity, just like the number of push-ups you can dot turns out to be a very high-fidelity indicator of your overall health. Obviously, a significant part of the UK politics has been directly aiming at destroying the UK economy and the UK identity.
> From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Services deemed essential (e.g. hospitals, telephone switchboards, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses) were exempt. Television companies were required to cease broadcasting at 22:30 to conserve electricity [...] The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974.
Year Avg consumer price in today's money
1975 13p/kWh
1985 15p/kWh
1995 n/a
2005 11p/kWh
2015 17p/kWh
2025 26p/kWh
We're currently paying a lot more than usual because:
1) we have to pay off operators for the billions of foreign investment they put into new wind and solar farms and grid storage batteries. If we didn't tempt them with a good RoI, they'd invest elsewhere, and we'd still be burning coal. The cost of this is going down year on year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
2) we're paying for new transmission capacity and replacing worn out transmission route. The fact we don't already have it, which we could've had by charging more for electricity in the 2000s and building it out decades ago, is why today we face enormous curtailment costs today, as we can't get all this wind power from where it's generated to where it's consumed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottlene...
3) our market arrangement is based on everyone bidding to supply power, and we pay everyone who generates the same rate as the highest necessary bidder. Thus the moment that there isn't enough wind power, or there is but it can't get to the region it's needed (see point 2), in come the gas turbines and given that Russia's trying to destroy Ukraine, gas is astronomically expensive. The sooner we solve our bottlenecks and decommission all the gas turbines, the better.
Fair enough, but that would surely be the result of local 'last mile' type infrastructure issues on a tiny scale, rather than wholesale electricity production (not being able to supply a whole city despite all the distribution infrastructure being in place), which is the topic of the article and threads.
Sure, a squirrel fries itself on a line. A tree branch falls on a line.
But the raw infrastructure was super reliable in the 70s. If anything we've used digital systems to chip away at the safety margins of the original designs
Two of mine we in the same village over two years, so yes, not everywhere is reliable. It was the same failure twice. So, yes, not everywhere is that reliable.
On the other hand I have lived in multiple places of varying sorts and regions of England (from London to a village in the North) so I think most places have reliable power, especially towns and cities. Other people's experience is mostly the same.
The OP is asking about the 1970s because that's what the headline is comparing to. My point was the 1970s had a lot of problems going on (labour disputes, oil crisis, extreme weather) so it's not an ideal comparison point.
I don't think I can agree with this. CfDs are (typically) a 15 year contract. For each CfD the price actually increases, as a result of inflation adjustment, each year. Dudgeon wind farm got £161.71 per MWh when it began but today gets £220.95 per MWh because of inflation.
Strike prices came down from where they began, but have since bounced around. Hornsea Project 2 is selling today for £80.08 per MWh but CfDs signed this year for similar Wind Farms would be (in today's money) more like £90 per MWh. Much cheaper than Dudgeon, but they are not in fact just steadily reducing in price.
The big boon for CfDs is the certainty for both parties. In 2022 and to a lesser extent again now, fossil fuel prices went crazy and so the less dependent you are on those prices the better for you. If you'd locked in CCGT prices at 2024 levels for 15 years you'd be doing great... except your providers would be bankrupt because methane just isn't available at those prices.
To further highlight the certainty versus cheaper dimension here's an analysis of public CfD payments year by year.
In 2020 22.0 TWh of electricity = £2.3B subsidy so about £104 per MWh
In 2021 21.6 TWh = £1B or about £46 per MWh
In 2022 20.5 TWh = -£235M subsidy - it paid us £17 per MWh
In 2023 20.6 TWh = £1.4B subsidy so about £68 per MWh
In 2024 31.1 TWh = £2.4B equivalent to £76 per MWh
In 2025 35.8 TWh = £2.6B or £74 per MWh
And this year, so far, 26.7 TWh for £1.7B or £62 per MWh
These numbers are pretty big, but even 35.8 TWh is maybe 12% of generation, most of Britain's renewable energy is not subsidised, it just made enough sense in the free market to build, one trick CfDs were used for, which doesn't end up with the government spending any money on a "subsidy" but which does result in more actual generation is that a potential generator would sign the CfD contract and then use a provision intended for practical obstacles - the sand bank you wanted to put turbines on turns out to be unstable for example, to instead sell the power wholesale at prevailing prices and not get a subsidy. That CfD contract made their project easier to finance, but then the market offered more money and they accepted the risk/ reward choice with their finances in place. Banks may or may not be happy they made loans on this basis, we'll find out when these firms go back for another loan and either get a champagne welcome or very different terms.
* All "subsidy" numbers are net additions to the price paid by the "Free market" clearing auction for electricity. Because metric system we can convert the market prices to the kWh units familiar to a household bill payer as "units" of electricity £100 per MWh = 10p per kWh but remember the wholesale electricity is just on some windswept Yorkshire hilltop or something at that price, you need it delivered to your home which costs extra to do.
The thing I'd be very interested in seeing, but haven't found a way to get, is the actual bids for one of the half-hourly auctions. Even seeing one that happened a week ago and thus surely lacks ongoing commercial sensitivity, would be very interesting. I'd particularly like to see: A typical BESS morning, this morning's 0630 auction for example, and a windy night like 2330 on October 9th.
I feel as though there are things in that auction data which are obvious to the generators and maybe the network operator but are utterly opaque to the general public and might help understand why things are as they are or aren't how they might be.
This is what I was meaning. The fact the contracts are auctioned via competitive bidding (usually) leads to price minimisation. Overall it seems to be a well designed procurement system.
The Low Carbon Contracts Company has a terrible Power BI which attempts to turn this data into charts, you can get the Power BI to give you the CSV of raw CfD data and I process it with some Rust I wrote to get at the bits I want like OK, what if we only look at February and only at Solar projects ?
So that lets me write code for "How much Electricity did we buy this way in year X and how much did we pay for it?" or "If we ignore Drax, can we see what subsidies cost us in each Summer?" and that sort of thing.
You could do much the same in Excel, or indeed if you had your own Power BI - but I can write software, I'm not great at Excel and I refuse to write Power BI reports without being paid for it because it's awful.
Over the 20th century, people switched from fuel based lighting, heating and cooking to electric, and acquired laundry machines, dishwashers, fridges, TVs, air conditioning etc etc. So electricity was a pretty good proxy for a certain aspect of quality of life. It might be a less useful measure in the developed world in the 21st century as we have kind of plateaued on energy-intensive appliances and are more focused on efficiency, and because other aspects of quality of life like pollution, work, mental health etc may be more salient.
I mean, what do you expect out of a resource poor island? The only reason the UK was on the map is because it has intelligent, well spoken people that could make deals and exploit the resources of their colonies. That’s not enough when you don’t have colonies. It’s reverting to the mean.
Seems like a bit of misconception given it has coal (more relevant historically), iron, North Sea gas, a temperate climate, fisheries and coastline, plenty of arable land and more recently massive potential for renewable energy.
Actually the UK has had a ridiculous number of resources despite its small size. It had good mineral wealth from coal to copper to tin (which was mined in the region before the Roman Empire) to some oil and so on. A lot of that is depleted but its mineral wealth contrasts with the Japanese home islands which had little. It has some decent arable land (although it keeps building on it) and better rainfall than some areas.
It also seems to be blessed with few natural disasters such as major earthquakes, volcanoes, larger tornadoes etc.
We may genuinely have the worst energy market in the developed world. It's going to get cheaper and reliable any day soon - George monbiot told me so it must be true.
If you import 12 million people in 20 years, your energy generation, water provision, and housing affordability are all going to fall off a cliff vs demand.
It's true that industry has been massively moving out of the UK for the last 50 years, so energy demand has gone down, but that just means that the proportion of energy generation costs are higher for the population.
Energy policy in Europe/UK is completely moronic. At some point in the past places like France and Germany had the most modern and technology advanced grids (nuclear) and were energy independent. Then the leftists/green came and destroyed it all, only to buy gas from Russia and the Middle East because renewables aren't enough during the winter and when demand is high. So now Germans pay the highest electricity prices in the world and still don't have AC (it's everywhere in China now). The left literally turned Germany into a third world country.
There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity. Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
I also wonder what the contribution of domestic solar and on-site industrial generation is? I'm a dev in a large manufacturing business and two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells which power a lot of our operations. Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too. Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?
(Edit: added "being posted", "welcome" and "(neutral?)" for clarity)
> There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and increased importing of electricity
Right – those things aren't great. What's so amusing or outrageous about pointing that out?
> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
Did the link say they were? Maybe I missed it.
> Did the link say they were? That seems like a red herring.
By "here" I meant posts on this thread, not in the content of the article.
The Telegraph-esque outrage in the comments here is explicitly people complaining about the idea of rationing their electricity, which as you point out is not suggested by any part of the article.
There are comments here saying yes, rationing is planned.
I don't see any evidence for that. Just people saying it.
To be fair, the people who think it believe that smart meters are how it will happen, so their existence would be all the evidence they actually need that it will.
I have no view either way (or a smart meter)
Smart meters themselves aren't the problem. It's meters that can control HVAC.
There don't seem to be any comments on this thread referring to rationing.
And FYI energy rationing has been one policy consideration for decades.
UK gov energy rationing proposal [1] 'Personal carbon allowances [2]
There's always discussion about this sort of thing, it's not fear mongering to point out that fact.
[1] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmen... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00756-w
> There don't seem to be any comments on this thread referring to rationing.
Trivially falsifiable statement, just read the comments in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50076266
>> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power.
In other words: rationing.
One possible reference to rationing - that is actually not a reference to rationing - does not infer that the thread is loaded with Telegaph-esque rants about rationing.
You're doubling down on the misrepresentation.
There are zero references to rationing on this thread - and yet the top commenter calling this out as some kind of 'Telgraph-equ' nonsnes.
'Intermittent availability of power' - is absolutely not a reference to 'rationing' and if it were, it wouldn't be any kind of basis for hyperbole over 'rationing'.
I gave evidence of two examples of govenmental policies around rationing, and it's definitely not via 'power outages' - that's absurd - rolling blackouts only happen during emergency situations.
You've stated that the conversations has tilted to 'rationing' is 'trivially falsifiable' and at the same time haven't produced any evidence.
Thats a basic misrepresentation though. And the condescending fear mongering out 'telegraph-esque' does not help.
The quote is:
"Deindustrialization has reduced demand,"
Leaving out 'Deindustrialization' is leaving out most of the story.
That is the gaph of industrial decline.
It's not that the 'dishwashers' are using less electricty so much as dishwashers are no longer designed and made in the UK. That is the story.
Probably less than 20% of that curve is 'green good news' - 80% of it is deindustrialization which is a primary economic malaise.
That deindustrialization is now starting to hit 'core' industry like auto - and a fundamental driver of the far right.
Industrial use of electricy is about where it was in the 1980s because industry ha moved elsewhere, like China.
AfD cannot get enough votes without that curve - Mercedes is closing down while China expands. That's the story.
> Probably less than 20% of that curve is 'green good news'
I would call this a basic misrepresentation, but you just pulled that number out of thin air. Or somewhere worse?
50% of the decline is from industry, 50% from residential[1]. During that timeframe, industrial output increased.
1. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...
[1] gives different numbers. About 3x decrease in industrial energy consumption since 1970. Steel production decrease is about 3x ([2]). Chemical production has shifted from bulk production to pharmaceuticals.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/651422e03d371...
[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
That’s a different metric - “million tonnes of oil equivalent”. That’s not the same as electricity consumption - that’s the total amount of energy used in all kinds of industrial processes.
The data across the board supports the notion that reduction in electricity is an industrial phenomenon overall, there is no data to suggest this is a 'consumer green activity' phenom - not even the link you provided.
All of think links here, the person you are responding to, mine (above) and your own directly point towards reduction in industrial use.
Rather than post incessantly about the vague “across the board data” and “probably X and Y” you could always cite a source.
Just a thought.
Dont think this is the right way of looking at it.
Two things were happening at the same time: deindustrialization and electrification. Industries and the economy used to depend more on machines and oil. That was getting replaced by reliance on electricity. If electricity generation was cheap enough, we might have seen the total energy usage get transformed one for one into electricity usage. But that didn’t happen and energy usage overall went down. That’s deindustrialization.
Of course it could have other reasons like labour costs and so on.
No, literally the evidence you provided does not support the 50/50 thesis, moreover, the data does show that residential reduction is a marginal - and you're probably failing to take into consideration the UK has grown by more than 10M people during that period aka this is 'per capita' - not aggregate.
This government data is must more substantial than that link, and it puts the ratio at 70% reduction in electricity due to deindustrialization.
Moreover - the OP's comment was a blatant misrepresentation (lie) - by ignoring deindustrialization, the primary factor as stated in the article (and in reality) - plus a bit of a thrown slander aka the 'Telegaph-esque' nonsense.
This is not Twitter.
This is not even controversial.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6aba96e8997a4...
Industrial usage fell about 100k TJ, household fell ~110k TJ since the peak.
The linked numbers are not per-capita, they are absolute.
It comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use, a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades, even for fossil fuels. It's well established that the cheapest additional capacity is efficiency. One of the reasons I am not so concerned about the AI energy needs, especially because the US has a lot of wiggle room.
There's a lot of HN and YC-aligned people who don't believe this, despite the empirical evidence of the last few decades.
To take the stupidest version of the argument (not going to sugarcoat it, I think it was embarrassingly stupid) there was Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto where he called for a 1000x increase in energy production from nuclear fission and fusion. I quote directly:
"We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well."
Driving energy costs to near zero drives down the cost for literally every other process, manufacturing or extractive or services. A 1000x increase in energy practically lets you extract so much material for cheaper that the cost of materials, and the associated logistics, goes down.
That is self-evidently true but misses the point.
The point of using energy is not to use energy. What matters is the services that energy delivers, be it a hot shower, a drive to the grocery store, a new house, a squillion tokens of AI computation. If we can get the services we want more cheaply by energy more efficiently, this is a good thing, not a disaster for humanity.
For completeness, I acknowledge that there are people for whom energy usage is inherently bad, which is equally silly. What matters are the downside impacts of the energy use, not the energy use itself.
My point was that even if you drive costs to 1000x, you're not somehow magically going to reduce consumption. Human output will match those efficiency gains in other forms. Imagine things like synthetic diamond jewelry being the norm, thermal pyrolysis of methane and CO2 into plain carbon, mining deeper underground for precious minerals, etc. A person in the 1890s could not have envisioned the things that would happen just 30 years later, enabled by cheap electricity.
And my point is that life has gotten better for 30 years despite Energy Line Goes Sideways, and what we care about is the life getting better part, not which direction the line goes.
If you want to see true evidence of this, look at the rebates power companies offer.
In all the places I’ve lived there are generally large incentive programs to convert air conditioners and old heaters to heat pumps, and other efficient appliance replacements, install better insulation, etc. because that rebate dollar stretches a lot further than building new power plants, transmission lines, etc.
If you cannot understand how a huge increase in energy might be useful you should probably not go around calling other people stupid. We are not going to get carbon removal and desalination at scale to fix the already baked-in consequences of climate change by making our water heaters more efficient. Efficiency is good but there is more to life than the status quo.
I am aware of the need for carbon removal and (some) desalination, but 1000x-ing our energy production is ludicrous stuff. The waste heat from energy production on that scale would render Earth uninhabitable.
If you increase it 1000 fold it would still be less than 10% of the heat the sun provides.
That's incorrect. It's in the order of 25% of the heat reaching the Earth's surface, or maybe 35-40 watts of heat per square metre.
That's roughly ten times the warming effect of doubling CO2.
Now, I don't have a climate model handy to simulate this in detail but I would suggest "render the Earth uninhabitable" is a close enough approximation to the actual effects to suggest it's a terrible idea and anyone seriously proposing it should be laughed out of the room until they've done their homework.
Total energy use by mankind is about 200,000 TWh a year
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
Most of that is lost in waste heat.
Total energy arriving on earth from the sun is about 1,500,000,000 TWh
https://smartstep.blog/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth-per-...
7500 times higher
Well given that cheap energy follows Jevon's paradox, it makes complete sense. If each unit of energy becomes cheaper to produce (which renewables are driving today), then you should see more consumption of that cheap energy into economic activity. Economic progress is easily coupled with increased energy use.
The US has a lot of wiggle room wrt energy consumption because it has ceded the role of being the world's factory to China. At the same time, the US is the world's data center and software development hub, and the world's finance hub, and the world's bank. What does the UK have in comparison?
Cadbury's creme eggs.
They sold those to America 15 years ago.
The numbers today in the developed works don't back it up. It's Jevons Paradox btw, the person that came up with it was called Jevons, not Jevon.
The US has a lot of wiggle room because it uses almost 2x electricity per capita than e.g. Germany. People don't need electricity, they need light and cooling. If you do the math, that is hundreds of GW of free "new" capacity just by getting the same value for less energy. Obviously you can't do 1/1 comparisons, a lot of people in the US use AC whereas they don't in Europe. But overall the US could get more efficient in energy use. People buy new appliances all the time, make them be more energy efficient. Or don't and let the market sort it out. "The solution to high prices are high prices".
"It comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use"
Yest it is. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.1855
"a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades" Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Same with AI. It is becoming much more efficient and cheaper. This will result in a much, much higher demand. Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.
That the energy demand is sinking is based on the fact that most industries got outsourced to China.
> Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.
Blech. I don't have wishes I want netflix to fulfill. I want to see the dreams of another human before me and be entranced/enchanted.
I wonder if this will become increasingly niche if people grow up with systems that can spoon feed tailored content and monitor feedback
No, it is not. For example, gasoline use per capita in the US peaked in 1978 and the economy went up around a gazillion percent since then. There are now millions of EVs in Europe and electricity use has declined in the last twenty years and this has nothing to do with the hand wavy "deindustrialization". Why would it not? The light bulbs I have today use 10x less electricity, the induction stove I have uses significantly less energy, I bought a fridge last year that uses 3x less electricity than the previous one, the TV died three years ago, the new one uses an estimated 50kwh per year of normal use, and the old one used 200. The EU has new standards where the devices on stand by are not allowed to draw more than 3kwh (I think) etc. And obviously manufacturers will not make efficient stand by devices for the EU and then make inefficient ones for the rest of the world in purpose. The same is true for other forms. My building replaced the gas boiler used for heating and warm water in general. The winter was tougher than the one before, I switched to working from home and heated a lot more. My gas use stayed flat.
When your logic collides with hard numbers I would stick to the numbers and reconsider the logic. Here is an idea: will I run my dishwasher 3x more often just because it is now 3x more efficient? Will I run my fridge more often because it is more efficient? Difficult, it already runs 24/7. Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?
So as you see although there is obviously some validity in the OBSERVATION that is Jevons Paradox, it is not a hard rule. There comes a point where it stops being true.
„Economic Growth Is Closely Tied to Energy Consumption“, Slide 3: “This rather strange situation arises because the standard calculation misses energy embodied in imported goods.”
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/the-ap...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/10/18/the-approaching-us-ene...
"Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?" Nope. But now you have a computer, maybe two, a cell phone, an ebook reader, a tablet, take international flights and use Bitcoin and AI.
Article title: A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account
Article link: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling?ref=ufuksno...
Your anegdotal evidence falls on its face as well: I have two TVs now instead of one, and my electricity consumption went down. This includes moving mid year from an office to work from home. So one laptop charging every day, and one monitor. I even bought a printer which I did not have previously. That's because the two TVs combined, made 2023 and 2025, use less electricity than the one I had before. The addition of a laptop, monitor and printer were negligent compared to the savings I made with my new fridge.
It's not a good look that the UK seemingly isn't installing air conditioning, decarbonizing heating, or adopting electric vehicles. Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first.
What makes you think that the U.K. isn't adopting electric vehicles? I can tell you from direct visual observation that people are. The little green numberplate rectangles are fairly common, now.
* https://rac.co.uk/drive/news/electric-vehicles-news/1-in-3-n...
The "green flash" scheme is great.
EVs are almost at the supply issues point. I've had one on order since June, which I suppose is my fault for choosing Stellantis.
It's not just Stellantis though, VW supply is stretched as well.
EV adoption in the UK is huge right now, heat pump adoption is happening (though could be faster).
Air conditioning is a weird one, because it’s only been necessary in residential properties for a couple of years, and really still only necessary for a couple of days a year, so a fixed installation isn’t cost effective. Portable units are becoming more popular.
AC has been a requirement in most commercial premises for years. Decades, perhaps.
The great thing about heat pumps is you can run them in reverse to become an AC, only requirement is a drain for the condensate.
I have one of those and it really isn't the same as AC.
I trust that you mean it doesn’t have the same effectiveness as other AC units you’ve used.
From a pedantic point of view, it is quite literally the exact same as an AC. Air conditioners are literally heat pumps.
Air conditioners are heat pumps. Not all heat pumps are air conditioners.
Common installations reuse the wet systems we have and are air to water, which was until recently the only thing the grants covered (and now it’s still lower for a2a).
And AFAIK the grants still don't cover something that can also be used as an AC, though maybe that's changed.
How is it not the same?
UK typically uses air-to-water heat pumps with convection radiators. The passive radiators are useless for cooling, and condensation on pipes in walls can be a problem.
Look, I know that actuuuualy and technically it's the same type of technology working on the same principle. The thing I have ( Daalderop 5G WPU) mainly works as floor heating (and great at that), but it's the size of a fridge and has it's own utility closet and a pipe underground for whatever thermal medium it uses and it's own separate meter (for reasons of regulatory kind). And it's a district wide deployment where I don't even own the thing.
Most importantly it's not the same in the way of me not feeling the chill. It's stupid, as I know the house is cooler than the outsides, but the actual split system delivers the cold air right to where I feel it and this thing just makes the ambient temperature down to 25c without me even noticing.
I don't want to know what it costs to install (I got it with the house), but split system costed lol nothing in eastern european dollars and took some guys less than half a day and zero permits to install too. For better or worse the heat pump doesn't live in the same locale I had that.
A water/water heat pump is absolutely not the same thing the other commenters are talking about. They're mostly talking about an air/air heat pump, where it's literally all the same parts but has a reversing valve so it can either be hot/cold or cold/hot among the coils with fans blowing through them.
This is more like what they're talking about, but they do come in a lot of shapes and sizes and can be more or less integrated into central systems.
https://senville.com/mini-split-heat-pumps/
It's almost like there is more than one thing called heatpump
I have one and it is? We keep our house very cool in the summer using it and it works just as well as an in window AC that we use in the bedroom. Maybe what you have is different somehow.
An AC is literally a heat pump
So is a refrigerator; all the other considerations make saying "I have a heat pump therefore I have AC" in this context a bit like a Mexican saying "I am American".
Like, sure, but the word has a specific and a general meaning, conventional use is only the specific meaning.
With a heat pump asked central heating system run in cooling mode condensate can form at your pipes in the wall and your radiators or floor when using under floor heating. So you have to limit its cooling power to prevent that.
With an AC the advantage is that the condensate is forming inside the AC when cooling the air.
Most British homes haven't been built to support AC. Retro-fitting a heatpump for heating is relatively straightforward, as the heating delivery mechanism (pipes to transmit hot water to wall-mounted radiators) is already in place.
Although you could pipe cool water through the radiators, it's an ineffective form of cooling compared to blown-air systems, and retro-fitting a blown-air system is much more costly than a heating-only heat pump.
You can't just pump the cold water through the heating elements, because of condensation. The correct installation, requires special heating, cooling elements that include fans (it helps with the cooling) and drainage for the condensation.
I have "cooled floors", so basically heated floors but you can reverse the circuit in summer. Condensation really isn't an issue unless the temperature difference is massive, say room temperature being 28 degrees C and then kicking the system into high gear trying to get to 20 degrees C.
Once room and floor temperature match, condensation doesn't occur anymore as long as you keep it running.
You can't pipe cold water through radiators, all you'll get is a very wet floor. Think of an ice cold bottle of beer.
You need a radiator with a built-in electric fan, this will all but eliminate the condensation.
However it will not cool like an A/C unit, only something like 5°C reduction. This can be enough to get a decent night's sleep during a summer heatwave.
We're talking about retrofitting to existing typical UK radiators. If I was buying new radiators (and paying an electrician to run electricity to them!) then I would want a better return on investment than cooling from 35C to 30C.
I visited a building once that had "cold panels" covering about half of the drop ceiling. Supposedly they made a difference in summer but I suppose they needed the massive surface area.
I've had a cooling/heating heatpump fitted. Adding a couple of wall units bumped the price by about £1500, although the whole thing was softened by the grant for getting rid of an oil fired boiler.
While our house is relatibvely small and we kept the units (which also do heating as well) confined to the main living space, it wasn't especially burdensome. The bulk of the work was installing the behemoth of a hot water tank!
Did you consider going with instant hot water at the sink/basin/shower/bath? My house is also relatively small and has little room for a huge hot water tank.
That can’t practically be done electronically. Needs to be gas. The power demand is too high for electric water heating
Original comment mentioned £ so they are in the UK. It's possible and not super uncommon to have electric showers in the UK because the 230V provides enough power for water heating unlike the US.
I'm currently investigating options for kitchen sinks and such. It feels quite silly to have a long length of pipe leading from a central source for a small amount of warm water to wash my hands.
They can be, and in many places that get both too hot and too cold they're built that way as standard, but in places that are usually too hot or usually too cold, they're often built one way to save a bit of complexity.
> Portable units are becoming more popular.
This is only the beginning. Soon people will realize that a mini-split install isn't that much more expensive than a portable AC, but is a lot more convenient.
And mini-split is definitely way more efficient thermodynamically.
> air conditioning
The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.
> decarbonizing heating
What does this mean? More renewables? If efficiency reduces energy demands then it directly results in less carbon.
> electric vehicles
Aren't people already adopting electric vehicles? Do you think that the government should introduce a scheme to persuade people to buy electric vehicles? Does the availability of charging for electric vehicles need improving?
> Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first
Efficiency means saving money. In what circumstance could efficiency be bad? The grid responds to demand, unused electricity means higher prices for consumers. One of biggest issues right now in the UK is cost of living crisis, so raising electricity prices would be universally hated. How does making the grid less efficient increase growth?
> decarbonizing heating
I believe this refers to switching to high-efficiency electric heaters like reverse-cycle AC units (also known as "heat pumps"), rather than oil heaters or ducted gas heating.
The majority of UK homes are heated by gas-powered boilers that pump hot water through radiators in each room. Often hot water is heated by the same system.
Decarbonisation usually means replacing that boiler with a heat pump which uses electricity to heat water.
> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning
I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid. Buildings are engineered to trap heat, so the heat doesn't dissipate at night and every day the indoor temperature rises, and rises...
At least they removed the need for planning permission recently. The problem is that the places that need AC the most (flats) will probably not be able to get it until the leasehold system has been abolished.
> > decarbonizing heating
> What does this mean?
Presumably it means heating using electric heat pumps rather than gas boilers. This also solves the AC problem. I don't think this is viable for most people. Heating was never the problem anyway, at least in the south winters are mild.
> I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable
well, i live in lincolnshire and used to live in london. i usually have a fan on for a few weeks over summer, but that's it. where in the UK did you live that the summers were so unbearable?
That's only a few weeks a year. The UK isn't Florida yet. And besides modern AC is incredibly efficient. The stuff that's cleared to sell in Europe has incredibly high standards.
Unbearable is a stretch. I live in Texas and don't use the AC every day in the summer. The human body can adapt if you dont constantly climate control
I for once feel better overall when it's 35c outsides airco or not, but people tend to think I'm being funny about that
It's fine if temperatures get lower during the night, but 25°C at night and 35°C during the day leaves little for cooling the infrastructure (roads, buildings), and constant warm temperatures are unbearable if you cannot even get in the shade when you want to cool off. Then, 35°C is also very hard to manage with high humidity.
I think you're right, and in addition to that there is also a lot we could do other than AC. Just having some shade from trees already helps a lot. Modern cities can be a man-made hellscape with regards to heat. But we did that to ourselves.
> UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid.
Not to be that guy, in the last 20 years, 27 was considered a heatwave.
> Buildings are engineered to trap heat,
I mean Victorian buildings were engineered to let in light, and have good ventilation. Hence why each room has a huge sash window, an airbrick and a fireplace.
> Buildings are engineered to trap heat, so the heat doesn't dissipate at night and every day the indoor temperature rises, and rises
This makes insulation sound like a bad thing. The more insulation you have the less the indoor temperature is affected by the outside temperature.
A common scenario is to have unshaded solid walls exposed to afternoon sun. Without insulation the inside of the house can be high all through the night. A good effect of insulation in summer is to prevent that effect. Important to note that it would be standard to allow cooling airflow in the morning.
> The more insulation you have the less the indoor temperature is affected by the outside temperature.
Insulation isn't magic, over many days of hot weather eventually the building will reach equilibrium with the average outside temperature. This means it will be cooler indoors than outdoors during the day, and hotter indoors than outdoors at night.
However, the nights are specifically when you want a residential building to be cooler, assuming the inhabitants are not at home during the day. So the insulation actually makes the building hotter from the perspective of the inhabitants.
Very few places "need" air conditioning but it doesn't take very days where it's 80+ outside and hotter inside to convince me that the per-day cost of AC is worth it. And that level of heat is nothing new.
> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning
Nobody "needs" air conditioning, but even a modest window unit provides a huge improvement in quality of life whenever it's 80+ outside.
80 plus in UK would be a bit of a stinky situation
> Nobody "needs" air conditioning
It can be considered a medical necessity for people with certain conditions like anhidrosis, asthma, COPD, kidneys disease, or cardiovascular issues. It's also a huge medical benefit for people with terrible allergies who wouldn't be able to open a window even when that'd normally help cool the house.
> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.
We are? It’s becoming more common and we had a few bad summers and earlier this year too. The heat wave a few years back killed my dad.
Given there’s a push to swap heating systems for more efficient ones, air con units are being looked at a lot more.
> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it?
We had 6 heat waves this summer. Parents were booking hotels just to keep their kids cool
We also had heatwaves in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018. 2024 wasn't bad but was still the 4th hottest year on record.
You can absolutely bet the better-off middle classes are installing aircon. I know many. If more people could afford it they would get it
It's the humidity too not just the heat. And how after 3 or 4 days of high temps, our houses just do not cool down at night because they act like radiators. Humid 25c+ nights suck for us
See @dang there's still really funny comments on HN, this is the good stuff.
4 days this year I figured “ac would be nice
I’m thinking about it, but there’s a lot of other things I could spend the capital on.
> ”It's not a good look that the UK seemingly isn't installing air conditioning, decarbonizing heating, or adopting electric vehicles.”
The UK is definitely doing all three of these things. Though arguably not fast enough, for some of them.
People overestimate the energy usage of EVs. Average usage 2-3000 kWh/year, but there's about 1 car per 2 people in the UK, so EVs would not reverse the trend even at 100% adoption, and they're currently at about 20-25% of new cars sold and 5% of miles driven in the UK (in comparison, to say, the US, where it's 5%/1%).
Number of EVs on the road is growing
BEV is 28% of new car sales HEV is 13%
https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/
I can't speak for the UK, but A big thing is that in the last 20-25ish years at least in a US home the big ones for me as far as efficiency improvements are
- CRTs got replaced by LCDs, and LCDs even 25 years ago were maybe around half the wattage
- CFLs and then LED Light bulbs replacing older filament bulbs.
- The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.
With the smaller thought of:
- Set-top appliances like rice cookers and air-fryers that tend to be better for smaller everyday cooking than a full-on oven or stovetop.
And it's fun to think about, e.x. I remember when I had to move back in 15-ish years ago my parents (very politely!) complained about the power bill increase until I went ahead and did the one-time cost of switching all the bulbs I could to LED. That change alone managed to cover the PC, monitors, and TV I had at the time.
Realistically, your average citizen is using less power than they were even 40 years ago, even with all the additional technology they have.
In terms of computing efficiency the big gain is that people use their smartphones drastically more than they do a personal computer at home, on average. And smartphones are hyper efficient compared to personal computers or laptops. An average use laptop will use ~30-60 times more energy than a once-daily charged smartphone across a year.
That also goes for people watching things on their smartphones instead of a 65" television.
Yeah, I forgot about the smartphone shift in that comment.
Even people who have laptops, the shift to smartphones and tablets for much (maybe most? IDK I'm still a laptop person at minimum when I write this so it's hard to say) of their computing/communication is another order of magnitude change for sure.
As another side note/anecdata, I still remember the amazement where the aftermath of a nasty (mostly wind) storm in 2017 caused major outages in my region. I had just moved into an apartment and due to the lagging maintenance around makeready/treetrim it took the better part of a week to get power back. Thankfully however, I had a fully charged, fancy-ish APS Backup unit [0] that was able to keep my Surface Pro 3 and 4G Hotspot charged enough to at least not feel totally in the dark. It was crazy to see how even with both charging the 'time remaining' indicator said I could have used both way more than I even needed to.
[0] - Some variant of an APS 1500VA
It's absolutely amazing that I can light my entire house for the same power draw as like one 100W lightbulb.
But the bulbs cost 10x what incandescents did, and in practice don't last much longer. That normally isn't included in the calculations.
In the 90s I’d change bulbs all the time - about once a month. I don’t remember the last time I changed a bulb. I don’t think my teenager has ever had the opportunity to.
I have a bunch of third generation Philips Hue bulbs, from around 2016. They weren't cheap. But I've had them all this time, and I brought them along when I moved house.
Haven't burnt out a single bulb yet.
I understand that this has caused some challenges for the Philips Hue division. They had extremely satisfied customers but not many repeat buys.
Here's a 100W-equivalent bulb: https://www.ikea.com/ie/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e27-1521-lume...
It costs 6 euro. I'm _fairly_ sure that incandescent 100Ws didn't cost six cents. I bought a few of these (actually a cheaper non-dimmable model which is no longer on Ikea's confusing website, from a cursory search) in 2016, when I moved. They're still working fine.
Whereas incandescents failed _all the time_.
A tenth of 6 euros is 60 cents, not 6 :)
I used to buy incandescent bulbs 4 for a dollar shortly before they were banned.
Throughout the house, I need to replace a regular screw-in LED bulb probably every other month or so. I don't know what brand they are, they are light bulbs I picked off the shelf at Target or Walmart. Life is too short to worry about light bulb brands. Until now.
Depending on the quality you can get a LED bulb ranging from 1 euro to 5 for the best one. The incandescent bulbs did not cost much lower, and adjusted for inflation, did cost almost the same, but you had to replace them much more often.
Industry got oursourced to China....
> - The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.
The total electricity consumption for computers is much higher then in the past. You just don't see it, because the consumption moved to data centers.
To me computers doesn't really have an effect on the data (for how much a computer costs, and how little time in the past it was used, considering the internet was dial-up and was the real cost of using it that made sure you weren't always online).
To me the difference is that we moved to more efficient ways to generate heat, more specifically from electric resistive heating to heat pumps. Both in home heating but also appliances (e.g. cloth driers).
And of course there is climate change, not only we generate heat more efficiently (an heat pump uses at least 1/3 to the power to generate the same amount of heat) but also the climate is less cold, thus less heat required. That is the big difference, not bulbs or computers.
Of course for nations that are more hot in the summer (e.g. my, Italy) the reverse applies, that is more power used because of air conditioning, that 30 years ago nobody had and now it's required since last summer was 25/38C outside for 2 months straight.
Even in Italy, though, peak generation was in 2008.
Germany saw a massive drop too. The only big European country that keeps growing their electricity production is France.
> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
If I search for "retail electricity price trends uk" I'm starting to see reports coming out of the UK like "UK electricity prices are now among the highest in the developed world." and "Household electricity prices have risen by almost 150% since 2010, and business electricity prices by nearly 175%" [0]. And now we see things like they've dropped below their 1970s per capita consumption.
That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much. It doesn't sound like an efficiency gain. Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff. It looks like they don't have enough energy and people are getting squeezed. I'd expect to see political instability in such an environment but the last time I checked only one of the major parties seemed to be in the process of collapsing (down from 2 in April) so they are doing better than expected on that front; I would expect riots in the streets with these sort of trends.
[0] https://ifs.org.uk/publications/electricity-prices
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
> Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff.
Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
Most appliances don't see much increased use from efficiency. And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency; other factors drive use changes there.
Somehow you’ve missed the drastic intensification of street, parking and building lighting at night not to mention headlights. People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.
Street lighting already had very efficient bulbs so I think that's caused by other factors. And headlights seem like other factors too. Building lighting I'm not sure but that's more like a doubling.
It's tough to say the exact multiplier but I've walked around at night a lot for years, and there has been a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights, as well as a move away from motion sensors toward permanently on.
It's the same here in Germany, and I very much dislike this development. We used to get so much beautiful fireflies in the summer here. Now they're mostly gone, and that's probably only the most visible damage.
Very appropriate nickname!
The disappearance of fireflies is not related to lighting. That’s a global phenomena involving the mass collapse of insect populations.
True, but besides insecticides and habitat destruction it is possible that the strong nocturnal lighting, which disorients insects, has contributed to this. Wherever insects are abundant, a strong white lamp at night will accumulate quickly dead insects around it.
Where I live, in Europe, when I was a child there was a great abundance of insects of many different kinds. If I did a walk around my home I could see insects from perhaps at least 10 different orders.
Nowadays, the only insects that are still abundant are the true bugs (Hemiptera) why all others have mostly disappeared (a few, like mosquitoes, may still be seen from time to time). I do not know the reason, but I assume that the true bugs might be more resistant to insecticides.
And locally a lot of harm is done through leaf removal. Fireflies lay their eggs in leaf litter, if that gets raked up & removed those firefly eggs don't survive.
> a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights
I think the number of lights is about the same at least where I live in the UK, the big change is the light is now bright white not the yellow of the older sodium vapour lights.
I kinda miss that but mostly because it wasn't as bright and is what I grew up with, you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.
> you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.
IN fact white light is MUCH MUCH less effective. Red light doesn't affect your night vision, and yellow isn't much behind. White light means you can see very well where the light it, but you can't see beyond that radius and so more light is needed. I don't need to see colors at night (where white it good), I just need to see the dangers in time to avoid them, and so white is much worse for the goal.
Just to make it worse, it takes nearly an hour for your eyes to fully adjust to dark after leaving white light. So if the lights go off or you have to leave the place where they are shining you can't see as well.
White light is only good when you have enough of it that everything you want to see for the next hour is fully illuminated. If there is any exception to that, then you shouldn't have white lite.
> drastic intensification of street, parking and building lighting
We got an increase in lighting whether we like it or not but for lower overall consumption.
> not to mention headlights
40 years ago the highest powered headlight halogen bulbs consumed 80-100W per bulb. so you were looking at 150-200W for low/high beams. A pair of modern laser headlights now gives you 5 times more light for a fifth of the electricity. The limit is safety in traffic. A misadjusted 200W laser headlight will leave you short of 2 retinas.
> People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.
They consume so little that even wasting is still cheaper lower consumption than in the days of incandescent lights.
roenxi: ...people using more electricity...
Dylan16807: Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
We're saying the same thing, but my spider senses are detecting we aren't on the same wavelength. Maybe if I point at the key words, that will help?
And while I'm thinking about it, let me recommend those heating bathroom lights. They are divine.
> That looks like rationing.
You concluded rationing before having evidence of real demand in the sense of need or even desire from the people. The less data you have, the more potential answers fit in the gaps.
Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it? Or do they already get more but with less electricity? I get twice the light I had 20+ years ago with a third of the electricity consumption. I get way more computing power with less electricity too. Same with my TV, my fridge, etc. Excluding the switch from gas powered kitchen appliances which drove my electricity consumption up, everything else went down in consumption while giving me more.
Do I mathematically want or need more? Am limited by the price of electricity, or by the price of the bigger/better product? Maybe I'd want a walk in fridge or a 3m tall TV but the electricity isn't the limiting factor. I need an extra room and taller ceilings first. Do I want more light? No. Do I need any of the things I mentioned? Also no.
The increase in price could equally be the providers extracting the maximum value from the consumers. Current consumption could be exactly as much as the consumers want or need to consume, and the providers sell for as high as they can before that demand drops. We need more data to answer this and we don't have it now. So your answer is your bias put in words, not the certainty you want to make it sound like.
The biggest consumers which dwarf the stove are industrial ones. And there the drop is real. Manufacturing moved abroad and electricity production moved with it. This is what the numbers of the article shows and it's hard for consumer demand to compensate, except maybe with mass EV adoption.
What is obsession with the light, that's like lowest consumer of electricity, also telly doesn't use much unless it's a really big one. Heating, cooking and appliances use the most, and people are definitely careful when using those, especially heating during the winter. Seems like you don't live in the UK.
> What is obsession with the light
Because the comment triggering this branch suggested improvements in efficiency must imply wanting to consume more. Light is one of those things, where the rule doesn't automatically apply. It's not the only thing I mentioned, you just chose to skip the others to make your job of arguing easier.
> Heating, cooking and appliances use the most
Even there you get more for less. Induction stoves are way more efficient than the old heating elements but do you want to spend more time in front of the stove because the electricity is cheaper? Some times, but not that common. Heat pumps are way more efficient than a boiler but it doesn't guarantee that you want hotter shower water or warmer room. But more importantly, most heating isn't electric. Natural gas, oil, or wood were always far more common. In the UK today almost 75% of heating is gas. Electricity is less than 10% [0] so it contributes little to the topic of the article.
Now let's get to the confounding factors which go down the pit of ignorance. Natural gas was always subsidized almost everywhere in the world whether you know it or not. District heating is more of the same. Where I live there are still "heating electricity" plans so people get a better price if they happen to use electrical heating because the provider knows that small number of people will suffer compared to others.
Another confounding factor, the push for extreme efficiency. Heat pumps have some big limitations that nobody wants but choose to live with for the sake of efficiency and self sufficiency. Because people also install solar panels on their roof and power their appliances without anyone ever reporting how much more heating or cooking was provided with 0 load on the grid.
In reality the biggest consumers which dwarf cooking appliances are industrial ones. And there the drop is real. Manufacturing moved abroad and electricity production moved with it. Maybe mass EV adoption can push the demand/production line back up.
> Seems like you don't live in the UK.
You are correct, I do not. This shouldn't prevent me from having an informed opinion though. Much like how I can write to you in English without living there.
[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
Writing in English is one thing but the cultural divide between the US and the UK is enormous, so I think all the context counts for quite a lot.
I see things stated (and assumed as a norm) by people in this thread that are just miles off.
If you're working off data and not assumptions though, fair enough.
> What is obsession with the light, that's like lowest consumer of electricity
It used to not be!
> What is obsession with the light
It is historic, electric lighting was the first major application for electricity in households.
" Electric lighting is highly desirable. The light is much brighter than oil or gas lamps, and there is no soot. Although early electricity was very expensive compared to the 21st century, it was far cheaper and more convenient than oil or gas lighting. Electric lighting was so much safer than oil or gas that some companies were able to pay for the electricity with the insurance savings. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrification#Benefits_of_el...
> Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it?
Well, yes? That seems somewhat uncontroversial? There are a lot of people out there who need more electricity and can't afford it. Electricity is one of the most fungible forms of energy, with infinite electricity we could all live like kings. It'd be very comfortable. The limit on use is the supply-demand balance represented by prices and if price were low enough people would up their living standards.
That is also the explanation for a lot of the issues your post goes to. If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead. And the way the math shakes out is it'd normally be economically optimum to increase their access to a good standard of living by giving them more energy than you gave up. These effects are over the entire economy.
And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd. If I were relying on HN comment threads I'd believe households in the UK were composed of nothing but light-bulbs and consumed nothing but the same given how much of a focus they are of the energy policy.
I personally use as much electricity as I want without care for price. It going cheaper wont make me spend more.
Yeah, if electricity dropped in price by 50% I don't think my usage would change in any significant way. There's no way in hell I'd use over twice as much and trigger Jevon's paradox.
Thinking about what happens when prices approach zero makes it hard to make realistic predictions. Yeah infinite power would change everything, but for realistic price shifts there are very different price elasticities for different use cases.
And one person changing their power use doesn't do much to the price, and a large group gradually changing their power use doesn't do much to the price either. So the idea of "If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead." is misguided. The person who's struggling is going to see basically the same price either way. If we want to help them, conserving power won't do the trick outside of specific supply emergencies, we need other measures.
Also roenxi I mentioned things other than lights, but lights happen to be a super clear example of Jevon's paradox not happening over a very significant amount of power usage so of course they'll get brought up.
Cheap electricity would change your usage in indirect way:
Cost of electricity is a significant part in aluminum production. Cheap electricity, cheap aluminum, more cars made from aluminum instead of currently cheap steel.
Cheap reliable electricity would enable cheap hydrogen production, which could replace many uses of fossil fuels. Cheap hydrogen, cheap ammonia production, cheaper nitrogen fertilizers.
Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand. You just focused on arguing weaker interpretation of what I said, discussing infinities, and obsessing about why people bring up lights.
> And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd
I think you want to distract from not making your point. But easy, light used to consume a lot. By some statistics [0] just a few decades ago it was ~10TWh, close to 15% of household consumption, which in turn was higher than industrial consumption (1.1:1). So lights consumed ~8% of UK electricity. Is 15% in a household or 8% for the country so insignificant that mentioning it is ridiculous?
Personal anecdata, I can use more energy but I realistically (not in "infinite energy" world) want and need exactly as much as I use.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/81562463/Energy_consumption_in_UK_h...
> Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand.
Supply/demand and prices are rationing. Prices represent the limit on how much of a resource someone can use before there is reason to believe they should stop. It's happens to be best form of rationing we have, the other methods tend to lead to disincentives to improve the situation (consider, for example, how the market rations out limited supplies of RAM right now - prices go up and people who pay get the RAM and all the money going to RAM producers gives them resources and incentive to build new capacity to produce more RAM). There isn't a limit on demand for electricity other than the price, it does literally everything. At the extreme case, if it were somehow cheap enough, we'd be able to use it to fabricate new matter. But every step of the way there are population-level opportunities to use more energy to get more comfortable if there is enough of it.
Yes absolutely more electricity is kind of the cornerstone of industrial production and comfortable living. If you make it cheaper you have more goodness
There are diminishing returns on more. My life wouldn't be better if I was using more electric for the things I already do. Sure I could leave my lights on all day, but by turning the lights off I save more than enough money which I can use for something else as to be worth the effort to flipping the switch when I leave the room.
All the things I see that would allow me to use more electric are not worth it - I'd rather spend my money on something else. My life would be better for an electric animated sculpture in my front year - but not by nearly enough that it would be worth building and so I don't have it.
I don't think the OP means it would be great because we can leave our heating on all day and just wear bathing costumes in the house.
It's more what it enables in terms of industrial production, and transportation and the knock-on effects from that.
Again though, diminishing returns. My life would be better if Bolivia puts in better transit to in their mountain villages - but not by much since I currently believe I will never go there and so it is a just in case. Even for the people who live in those places the population may be so small as to not be worth the investment even if energy was free.
You said: "Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff."
And that doesn't happen at all with light bulbs. The cheapness caused a mild increase in lighting, but people are using way less electricity on lights now.
I mean, sure. They might use more electricity for lighting or less. How much electricity gets used for lighting isn't really the point here. More electricity gets used.
Seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox has a pretty good explanation. This isn't a new effect, it's been an established consideration related to energy efficiency since the 1850s.
If light bulbs get more efficient, and someone uses more electricity on something else, that's not Jevon's paradox, that's a coincidence because there's a million things using electricity and some go up and some go down. There's no significant causal relationship between the two. (Mostly little fluctuations in electric prices that even out over the years as supply is built to match demand.)
Jevon's paradox is when a specific use case gets more efficient, so you do more of that use case, so much so that the extra use overwhelms the efficiency. It happens in many situations but definitely not all. You have a curve between how much you use and how much value you get, and the steepness of that curve decides Jevon's. For lighting in the past few decades, there's no Jevon's. The changes in light bulbs have caused a big reduction in electricity use. If we were stuck on incandescents we'd be using a lot more electricity total.
And then the article discusses that even if Jevons paradox doesn't hold, we'd reasonably expect more efficient energy use to lead to more energy consumption. Energy is an absolutely classic field where it improvements in efficiency isn't a likely cause for dropping use. There isn't any reason to use less energy; if there are efficiency improvements then all else equal it makes the most sense to produce the same amount of energy and trade the excess into higher real living standards. Economies are good at sniffing that equilibrium out.
The UK doesn't look like it is experiencing an efficiency utopia; it looks like it has a relatively poor population among the developed countries (per capita) and they're suffering from an advanced energy shortage. The costs appear to be going crazy, they're deindustrialising. That isn't efficiency. It looks like they ran out of coal and are suffering from an energy squeeze.
Indeed. Jevons's paradox does not apply to everything.
On the other hand more stoves are electric now rather than gas, new builds frequently have air source heating where they would've had gas or oil boilers, more cars are electric; all of which are huge percentages of a household's total energy consumption compared to something like lighting.
Not necessarily. In the bad old days folks would draw a continuous kW or more in the evenings just for lighting. 8kWh for an evening of lighting, or 1kWh for dinner, and 1kWh for lighting.
As for gas or oil boilers - oil is uncommon except in rural areas - gas is far more common but not as ubiquitous in the past as you’d think - many folks heated their homes with resistive electric radiators or IR heaters - so a heat pump is a huge efficiency win.
But that's a very modern perspective:
1950: Lighting was 30% of total electrical demand [1] 1993-1997: 112 TWh, 9% of demand [2] 2020: 81 TWh, 6% of demand [3]
Couldn't find total used in 1950 but the point remains: Lighting used to be a major source of consumption and now it's pretty minor, and at least the trends in the last 30 years have been driven by efficiency gains, particularly following the energy crisis in the 70s.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222531686_Exergy_po...
[2] https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl-40...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=99&t=3
> And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency;
I mean not really.
Old aircon was off/on which mean that at temperatures near the target efficiency drops. (as in turning on for a few minutes, it takes a while to move the settle heat around)
Moving from fixed speed ac motors to "inverter driven" (brushless motors) means that AC can be run at a speed other than 100% or 0%. Yes, CoP hasn't increased 6x, but newer aircons have higher CoP over a wider range of temperatures.
moving from Plasma TVs to LED/oled is about a 2-3x improvement in efficiency.
Laptops are anywhere between 2 and 10x less power than desktop (caveats apply)
then double glazing has a large effect on heat rejection/storage. Non-coated glass lets in something like 1kw/m2 of heat, coated glass can reject anywhere up to 70% of that.
> Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
But they do just leave their lights on more[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
They're not leaving them on 6x as much.
People absolutely do use much more light than they used to.
Actually even 8x as efficient.
An old 100 W incandescent bulb produced about 1500 lumens, and now a LED bulb of 12 or 13 W can produce slightly more than that.
In the now distant past, I used only 100 W incandescent bulbs, all of which had been replaced more than a decade ago with 13 W LED bulbs, so I have benefited from this 8x reduction in energy consumption.
The other significant reduction in electrical energy consumption happened when I replaced a many-decades-old refrigerator with a modern high-efficiency refrigerator.
Compared with a half century ago when I was a child, now I consume additional electrical energy with some computers, one or two of which are almost always on, and with a microwave oven used for cooking, but the additional energy consumption is normally less than what is saved by modern lighting and refrigeration technologies.
What I don't get though is that with increased household efficiency and presumably an increase in population (i.e, density which usually lowers cost), and the benefits of efficiency improvements to generation and distribution... why is household energy spending is UP, even accounting for inflation?
My bet would be in part more A/C units.
Households use about 20% less electricity today than in 1985; per person kwh is also down. But household expenditure is up by 20% in real terms and cost per kwh is up by 50%
40 years of technological progress and prices went up :(
In 1970 the UK domestic electricity grid and generating plants had been state owned since 1948, and was basically run by civil servants. This lasted until 1990-91 when it was all privatised by the Thatcher and Major governments (both Conservative).
Now in 2026 the main generators are EDF (French state owned), RWE (German), and Scottish Power (Spanish owned). These companies tend not to publish executive pay, but back in 2012 the CEO of EDF in the UK was being paid £1.2 million a year.
I would submit that all this has some bearing on why the prices have gone up.
In the US, it's due to the cost of the grid, the part of the utility bill that PUCs allow utilities to charge a fixed rate of profit. So if utilities take 20% on that grid "maintenance" project, the utility drives up the price as high as possible.
This is why distributed solar is actually cheaper than utility scale solar all-in: you need less of that very very expensive grid, even if you pay 3x on the initial install costs.
>Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
I want more than 6x as much light as I had in the incandescent bulb era. Indoor lighting is usually very dim compared to outdoor lighting, and that makes it harder to see things. As I get older and my eyes degrade I expect I'll want even more light. People running offices understand this and provide more lighting than typical for homes. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux
Lightbulb in your home is 100% in your control. I prefer strong light, I have strong light and I dont need it stronger.
Even air conditioners have improved as we've moved away from having multiple leaky window air conditioners to mini-splits and central (though I would still think that's an increase in overall energy use).
we never had window AC in the UK, if we did it was only a handful of installations.
> Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
Yes, that means we can use the energy we would have used on light for other things.
Just aluminum smelting all moving to China probably reduced UK energy consumption by a few percent.
which is why i think looking at raw electricity usage doesnt make much sense in a globalized world.
Consumption of final products, and exports are what make more sense to look at to see if lives are better today than the 1970's, which the article implies it isn't.
It makes sense to look at electricity usage. It tells the full story of the UK’s deindustrialisation policy starting under Thatcher and continuing under all governments, and recently under Theresa May’s net zero policies (also supported by all governments). There’s no reason aluminium smelting can’t come back to the UK with a proper energy policy of expanded nuclear power, more fracking, more renewables etc
Still one aluminium smelter in Scotland:
https://alvancebritishaluminium.com/
Which has it's own hydroelectric scheme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochaber_hydroelectric_scheme
Aluminum smelters have so high electric consumption that you usually build then near the cheapest reliable sources of electricity.
Cost of electricity is a very significant part of production costs of aluminum, around 30% on average.
https://www.aluminium.fr/en/energie
This and the loss of steel smelters in the 1980s is the real answer here.
Steel smelters used coking coal not electricity
There are still electric arc furnaces in the UK and more are being built
Rabbit hole on this subject: https://aluminiumtoday.com/features/recognising-uk-aluminium...
We import very little Al from China; it turns out mostly to come from the UAE, which will have absolutely terrible CO2 emissions, as well as greener countries like Iceland and Norway.
It looks like we need to invest in local recycling (which, yes, needs cheap energy, but not as much as primary Al) in order to make more of a circular economy rather than just exporting vast volumes of scrap.
I've been shown a fair few riots in the streets in the UK recently, just not regarding the price of electricity.
Racism and immigration are the main topics which have recently generated violent protests.
Climate change and oil use have generated predominantly non-violent protests.
Palestinian rights have generated direct action protests but not riots.
Energy hasn't really been on the radar (except in the context of climate-change protests).
I would make the hypothesis that racism outbursts are tied to worsening life conditions.
I would make the hypothesis that racism outbursts are driven by Farage, Tommy Ten-Names, Putin and the right wing engagement mill that is Twitter.
Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization. And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.
It's just an immense right wing noise machine which makes it impossible to actually focus on finding solutions. We're back to people who want to improve electricity per capita by decapitating people.
People hate electricity prices, but they hate electricity infrastructure as well. They hate pylons, they hate renewables, they hate nuclear. People hate pollution and hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity). Every solution will encounter angry blockers, often angry about things that aren't even real (anti-5G lunatics). And they want to blame everything on foreigners. Absolutely childish behavior of our """elite""", the dead hand of which sits on our media and most of our parties.
I think everything that needs to be said in this thread probably already has been by someone. Re-litigating the same issues.
> hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity)
Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.
And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.
Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.
Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.
Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!
This is, of course, not what happened. It's not even all that unpopular. Only about half of Londoners even have a car in the first place.
When I say radicalized, I mean this guy: https://www.cps.gov.uk/national-news/news/updated-sentence-m...
There's also this:
The camera was already useless. Detonating an IED served no purposeful protest, and endangered property and lives.
There's also a huge racial undertone to the whole London anti-ULEZ 'debate' as Sadiq Khan is a muslim
Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Despite anti-ULEZ folk claiming it's hugely unpopular Kahn convincing won the next mayoral election including some boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ zone expansion
> huge
I think you overstate this. While there are wingnuts on Twitter who hate Khan for who he is, massively more people hate him - any politician, not just him - for dipping into their pocket and taking their money. "For the greater good".
Even the most beloved politican on the planet will become the most hated as soon as the propose increasing taxes, or increasing household costs. Which is why they're always looking for the sneakiest way to do it.
> Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Alternatively, the central authority with all the money (Johnson's government) tells the devolved authority (Mayor of London) it doesn't like handing out free money, so what if our lockdown has decimated your cashbox income... so in exchange for money now to keep the lights on during this pandemic, I demand you make more of your own money in future, by fining people and by driving up public transport usage in your area. Also, I know how unpopular it is, which is why I delayed it when I was Mayor of London, so good luck at the polls ha ha!
> some
"some" indeed.
> “some” indeed
Well he flipped one of them from Conservative and didn’t lose any of the ones that had previously voted for him and his vote was up overall
What kind of car/van was it? Since you said car/van and not car or van, I assume there's more than one?
They're referring to LEZ (Low Emission Zone) legislation where a fee is charged for vehicles which exceed a defined emission threshold.
In general, diesel vehicles are more likely to exceed the emission threshold.
Diesel cars/vans. In 2001, the government cut yearly road tax to £20 for cars/vans emitting less than 110g/km of CO2. Many car/van diesel engines can meet this but few petrol engines can. The road tax normally costs £180-£300, so a £160+ saving every year.
So a lot of people moved to diesel cars/vans from 2001 onward.
Then in 2019, the Ultra Low Emission Zone was set around central London, which issued daily fines to:
- petrol cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 4 standards (most vehicles pre-2006)
- diesel cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 6 standards (most vehicles pre-2015)
This didn't bother that many people, because central London already has a daily congestion charge, so anyone taking a vehicle in there already had business to justify it. Most people get around central London by train/tube/bus/taxi, it's the best served city in the UK for public transport. There was also a scrappage scheme offering up to £9500 for replacing the vehicle.
What bothered a LOT of people, though, is the widening of the ULEZ area, first to the inner London orbital in 2021 and then to the whole of Greater London (9 million people) in 2023, regardless of whether they went to central London or not. The outer boroughs, aren't as well served by public transport as central London is, and car/van ownership and use is much higher than central London. And of course, the scrappage scheme was cut down to a maximum of £2000, which is not a lot.
You can perhaps see why there was so much opprobrium.
There wasn't 'much opprobrium', there were a bunch of radicalised mainly white men opposing it who made a lot of noise backed by right wing newspapers who want to criticise Kahn for Tory government policy
Kahn won the next election including outer boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ expansion
https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/04/map-reveals-london-mayor-elec...
Reduced fuel duty for diesel came in in 2001 (25yrs ago) and was removed following the scandal of manufacturers cheating the emissions tests in 2015 (11 yrs ago)
We've known diesel emissions are bad for health for a long time and ULEZ schemes improve people's health, particularly children https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1l1r1zne1ro
But some selfish people still think it's their right to drive highly polluting vehicles and let everyone else bear the cost
ULEZ / LEZ zones are a good thing
Social media is a catalyst that only works because material conditions are bad. If everyone is happy, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they just laugh it off. If everyone is angry, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they burn down a mosque.
It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.
Considering the number of people involved in the hotel arson attacks who have "previous", including domestic violence convictions, I think you can say that they themselves are unhappy, but that's not quite the same thing.
> fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves
I think we can agree on this. It's not that the UK is in any way a poor country in total, but it is an unequal one. And open to the negative effects of inequality from the outside - see the involvement of UAE oligarchs in Man City fraud, for example.
Meh, economic excuse is jist that - excuse so that the perpetrators sound better.
> Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization.
It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.
Very true.
The establishment view is that riots and racism are right wing agitators and foreign power influenced. The people look to rival immigrants and conspiracies, united by anxiety and fear.
They are both looking for scapegoats. This has unfortunately lead to so many atrocities in history.
I question to what degree people are riled up over economic difficulty being scapegoated onto immigrants like the comment chains below seem to claim.
This explanation seems to ignore much more obvious motivations. Most of the recent violent protests were triggered by concerns about immigrants committing violent crime and sexual offenses or harassment, often following concrete incidents.
Public safety seems like the clear primary motivation here.
One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.
However, I think that glossing over the primary concern to claim that the outrage is essentially engineered or purely driven by economic factors and living standard, will not convince the public. At least that's my opinion.
Because some of the worsening life conditions are caused by migration. On other fronts it may provide a benefit but people need to get their head out of their ass if they don't think some qualms are legitimate.
To what degree? I'm sure migration is statistically responsible for some percentage of worsening life conditions, but I doubt it's the biggest cause for anything specific getting worse. The far bigger cause is the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent extraction by the powerful.
If migration is responsible for 5% of an issue, and other causes are responsible for 95%, it's far too easy to make the population imagine the numbers are swapped.
Migrants are always an issue when the pie shrinks. You bring them in when the pie is growing but during contraction it goes the other way.
Since migrants aren't a major cause of the shrinking pie, this doesn't really help. It can actually hurt, since the pie can start shrinking faster.
20% of the whole population are immigrants. In the big cities, where problems are worst, it is far higher than that.
I can't respond to your point about problems in big cities, since you don't specify what they are, but rural areas have a whole host of problems that cities don't face, so I'm gonna need more than a vague assertion.
Though it still won't help your argument, because 1) correlation != causation, and 2) there are literally thousands of comparable correlations, so why is it immigrants, and not any of the others?
Except that most evidence points against that. The people who don't live next to immigrants are generally much more angry then those that do. And the general places where people are angry about living conditions are former industrial economic heartland that have de-industrialized for reasons that have literally zero to do immigration.
Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.
>> The people who don't live next to immigrants are generally much more angry then those that do.
Lol. Ask people in Crowborough and Piddington if that's true.
Using individual example instead of overall statistics is an indication that you are not actually seriously engaging with the topic.
Individual examples are results of specific circumstances and not indication of a universal trend.
They very much are.
There are literally millions of examples against your position.
Contrary to that hypothesis racists are just as racist when the going's good.
True. But they aren't as rioty.
Riled up about all the wrong things. How convenient !
And we ration busy trains with pricing. We have some of the most expensive trains in the world (and an inability to build any new tracks at a sensible price)
Water, too, because our water infrastructure is dire. I imagine we have some of the most expensive water in the world too
I was once taking a trip from Canterbury to Glasgow. The train ride to Stansted airport cost more than twice the flight to Glasgow. Also, it's crazy just how cheap the flights are in Europe. How do the airline companies make any money?
Yeah the airport trains can be pricey!
> How do the airline companies make any money?
Addons and cargo I believe (and cutting every single cost you can imagine, then more).
A lot of people have the perception nobody buys addons but the airlines make a tonne of money from them
People can indeed change their consumption patterns. You don’t hear about it with electricity as often, but with natural gas spike after the Ukraine war, it was all over the news that many couldn’t afford heating and were leaving their houses cold in the winter. But it’s not just poor people.
Low margin industries probably contribute a lot and are more likely to change electricity usage patterns (by moving to a different country or being outcompeted).
A lot of it could probably be brought back to consumption patterns or present day issues with war and outsourcing.. but.. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ is worth a (re-)read since I gather this is more of a more macro-structural outcome as opposed to a sudden thing.
It's the shift from the economy serving everyone to the economy serving rich people.
I think you miss the point that power is a global market. In the UK we pay international prices because otherwise our state/corporations/establishment would sell it overseas. Yes, electricity is linked to natural gas, just because they can.
The UK population is generally docile, we don't really riot even when things are bad (unlike the French who barely need an excuse).
Our elites are pretty bad at running the country but actually quite crafty when it comes to managing dissent and channeling it into things that don't threaten their hold on power.
So the regime can get away with a lot, there is no organised violent resistance
There at the end of your post, your agenda peeps out.
> the regime
The 'regime'. Also known as the democratically elected government.
There is a lot of anger in the UK because their (our) environment and life conditions are measurably worse than in the past (even 10 years ago). This anger is masterfully directed (by political orgs but not the actual government) against immigrants, drug addicts, and other groups whose ousting is positioned as an "easy fix" to these problems. So there's not much meaningful action taken against the actual perpetrators.
The UK population and total GDP has gone up, whereas GDP per person has gone down or stayed flat.
The Boris Wave has been the biggest adverse event to the UK since OPEC Oil crisis.
There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.
Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.
>> There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.
It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up. Good luck proving your Brexit counterfactual.
>>Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.
When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true. Also, given that you can get a "skilled worker" visa for working in a kebab shop or a corner store [1], "skilled" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence [1].
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjdg4nvz5mro
Immigration is one of the primary factors in the decrease of life quality in the UK. The only mistake here is that being angry with the immigrants isn't going to change immigration policy.
So we're talking "government rationing" vs "economic rationing". Are they the standard terms used?
>That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much.
With the massive extra "pro" of plausible deniability so all those who's interests are served by it can lie up down and sideways about how it's a good thing.
A lot of things are like this. It's really hard to overstate the cost of laying unpopular things bare.
The social media content about the UK in America must be "wild". You guys are obsessed.
Actually, I always found it so weird how often America is talked about on not only British social media, but on your state propaganda channels such as BBC and Channel 4 as well, who are taxpayer funded.
Almost every British person I've ever known has kept up with and has an opinion on American politics, but when I try to talk to Americans about British politics, they don't even know the names of the parties.
Which is to say, the UK is far more obsessed with America then America is with the UK. This has been true since WW2, where Britain was 'obsessed' with getting America to come save them from losing the war.
To be fair a lot of parties in the UK have appeared or changed names since around Brexit. I think "labour and tories" might have been simpler for American audiences than Reform vs Restore vs Rehab or whoever is up now
> That looks like rationing.
What a way to characterize supply and demand variation.
It is in large part because the UK made infrastructure decisions that essentially couple their electricity prices to the price of natural gas.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of...
https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/65515/decoupling-...
It is very strange to see how many nations gave up energy independence and basically exchanged a temporarily lower price of energy coupled with deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation. Money seems politically easy to spend raising defense expenditures by a few more percent of GDP but energy independence through decentralized renewables would be a much higher defense value imho. And it would actually propel more economic activity.
>>deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation.
They are only deep geopolitical dependencies because our politicians are too stupid to actually let us drill for it in the North Sea or frack for it on the mainland.
The article claims that gas prices are set by international markets that are willing to bid up prices and the small added contribution from the North sea is not going to swing prices significantly. The US is going through a similar delusion that they produce enough domestically to protect is Diesel prices - they don't and the oil companies are not going to forgo international markets
>> The article claims that gas prices are set by international markets that are willing to bid up prices and the small added contribution from the North sea is not going to swing prices significantly.
Argue what you like, but it's hard to think that increasing the supply of a commodity won't make the prices go down. Will it be major? Probably not compared to the massive amount of tax on fuel, but I'd still take it.
> That looks like rationing.
You've drawn the wrong premise from the data you've looked at. There is no rationing.
UK electricity prices operate in a broken market where the price is fixed to the most expensive on-stream generator in that moment, so in the auction of wholesale prices that happens dozens of times a day, if a single gas generator is online, everyone is setting the price around gas generation even if most of the supply is much cheaper wind.
Last week the PM announced that this broken market should get fixed in the next parliamentary session, because he - and his party - know that reducing energy prices has material impact on how people feel about the economy.
You should also understand that demand has changed shape considerably in the last 50 years.
There's been a pretty devastating deindustrialisation in the UK since the 1970s - there's only one steel forge left operating, and that required nationalisation this year, for example. As the UK moved to a knowledge economy, we found that most of the workforce moved to needing nothing more than a laptop to add to GDP.
But the home has also changed shape: you can't buy an old fashioned light bulb any more, so dreary wet winters are illuminated exclusively by LED lighting at ~10% the power consumption used in the 1970s. Heatpumps have replaced storage heaters, and while electric cars are popular even they do not use as much energy as the factories and ship yards used to.
There is literally just less demand. And the pricing is pegged to gas, unfairly. If that market breaks, I doubt consumption would go up, but maybe new industrial opportunities would open up - if we end up with cheap, abundant energy as a result, we might attract more energy-intensive industry to the UK, but I don't think it's fair to define current state as "rationing"
Someone doesn't understand marginal pricing
Well, there's a difference between "This is just marginal pricing" and "This very specific market with marginal pricing is the only one possible"
I would like to think that National Government is considering choices which would still be marginal pricing but change other elements to better suit our present reality. Two examples:
1. Regionalize. Today the price for 1MWh of electricity in Portsmouth is exactly the same as for 1MWh of electricity in Dundee but if the UK is making so much electricity in the far North on a windy January night that's not the real price to deliver the electricity, getting it to Dundee would be far cheaper. Prices can reflect that, and if they do that new energy-hungry factory makes more sense in Dundee than in Portsmouth even if it would be slightly more convenient to build it in Portsmouth.
2. Retail pricing can have a significant social policy element distinct from "What the market says this costs". Technically an old lady living alone who uses 50kWh per month and a wealthy family with two EVs and a swimming pool chewing almost 10MWh per month are both "connected to the grid" but maybe the 40p per day "standing charge" to cover that connectivity could be 10p per day for that old lady and 80p for the wealthy family. Again, the market says that's wrong because the connection doesn't cost more money if you use it - but it's a social policy decision.
Edited to Add:
By the way I assume regional pricing is a reason sometimes the UK is both buying Electricity from France and selling Electricity to France, over different links. Presumably the prices are different and so we are effectively arbitraging their electricity.
Yep, line congestion is a pretty big problem - lots of wind generated in Scotland - industry down south have large demand so we end up curtailing wind and spinning up "peakers" to support regional demand. This is a bigger problem in Germany.
Regional pricing is something being looked into - comes with it's own problems - but more solve-able with modern data processing pipelines.
IMO stick a battery in every house, and you have a nation-wide buffer for smoothing out renewables is a good idea. Large battery bank projects are being rolled out which can help with this too.
In terms of social pricing - that would still need to be anchored to "something" - which currently is the price derived from the merit order.
There are also a lot of projects around improving transmission infrastructure. It's a very interesting time.
The UK doesn't have basically any "peakers" (Open Cycle Gas Turbines) and I'm surprised to hear they're a thing in Germany,
Combined Cycle costs more to build but is far more efficient. So OCGT is basically a bet that fuel is cheap forever, or at least for so long you've made your money. I know that bet doesn't work in the UK and I would not expect it to pay off in Germany either.
>>There's been a pretty devastating deindustrialisation in the UK since the 1970s - there's only one steel forge left operating, and that required nationalisation this year
Nationalised because high energy prices made it unsustainable commercially.
All of this, plus it seems like every other roof is plastered with solar panels.
As the price of a good goes up, demand goes down! Hardly a surprise. It doesn't mean the economy wouldn't use a lot more energy if it was affordable.
Increasing market prices aren't rationing. They should encourage more people and companies to consume less and produce more electricity. Of course if regulation is too complex that might not happen easily (I'm thinking of German solar power regulations right now).
We also have whistle blowers coming forward saying that the UK is struggling to manage the electricity supply:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/13/lawyers-to-...
Most of the increase in the UK has come since the Russian invasion of Ukraine spiked gas prices
"welcome improvements in efficiency"
ROTFL.
Yes, true, many economies like US, UK, Germany are becoming more "energy efficient". By outsourcing energy hungry industries and steps to China.
That's even more outraging IMO. How could demand fall for the closet thing to the literal transport of physical work.
"Electricity oh that's the thing the runs the telly and kettle"
There is something very concerning about this complacent attitude towards the stagnant QoL of citizens. Demand only reflects current prices and conditions, if we saw a 100x increase in usage (in the UK or America) since the 70s rather than a flatline conditions would be much better.
The outrage is real, because production is less than half the story.
In the past 10 years.
The supply margin (declared capacity - demand) has reduced by half.
Electricity prices have increased 250%(edit: from 0.11 to 0.25).
And the 9-fold relative increase in imports (1% to 9%) definitely contributes to that increase.
Before you say it's all inflation, I believe inflation is not that high over the same period, and consider the role that electricity price hikes have played on inflation.
0.11 to 0.25 is not even a 150% increase
Yeah I meant the price level is about 250% of what it was.
This is mostly down to gas: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uk-natural-gas
Which, in turn, is due to the war.
The main policy failure was the conservative government banning onshore wind for five years. There's less critical issues with pylons and planning that I would actually blame the public for rather than the government.
Other than that, not a lot of other options. People mentioning nuclear will be referred to the build time of Hinkley C.
Europe in general has failed to adjust to the then obvious risks of natural gas and fossil fuels in general that have now come to pass.
The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014. The geopolitical risks were crystal clear back then.
As far as nuclear goes there is a western failure to innovate on design presumably due to ossified regulatory requirements and possible contractor malfeasance. In China new clear plants take 5 to 7 years.
> The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014
Hmm, I wonder what hugely expensive and distracting project the UK engaged in after that time instead? Ah yes, Brexit, which turns out to have been promoted in part by the Russians (with a lot of help from the UK press and local dodgily-funded actors).
Decarbonization should have started in 1973 witch is exactly when France started it and by 1990s they had mostly done it.
And nuclear had no chance what so ever in the post market liberalization world. Those sudo-market are not design for that kind of thing.
Nuclear made most sense in the area of centralized utilities, but most nations didn't use it well for various reasons.
We don't really need new technology in nuclear, I mean it would be nice but its not really needed.
France has made an absolutely amazing deal by investing in nuclear. If you calculated all the benefits is actually insane how beneficial it was.
> France has made an absolutely amazing deal by investing in nuclear. If you calculated all the benefits is actually insane how beneficial it was.
This is all true, and yet somehow, at the end of the day, the UK has a higher per capita GDP than France.
Part of the higher per capita GDP than France is the anglosphere dividend. There is a great deal of preference in all the english speaking world to do business with english speaking countries for obvious reasons.
That's a strange comment. Electricity provision is a small part of GDP. So of course doing something great in one part of your government doesn't magically mean you have the best overall economy.
That said, its also wrong to measure benefits only by capita GDP.
Onshore wind was effectively banned for about 10 years, not 5, in England.
The conservatives also appear to have intentionally sabotaged one of the auction rounds for offshore wind.
> Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?
Probably _mostly_ as reduced demand, though if you net feed back into the grid then that may be counted as generation.
It's estimated that embedded generation - behind-the-meter solar and batteries, CHP, and diesel generators used for backup or to avoid peak pricing - was about 23% of the UK's total capacity in 2024, and almost certainly a little higher now.
https://www.neso.energy/energy-101/electricity-explained/how...
I would have expected that this can only be possible through economic downturn. Sure, the more efficient light bulbs can slightly flatten an ever rising graph, but we should not have any illusion that humanity will even use less energy than yesterday. That would only happen if a severe crisis of some form hits us.
And sure, if steelworks and chemistry is moved abroad, the country will use less energy on the whole. But then you have to calculate the indirect usage through imported products as well to have an honest "energy requirement" value for a region or country.
Not saying you can skip efficient light bulbs, but we need to stay realistic about future energy requirements.
It is a wonder isn't it? The absolute determination to debase ones own country. It does, however, make complete sense when you consider the incentives at play (and that is where British governance is genuinely on the back foot).
The Australians call us "whinging poms" for a reason. It's one of the least attractive national characteristics.
Industrial sites are almost always connected to the grid with backfeed. And even if they can't push out their entire wattage, in accounting terms, that power is priced the same as you get from the grid.
So I'm almost certain they are being counted
> [...] two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells [...] Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too.
And increasingly, batteries are also coming to such sites. Would be very interested in learning more about the study's analysis/impact regarding this trend.
>>due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity.
The price of electricity is driving deindustrialisation.
> There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here
This is so hilariously Daily Mirror.
> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
Don't be so sure.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/10/great-brita...
https://spectator.org/germanys-electricity-rationing-is-no-l...
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/german-electricity-to-...
And you don't even have to do it through law, with high enough prices you get the subjects to do them themselves:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/oct/01/britons-prepar...
It's interesting to look at the all time demand at the bottom of https://grid.iamkate.com and see that demand has one dropped from 36GW to 30GW since 2012
I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).
But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants.
If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.
There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.
But, climate change!
Climate changeis a reason to produce more not less. Ac isnt energy free
Will ac fix all the other things that come along? Like, extreme weather, droughts, flooding?
"produce" what exactly?
Literally everything but specifically air conditioners and electricity to run the air conditioners. Better if production is skewed to productive equipment rather than consumer end goods but it isnt strictly necessary. More productive capacity will always do better against change than less.
There's two things that are simultaneously true: 1) improving efficiency of electricity use is often the most cost effective use of a dollar. Better insulation, more efficient appliances, etc. are choices made purely on financial merits. 2) We're going to need to greatly increase electricity consumption in order to decarbonize.
People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a completely different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.
I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.
Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there are politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.
Antivaxxers have always been heavily promoted by bot farms. [1]
Degrowthers, who have had some reasonable successes like the Passivhaus movement, are opposed by those same bot farms.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6137759/
> There's a weird "degrowth" mindset
Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.
This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online? Because it's expensive? Or because we let oil companies and land owners make the rules?
Making peoples lives worse to save money is a capitalist mindset and I don't understand why so many left wing people believe in it. The promise of socialism was always higher living standards for the working class (99 percent) at the expense of millionaires.
Today's leftists seem to not have any coherent philosophy at all. It's not better on the other side. Everything seems to be about grievances and assigning blame rather than rationally discussing practical solutions.
There's a significant misanthropic sentiment on the left stemming from, among other things, the mid-century environmental movement. It creates for a maddening incoherency, but I guess that's typical of all politics at scale.
The misanthropy is infused in popular culture, and specifically in the way ecological sciences and history (for additional reasons) is taught in schools. I not infrequently have to discuss this with my kids when they recite something they've learned in school and I can hear the misanthropic cynicism in the framing and intonation.
It's quite eccentric to suggest the left is misanthropic when the right majors in racism, violence, short-sighted selfishness, and contempt for the weak, poor, and unusual - none of which are particularly humanitarian.
Making your own planet less ecologically stable is certainly an interesting choice, but probably not the best long-term bet for anyone's kids.
This particular misanthropy does not seem to have a particularly strong affinity for either conservative or progressive groups; it is an opportunistic predator that attacks the weak and stupid in both camps, and has for generations.
Be wary of anyone who argues the poor should go without food or protection from the elements, regardless of what flimsy justification they give for their cruelty; the most dangerous to each of us are those who appeal to our own beliefs.
Sure if they're actually saying the poor should go without and that's not a dumb strawman. The idea of consuming too much isn't usually focused on the poor.
Y’all are equally incomprehensible to us. Drastically reduced immigration, ineffective policies for incentivizing pregnancy, and no cash incentives for having multiple children (the one intervention that has been found to have a real, albeit modest impact on TFR). Degrowth under those conditions is all but certain.
That is definitely the impression one would get if one watched Fox News.
If one consumed nonfiction media one might get a different impression.
bro there are degrowth austerity leftists posting in this thread right now, it's not a Fox News caricature
> Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online?
I'd argue there's more ecologically sound ways to supply the desired energy demand in combination with shifting some of the load away from peak times. I don't think that strictly correlates to "a lower standard of living" so much as "there's minor behavioral changes that would more efficiently use existing resources."
> Making peoples lives worse to save money
This is exactly the mentality that I'm surprised by: I suggest shifting high energy use slightly and your reaction is "that will make my life worse." Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight for your towels/sheets/whatever if it meant 50% cheaper power?
> Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight
Absolutely. That thing is loud.
Fair enough
Finally a reasonable objection.
What if manufacturers developed quieter dryers?
If you live in a small house or condo it's still going to be loud enough to wake you up in the middle of the night when it starts. It's a bit more difficult than making a quiet dishwasher (which I'd still find too loud to start running in the middle of the night) since a dryer has to move a bunch of heavy, wet clothing around and run a fairly strong fan to avoid starting a fire.
Seems weird. Dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers are the epitome of "white noise" to me. I love sleeping with those things, drowning out all annoying noises and ensconcing me in a pleasant ocean of peaceful wooshes.
The last time I had in-unit W/D, it was right outside my bedroom. Never bothered me in the least. Certainly not compared to the neighbors' dogs, pot-smoking, screaming arguments, etc.
Time of use plans generally have lower rates starting late evening. There's no reason to run the dryer or dishwasher in the literal middle of the night. An hour before most people's bedtimes will still be during a lower tariff period.
According to https://www.energysage.com/electricity/whats-the-cheapest-ti... 9pm - 6am is common in the US. Hardly anyone is in bed by 9pm.
In the UK it's 10pm - 5am or midnight-7am, depending on your plan. https://uk.jackery.com/blogs/knowledge/when-is-off-peak-elec.... But there's also a mid-day slot 1pm-3pm which can work if your dryer can be timed.
You can also dry heavy items on a folding rack so the dryer doesn't run as long.
That's a pretty solvable problem, since we're spending money to solve problems.
>Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight
In a london flat we rented, the washer-dryer was in a cupboard in the bedroom. So yes. At least it had one.
Trump and doge once fired all the nuclear inspectors.
Building expensive power sources (nuclear) is inevitably going to result in raised electrical rates for the working class.
You seem to be missing the human element in your calculation. It's not just power plants and the machines that use the electricity from them. The machines are built for humans, who want their clothes washed today so they can be folded today and ready for tomorrow. They want the dishes washed today so they can be put back on the shelves before tomorrow's breakfast. And, by the way, grime on dishes gets more difficult to remove once it has sat drying, waiting for the machine to start.
We also want everything in single use plastic containers and to drive big cars a mile down the road to buy groceries, but there's better solutions for those things that people are buying into more and more.
I'm not saying human convenience should entirely take a backseat to machine efficiency; to your point, the very existence of these things is to make human life easier. My frustration is that Western approaches to these problems seem uniquely resistant to ever altering behavior for the sake of reducing ecological impact.
(Dishwashers were a poor example for me to use anyway, they're remarkably efficient; a better one might be water usage: it's best to water plants in either the early morning or late evening, so the water doesn't evaporate as much, but people often prefer to do so during the day, which coincides with high household water usage for showers/laundry/whatever. though, I routinely run my dishwasher overnight and have never had issues with grime, so long as I prime the hot water feed.)
Then they can pay the higher rate for energy during the day, and if enough people want this it will be practical to build infrastructure to support them. This issue is they want it and they don't want to pay for it.
People want all sorts of things. Somewhere there’s a limit to what you can actually get in a finite world so that your kids and grandkids aren’t left with a lower standard of living because they have to pay for your externalities, never mind all the other damage to the ecosystem. Washing dishes when you want is probably okay, but dishwashers are remarkably efficient and really a red herring, or a motte-and-bailey type argument. Wanting to own, say, a massive F150 for the convenience of having your own personal tank and feeling better than others is probably not okay.
Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences. It's how we progress from 0 climate control and lacking clean drinking water to how we live today. Here's a good article on the subject: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-roy...
Smart human development is about thinking long term, not trading minor conveniences now for avoidable catastrophic consequences later.
It turns out that small minor improvements compound long term, and there are relatively few examples of massive step-changes that were centrally planned. Here's a good book on the topic that you may enjoy: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency
> not trading minor conveniences now for avoidable catastrophic consequences later.
Those minor conveniences are a drop in the bucket when it comes to total CO2 output.
> Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences.
That's a uniquely American perspective.
Japanese homes often don't have space heating. The Swiss often keep their homes at 20°C in the winter.
Most of the globe doesn't travel everywhere by car. Arguably it's the intention to remove pain as much as possible which resulted in the opioid epidemic.
There's a point at which trying to get rid of inconveniences becomes harmful.
Is 20°C supposed to be austere? Is that a typo? I keep my American home at 67-68°F in the winter...
20C in wintertime is quite cool for North America, in my opinion. I think 23C is commonly considered "comfortable," but obviously that will vary significantly by individual.
Chicago building codes require 68F as a minimum for residential in winter conditions, so I think that's reasonable as a "habitable minimum yet not necessarily ideal" benchmark: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bldgs/supp_info/chicag...
Wow. Obviously there are humidity differences during different seasons, but 23°C is probably the limit of "this is uncomfortably warm" for me if I set my thermostat above that.
And to what temperature do you set your AC in the summer?
73-74F, so ~23C, my limit where it starts to feel too warm.
So you're just used to cold and not heat.
The thing about the nations I mentioned is that they either barely use any AC, like Switzerland, or set it to 25°C or more, like Japan.
They embrace discomfort - most of the world does.
For me, it depends on outside temp. The main advantage of AC is dehumidification. So if it's 95 degrees and humid outside, 78 degrees inside feels great, and keeps the AC running often enough to keep humidity down.
If it's in the 80s outside, I'll probably drop the inside temp to 76, again to keep humidity down. I rarely set it below that. 74 feels cold in my normal summer attire of shorts and a tee shirt. If we have an 80 degree day with low humidity, I'll open the windows.
Me too, but my husband and guests are clearly uncomfortably cold at my preferred 66/67, and my sister with poor circulation just about has her hands go numb.
You think HVAC and cars are an American prospective?
I think waging war on discomfort is uniquely American.
The rest of the world also has these things, just doesn't use them nearly as much.
I don’t think your thought is as insightful as you think it is. You simply fell for the American Exceptionalism propaganda thinking that Americans are some special breed of humans. America is the richest country in the world. And for most of the 20th century average Americans had the most disposable income and the largest consumer base of all countries. Of course they led the way on adopting luxuries and reducing discomfort. The rest of the world followed as the price became attainable and their purchasing power increased.
50 years ago hot middle eastern countries had no AC. Not because they had some sort of symbiosis with nature and the summer heat. It was because the average AC costed the sum of 8-month of average income. As AC prices dropped, and the average income increased, having an AC became the norm.
Of course the richest people, richest economies get their first and to a non inquisitive or surface only thinking, it’s some how a unique was on discomfort or lust for luxury, when it’s just simple economics. You can see rich Asian countries and cities leading the “War on discomfort” now a days as their economies have developed and stabilized, but they face unique discomforts that previous rich nations didn’t.
> America is the richest country in the world.
In absolute terms, yes. But per capita there are quite a few richer countries, like Switzerland, where people genuinely seem to brave the elements as part of their culture.
Sure, everyone adopts conveniences, but I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
The per capita numbers are more recent as opposed to be throughout the 20th century but even still the size of the Swiss market (in absolute terms) is tiny compared to the size of the American market. Unless the per-capita wealth or disposable income is 30x to make for the population size difference, the "reducing discomfort" goods market will still favor the larger (overall) richer and bigger markets then trickle down to smaller ones. I highly doubt the Swiss endure through cold winters by wearing more layers in doors and drinking lots of hot tea.
> I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
Sounds more like observational or cognitive bias tbh. For example, the Japanese market is notorious for building gizmos and machines for far less grand inconveniences that the weather or long-distance travel. They eat a lot of rice in Japan, so it makes sense they invented the rice cooker. To many Americans (today) who don't eat a lot of rice having an entire appliance for just cooking rice might seem like a crazy war on discomfort and too much of adopting convivences. What's next? a machine just for Turkish coffee?
20 degrees is just fine. During winter I really don't want to sweat at home, nor do I want to only wear a T-shirt (like I would need at 22 or more).
Whenever I go shopping, it's insane how much they heat most places, while people are wearing heavy winter jackets.
> "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house"
The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and most likely in the world. [0]
Roughly 30% of the stock is single-skin, without a cavity. While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons. The same goes for the roofs of these houses; although you will find many companies willing to spray your roof with foam or other forms of thermal sealing, those roofs were never designed to be insulated, causing other potentially catastrophic problems once it's been done.
Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses, but no matter; the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps, despite them being incompatible with the existing pipework and radiators.
0: https://files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the...
How exactly would a heatpump be incompatible with existing pipework and radiators? I see them installed into all kinds of houses, summer cottages and whatever no problem.
Having 8mm pipework (microbore, which was fairly commonly used when central heating was being retrofitted) connected to standard sized radiators with a flow temp of 35 degrees is unlikely to actually heat a building.
That said, most properties in the UK don't have this problem. They _do_ likely need bigger radiators which comes with a cost, but a lot of these houses would benefit from just upgrading from their single panel rad with no fins.
Older houses might need higher temperatures, but insulated ones might be fine with 40-50. My house is slightly over 20 years, and most of the time, we are completely fine with the radiators just lukewarm. If it's like -10 outside, they need to get warmer.
Many old-style radiators only work with high water temperatures. Uninsulated pipework can "waste" a lot of water temperature before you even reach the radiator
I'm not sure any of that makes heatpumps technically impossible, but it makes them more expensive and less efficient
What the other comment said, but more technically, the amount of heat transferred is proportional to delta-T. So older radiators have less surface area, relying on hotter water to transfer enough heat energy to make up for the heat loss of the building.
Meanwhile the efficiency (COP) of a heat pump drops the higher its temperature differential is. So trying to keep the water loop temperature the same is a non-starter. (The same problem can happen with high efficiency condensing natural gas boilers which have much lower flue temperatures)
(From an American perspective although I'll convert the units) - older radiator systems were designed for water temps of around 80C, room temp around 20C, so that is 60C (60 K/Kelvin, really) delta-T. Whereas if a heat pump wants to put out 50C water for half the delta-T (30K), you then need twice the amount of radiator surface area to transfer the same amount of heat. The system will work fine in the shoulder seasons when not much heat is required, but at the coldest nights design temperature it will not be able to keep up and your indoor air temperature will then drop despite the heat being on.
(Pipe sizing enters into it as well but isn't as straightforward to explain)
I can't be the first small-brained Canadian that stuck a fan in front of those euro apartment bloc radiators on a cold day.
(And re-arranged the furniture a bit + stopped using the radiator as storage...)
We're about to get a heatpump (in the UK) and our pipework is fine but we need to replace pretty much all the radiators, both the old ones, about 45 years old, and the newer ones, about 15 years old, in order to be able to heat the house to a sensible temperature.
Is there reason why retaining radiators is preferable to an air heat pump (either ducted air or mini-split)?
I guess it's cheaper to not have to install air ducting or indoor units if you can reuse existing pipes & radiators. But if you need to replace the radiators anyway, the cost might not be that much different? You'd get more precise temperature control, and cooling in the summer.
The roof cavity is not large enough for hidden ducting and the ceilings in older houses low enough that exposed ducting would be a head impact hazard. So you'd end up needing one installation per room. Expensive, especially when the expertise isn't there, and mostly used by commercial users.
Most old houses are not ducted and retrofiting them is very expensive, capital repair.
Mini-splits are noisy and have major problems getting heat distributed over a whole house.
> Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses,
Reasonable point, but I feel my case still stands: the population able to make these changes could do so, enabling existing infra (and housing stock) to "go further" before requiring expensive and disruptive overhaul.
> the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps
I agree this is shortsighted, and it's better to incentivize more efficient systems rather than applying punitive strategies to less efficient ones.
>Reasonable point, but I feel my case still stands: the population able to make these changes could do so, enabling existing infra (and housing stock) to "go further" before requiring expensive and disruptive overhaul.
I'm sorry but as an outsider to me this straight up just sounds like kicking the can down the road! Let's get it fixed, build more solar, get more power in the grid, deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc.. Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
It's been pretty clear that globally the grid operators are all very much lazy and would rather increase prices and reap benefits short term than adding more capacity to the grid, even where i live (in Brazil) its very much clear that grid operators too would rather raise your bill and collude to add more taxes if you want to generate your own solar than to get more supply in the grid and make the bills cheaper (we have a minimum bill you have to pay even if you have full self-generated solar AND a thing called a "solar tax" because of course, the sun is the govt's property, gotta pay a tax for using it..).
I think you're overstating my position.
> Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
I'm not saying _everybody_ must use less AC/clothes dryer/whatever. Grids are remarkably complex machines and are incredibly expensive to upgrade--which we should do! We should have done that ages ago, but the second best time to plant a tree is now. However, that's not an instantaneous process and requires quite a lot of political willpower to achieve, let alone the capex to bring new generation plants online.
In the meantime, as you've noted, people die without access to critical infra, i.e. AC in heatwaves. If the options facing grid operators are "rolling brownouts to keep from blowing up a transformer" or "educate people on time-of-day use re: peak load to reduce grid strain," the latter is often dismissed out of hand when it seems a perfectly sane approach to maximizing the utility of existing systems.
> deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc
Solar has a tremendous to "democratize" access to resources [0], we should absolutely incentivize its adoption as much as possible... but changing regulatory or tax environments is difficult. *We should still do that,* but altering behavior is (comparatively) free, so long as you can get past people being personally offended for being asked to not water their lawn every day in July.
[0]: https://mashable.com/article/solar-energy-rural-africa
Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers. What is happening is that new builds will have to be built with heat pumps from (if memory serves) 2035. Please don't scaremonger.
Further, it is possible to run a heat pump at high temperatures: some use refrigerants specifically designed to do this relatively efficiently.
> Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers.
Several energy suppliers websites have pages dedicated to this very topic.
The current 2035 target originates in the ministerial Heat and building strategy policy paper (2020):
"Our ambition is to phase out the installation of natural gas boilers beyond 2035."
In the Annex:
Aiming to phase out the installation of new and replacement natural gas boilers from 2035, once costs of low-carbon alternatives have fallen, in line with the natural replacement cycle, including any hydrogen-ready boilers in areas not converting to hydrogen, to ensure that all heating systems used in 2050 are compatible with Net Zero.
Given the energy policy of the UK, which to many engineers makes absolutely no sense at all, it's impossible to predict what will actually come out of the policy sausage factory next.
Hydrogen is a dead end for domestic gas
Eventually everyone will need to switch from gas because as the number of heat pumps rise then number of gas consumers fall and the infrastructure costs for them will become uneconomic
> new builds will have to be built with heat pumps from (if memory serves) 2035.
England: from 24 March 2027
Scotland: since 1 April 2024.
The legislation doesn't mandate heat pumps specifically, it mandates >=75% lower carbon emissions than homes built to the 2013 standards, which effectively requires heat pumps, solar panels, and significantly improved insulation. Build and running costs aren't measured, it's quite possible new homes will cost more to buy and run, and could be smaller to compensate.
You remember "2035" because in 2021 the government announced it "wanted" to ban gas boilers entirety by that date: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58959045
... but as far as I know, never enacted legislation to ban their sale or fitting in existing houses. And that aspirational policy has been announced as dropped multiple times, at least since last July, most recently today
> could be smaller to compensate.
New builds are already much smaller than previous generations' housing, to increase margins for developers. Smaller than that, we'll basically be like rats.
Either we ban gas boilers sooner rather than later, or we mandate expensive syngas to run them, or we can't reach net zero emissions.
They can, but then their COP is like... 2. Which is not great. Coupled with high units costs, need to make math is it even worth it compared to just electric heating.
> While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons
Lime plaster with cork in it is fine way to insulate these buildings.
It won't be as good as modern materials but is an improvement and is breathable
> Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses,
I own one of these houses – single skin, 200yr old farm workers cottage – I'm neither poor or that old
Much of the expensive old housing in London, Bath etc is single skin too
There has been research into Thin Wall Insulation for this very reason, and that would be a good start for much of the Victorian housing stock (e.g. Cork Spray which is permiable so avoids the problems of sealing up these older buildings).
From a T&M standpoint it's affordable to use external insulation and cladding to safely insulate these old houses. But that runs afoul of planning/landmark laws (some places even mandate single-pane windows!) So some Brits freeze to death rather than hide some history. Their choice to make, I guess.
>This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me.
I assume you're in good health, not poor, in a stable living arrangement, etc. The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer. Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
> Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
Most of us don't. But smart meters are free in the UK, and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat. Same for my dishwasher. Heating is a bigger issue.
You probably want your washing machine to finish when you'll be ready to take the clothes out, rather than leave them sitting damp in the machine.
There should be plenty of opportunity to load shift with other things though, a dishwasher as you mentioned, or a fridge or a storage heater or a charger for your electric car. All can be done with minimal inconvenience to the user.
> leave them sitting damp in the machine.
Rinse hold solves this. Even the cheapest machines have it.
Sadly not in the USA.
> and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I think most of these appliances sold today have at least some sort of "delay start" function. We use that to do exactly what you describe. Not even for nght tariff, it's just convenient to time it like that.
Every washer, even basic ones, I've owned that were made post-2000 had a delay start function. Even my most basic one that just had dials to select options, it had a 2/4/6/8-hour delay dial. I figured it was a common feature by now.
A 2-hour granularity delay start would drive me insane. Better than nothing though. And maybe the dial one works with a timer on the outlet too, as the program is mechanically selected.
Yep and I do it. But the point is that if everyone sets it to be done at 8am, you move the demand window to 6-8am. All o care about is that I can put it away when I wake up so if my energy company said “your electricity is cheap between4 and 6, go for it” my dishwasher, washing machine, hot water tank could all go at that time
> The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer.
Excellent point, and I agree, though the vast, vast majority of the pushback I feel I get when advocating for these kinds of shifts are from wealthy/healthy individuals.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario: existing resources should be able to support our current level of creature comforts with minor conservation, even if a segment of the population is less able to support the conservation efforts, but the extremes people demand in turn place extreme load on our infrastructure.
What is the point in being wealthy if it is not to avoid tedious inconveniences?
Bit of a logical fallacy. Not avoiding ALL tedious inconveniences doesn't mean that being wealthy can't avoid MOST tedious inconveniences. You can have a weekly cleaner and a holiday house in the south of france and dry your clothes at night.
> Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
That is exactly the people reducing expenses even when they know that will be extremely painful. That is why the poor are poor, because they cannot afford that kind basic expense. They need to choose between heating and food.
"Let's consume more" for the poor. It is a grotesque argument.
> "Let's consume more" for the poor. It is a grotesque argument.
OP was making a fair point that not everybody has the same amount of time and energy (or money) to tolerate shifts in their routine, which in the context of a "personal vs collective responsibility" style argument is entirely reasonable.
By the same token, if only the _rich_ have the freedom to make such behavior changes for the sake of conservation it will only ever have a token impact, and in many cases the "correct" level to make an efficiency pitch at is the community: a decent light rail system will always outperform everyone driving their own vehicle to work/the store/downtown in terms of space and energy efficiency.
...but, to get people to buy into such "collectivist" systems, you often have to get them to contend with some perceived reduction in personal convenience: yes, a train doesn't need a parking lot and uses less gas per passenger-mile, but then you're beholden to the train schedule. It's exactly _that_ sentiment that I find frustrating in advocating for sustainable civic design.
To OP's point: whatever that "collectivist" option is necessarily has to contend that standards of accessibility and convenience are not constant across the population. That doesn't inherently mean "the poor should consume more," but that "hang dry your laundry" isn't an option for everyone in the current dominant socioeconomic structure.
The rational approach is to both bring that new green / nuclear energy capacity online AND simultaneously reduce waste.
Yes, but that waste reduction mindset is the 'degrowth' was being derided in the original comment I replied to :-)
> add some insulation to your house,
Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward. If you have cavity walls that are uninsulated, it needs to be done right. If you have single skim walls you either do external cladding (and change the outside of your building), or build an internal stud wall and insulate that, which is very effective but costs a decent amount, reduces internal floor space, and requires a full redecoration after.
> Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward.
Expensive short term, life saving long term.
> requires a full redecoration after
Tell me that you are rich without telling me that you are.
Lime plaster with cork in it works, it's just a messy retrofit
Lime render with cork is the outside version
Building more power plants seems like a pretty sane approach to me.
> Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach.
No, you're supposed to do the other way around.
One measure of progress is not having to think about something. I don't want to have to think about when to wash my clothes or my dishes or whatever. I want to push the button and have it go. I'd be willing to make a concession for an EV since it consumes a lot of power, but it should be automatically controlled and not make me think.
If we're going to electrify everything, we need a clean, plentiful, reliable electrical supply. There is no technical obstacle to having this.
Saying "we can save $1000 per person in capital costs, they just need to deal with 5 extra minor inconveniences per day" is not how you run a developed country.
Then you can pay a bit more for the battery capacity and others can take the discount to deal with the minor inconveniences. It works out for everybody.
You're pushing the burden back onto the consumer to find workarounds for a broken system.
Having to install battery capacity in your own house is a step backwards.
If water was unavailable for 4 hours a day, you would suggest putting in your own rainwater filtration system.
You can timeshift your power consumption, but in many cases you can not timeshift industry power consumption, especially heavy industry power consumption. For example it takes few hours to start a big plastics injection plant, it takes few days to heat an aluminum smelter. High quality glass production needs few weeks of uninterrupted power supply. Iron blast furnaces run without interruption for years.
But for example, cement production can be turned on and off quite easily, and is turned on and off on demand by the grid electric operators to help with grid stabilization (cement producers are paid for this grid stabilization service).
surely, you mean matching production to demand?
That's the way our system has developed for millennia.
It drives me up a fucking wall that you think this is a preferable strategy to just idk, installing some solar or wind? Why is this so difficult. We have the technology for practiciatlly infinite cheap energy but we just wont build it. Are the Chinese the only people that arent too stupid to understand this?
That's some hostility, friend.
It's not a "preferable" strategy, it's one that can (and should) be deployed in tandem with expanding our renewable generation and doing more "at scale" conservation of commercial resource use.
We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0], _and yet_ we're not even capitalizing on that gain as much as we could because people don't want to tolerate the behavior changes necessary to do so.
My beef isn't with expanding capacity, it's with that being the _only_ solution that's considered to match supply to demand instead of doing anything to manage demand.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67367
> We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0]
no we arent. China added the entire capacity of the US grid in solar in the last 4 years and they are accelerating. That is bananas. We've barely increased total grid capacity in the last 20 years. It should be a national embarrassment. Energy abundance is possible, and one of the greatest ways to improve peoples lives. There are no energy poor countries that are rich.
Half the state of Nevada should be a solar farm at this point if anyone actually cared about climate change, and that would do 10x to imrpve peoples lives than telling them not to use the dryer.
again, the degrowth mindset relies on a fundamental paucity of imagination and will to actually solve the problem.
When fertility rates fall below replacement rate, some amount of degrowth is all but inevitable. Probably multiple generations’ worth, assuming things remain at least nominally normal.
That few in government are readying for that and are rearranging deck chairs instead is not particularly reassuring.
The electricity generation in the article is shown per capita.
Now I'm not saying we should generate as much as humanly possible, because even with renewables that has a cost.
And some things have gotten genuinely more efficient (compare modern heat pumps to heating available in 1968).
But why shouldn't we maintain the levels our parents enjoyed? And use the extra capacity if anything for EVs, grid stabilization, medical research, etc.
So population degrowth is a pretty separate issue.
My mother moved to a brand new apartment. Everything is electric- heating and cooking. Gues what? Her bills went down.
That is the power of modern construction techniques.
Unfortunately this is out of reach of poorer people and it would takes a hundred years before all the old housing stock is replaced. But it's nice progress for the happy few.
It'll be temporary. Low fertility rates are an evolutionary bottleneck. After 100 years all of the people and ideologies predisposed to low fertility will have literally removed themselves and their bloodlines from existence and those who maintained a higher than replacement rate even when confronted with the ills of modern society will have taken their place. This works at the individual level, I'm not talking about race or nationality.
Except ideologies aren't genetic are they?
No, but they can be (and often are) inherited.
At such a high concordance as to see ideologies disappear from the population? Or is it more likely that ideologies and people's beliefs are from social and environmental feedback?
The future is Amish.
Given that the alternative is trying to communicate with someone who thinks that the physical-goods aspects of our economy can grow exponentially forever...
I'm going to go with the degrowth, or the steady-state economics guys, they are more likely to be closer to the mark of what is actually achievable in the real world.
Here in the UK the debate around energy is really unbelievably stupid.
It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production.
Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues.
It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad".
Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.
The North Sea is a mature basin and there isn't that much gas left in the UK sectors
If there's little left, why does it need to be banned? This is like the German argument against nuclear - it's supposedly expensive, and yet it needs to be banned because otherwise there would be plenty of it.
It isn’t banned.
Well, fracking kind of is, we stopped after we tried it and it caused ground tremors.
AFAIK we use fracking type techniques in the North Sea
Part of the problem with fracking on mainland UK is not just the tremors but that there’s also not much proven gas either
Look you can make an argument that slightly more domestic oil production could have happened. But lets actually be realistic. Even best case you don't get that much and it takes a long time.
And its in no way going to solve any of the actual long term energy issues in the UK.
For example, if you assume limited government resources, massive investment in North Sea fossil is just inherently stupid.
Allowing some private exploration and production would be tiny and barley relevant to solve any problem. The right wing people who advocate this as some kind of 'solution' are more delusional then any 'leftist'.
I sympatize with degrowth. But the measures are wrong.
Take the idea of not being able to wash your cloths when you want. What a step back! But instead get rid of your heated pool or turn down heating by two degrees.
Right? Wear a f*cking sweater and socks in the winter, instead of shorts and a tank top, rather than not be able to do laundry.
Hah, only an alien species would be of the idea that infinite growth in a finite planet is a bad idea. No, surely we can keep pressing the gas pedal forever, never slowing down sounds like a sound and reasonable plan.
- global wildlife population declined by 70% since the 70s
- climate change is having real measurable negative impacts already
- 90% of the shit we create is useless low quality junk and e-waste with a two years life expectancy
- green washing doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of industries are not compatible with long term sustainability
What are your argument for infinite growth at all cost?
> - global wildlife population declined by 70% since the 70s
Here's an example of how to bullshit. The original report is here: https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastroph...
And it's missing the word "monitored". And then you read the methodology:
> The LPI measures changes in the sizes of 35,803 populations of 5,790 vertebrate species (amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles) that have been monitored over time. The latest LPI shows a decline of 73% (73.2%). This means that the size of these populations fell by, on average, 73% between 1970 and 2022.
> This doesn’t mean that there are 73% fewer wild animals in total today than in 1970. The LPI measures changes in relative abundance, not the total number of animals. Changes in small populations with few individuals are averaged with changes in large populations of thousands of animals. Nor does it mean that 73% of species or populations are declining. In fact, around half of the studied populations are stable or increasing – but these gains are outweighed by the greater magnitude of losses elsewhere when calculating a global average.
So basically, it's a made-up number.
Ok and what's the current copium for this one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
Why should I cope with it? Humans change the planet, but the planet changes itself all the time.
Mammoths disappeared without human intervention, for example.
Ah yes, and let me guess "climate changed before human even existed" am I right? So nothing matters and you cannot be wrong, you got me!
No, you're not right. I actually worked (a little bit) on climate models.
I just don't think that the only natural state for the Earth is change. And human-caused changes are neither bad nor good from that standpoint.
Surely you understand that infinite growth is impossible, and it will all come crashing down sooner or later.
what makes you think we are even remotely close to bumping against the barriers of infinity? like what are you even talking about?
"progressive circles" ? The whole reactionary movement is essentially just one big self-own exercise in degrowth, just phrased in terms of being macho - like drunks thumping their chests before getting into a fight with the bouncer.
But yes I do agree about the impossibility of communication.
there is some irony in the growth ideology, which is barely more than a century old, to claim that every other species on the planet, ecological thinking and most human life is somehow alien to existence here, when they are more fanatic than just about any religious cult
the logical terminus of the growth fanatics is to literally want to leave the planet so I think we ought to reserve the label 'alien' for them
It's not weird. Not politically. They know since the 80s they can't match growth of a capitalist society, they don't want that kind of society, so instead of considering their priorities, they market disadvantage as advantage. It makes perfect sense if gaining power is the prime concern.
“Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature.”
Nothing weird about it. They themselves have all their needs comfortably met, which is what matters. Other people have to learn to just accept their lot in life and not try climbing.
The degrowth mindset has existed for at least 50-60 years on the left, it merely bubbles to the surface more prominently from time to time. It was extremely popular ideologically in the late 1960s and 1970s.
For some on the left, they view humans as parasites. It starts as self-hate internally and expands outwards to encompass humanity more generally ('I love animals, I hate people'). Humans have to modify their environment to exist (shelter, farming, hunting, et al.), so the people that hold that ideology, you will find, they comprehensively hate any modification of the environment by humans, ie they want humans to cease to exist, rooted first in their own desire to not exist (they hate their own existence first and foremost).
The world is at all times overflowing with people that hate existing. They're miserable sad sacks and they desperately want everyone to drown in it with them. Sometimes that gets formalized into projected ideology used as a weapon against the rest of humanity.
Yeah, thats why im on the side of liberals who promote "abundance" policies (see the Book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson)
Doesn't the "growth" mindset also feels a bit alien to you?
Everything must grow all the time because all we care about is compounding interest, and that can only exist with continuous growth.
Finite resources and time be dammed.
If you arent growing you are dying. This is base biological reality. Its completely intuitive.
Degrowth will need to happen at some point. I believe that people "with a growth mindset" are just hoping that by submitting to growth they believe it won't happen in their lifetime.
Which is a fair gamble to be frank, I don't blame them.
I don't see what is so hard to understand at all, it is mostly ecologically minded.
Human production and consumption (in a broad sense) is generating/leading to ecological catastrophes. Some people believe technology will solve the problem, some people believe the easier solution is to stop producing as much.
Unfortunately, that means letting go of some privileges and not everybody will agree on what to let go.
This is why we should rename them to regressive. They somehow think going back to pre-industrialisation can work while they still keep their smartphones that they use to absorb their latest TikTok fuelled outrage, somehow incapable of understanding that they're not "de-industrialising", they're _exporting_ it to to other countries that are massively industrialising on their behalf, and now have tremendous power over them. Including via TikTok brainmelting slop.
You hit a nerve lol.
> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I've seen proposals that are less intermittent availability and more incentivized pushing of consumption towards periods of lower demand. We already have all these computers in our appliances, might as well let them do reasonable things ... your freezer probably does a self-defrost cycle triggered by a timer and/or a door open counter, but why not wait up to X hours for off-peak pricing to do it. Or push the set points down a degree or two during off-peak pricing, to reduce energy use during on-peak. Also works for HVAC subject to user comfort, and water heaters if you're careful and avoid high temperatures that cause injury or low temperatures that allow microorganism growth.
Of course, that's science fiction... all the communication in appliances is designed to collect data and serve targeted ads. :( So very few appliances know if current pricing is peak/off peak or when it will change.
My utility company does a program where they'll pay you to raise your thermostat a couple degrees when there's the most grid stress and the spot price of electricity is super high. You can also have your thermostat do extra pre-cooling in advance of these events.
People in my area HATE it. They hate giving up control (even though you can still manually lower your thermostat if you get too warm), and feel like the power company is doing some sort of scam even though it's a win/win/win (you make money, electric company saves money, homes are precooled with solar instead of burning fossil fuels).
> People in my area HATE it.
Yep, it's probably not terribly hard to leave either, most of the one's I've seen aren't.
I dunno how you can make it more palletable, when they're already paying you monthly, it already does pre-cooling (or pre-heating), and you can also override it. And you might not even be home.
Counties tend to use kore power in the day, thus electricity tends to be cheaper at night when there less demand.
Personally I’m happy to. Charge my car at night when it’s 1/3 the price and use the h used capacity rather than pay higher bills to build more nuclear plants.
This is nothing new in the U.K., “economy seven” was a thing 50 years ago.
Can you provide a source for either of your claims?
Like a selfie of me at the conference?
That could work.
I've only heard similar claims repeated by Reform.
How about some detail like the time, place or name of the conference, the name of the speaker or the title of the talk?
You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries.
Firstly, that doesn't sound like a particularly hard thing to accept if it genuinely helps. "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
However, regardless of that, this isn't new. There have been time-of-day based electricity tariffs for decades that are aimed at incentivising people to do more demanding things at particular times e.g. when industry isn't using the power. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
"I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment."
The environment is going to be destroyed anyway, since the rest of the world will continue to use their washing machine whenever they want. [1]
The current European approach to climate change is completely bonkers and will only make Europeans poorer and miserable.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
It already has made them poorer and miserable. The Draghi report was all about how they were poorer due to these things. Of course they decided not to follow the recommendations.
> since the rest of the world will continue to use their washing machine whenever they want
No they have even less money than Europe. They'll do the smart thing, which is using electricity when it's cheap.
You'd have a point if those countries had followed Europe in replacing coal with imported gas, but few countries outside of Europe have done that. Without imported gas, electricity is generally cheap.
China burns coal and has still had time-of-use pricing since 1999.
The price of electricity is a function of demand with respect to supply. Even if the fuel is cheap, heavy demand will cost more to supply than low demand.
https://www.climatescorecard.org/2019/02/time-of-use-electri...
Europe did not replace coal with gas. The only country that did this worth mentioning is the US.
The UK largely did - there was a "dash for gas" throughout the 1990s, a response to the decline of UK-mined coal and the availability of North Sea gas.
Coal is no longer used, and the remaining mothballed coal power stations were demolished a couple of years ago. North Sea gas is now in decline, and is rapidly being replaced by renewables for electricity generation but we'll still rely on (expensive!) LNG imports to make up the difference until the end of the decade.
Well Germany did. We switched off Europe most modern (at least at the time) coal plant in Hamburg and want to phase out remaining coal and lignite.
Even on sunny days we are pretty much burning gas now for electricity 24/7 (last I looked sometime in September).
It did not. Germany's percentage of gas use for electricity stayed mostly flat. In absolutely numbers it went down because of less electricity use. Energy Charts from Fraunhofer publishes this data [1].
2025 it was 49.5TWh
2010 it was over 66.4TWh
Coal use went down significantly.
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
> "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
What the heck? Where is your evidence that using washing machines at inconvenient times is going to destroy the environment?
If your argument is that any use of electricity from fossil fuels is destroying the environment, then nobody should even be charging their phones at night. Time-shifting washing machines isn't going to fix carbon emissions since they're going to be emissions at any time of the day.
I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development. A lot of these moral arguments do not make sense. You said it yourself -- industry is incentivized to convince the public to use less electricity during peak hours so they can pay less. It's pretty much a psyop by capitalists. And for some reason you're shilling for them even though presumably you're paid exactly zero buckaroos
I've been receiving tons of free or negative rate energy for the last few years because of time of day pricing and as a result have driven thousands of miles at near zero fuel cost. It's automated for me so all I have to do is plug my car in.
I certainly don't view the windless day where the price is a little higher than average as a cause not to use my washing machine as on average I win out.
I'm not sure it's useful generalising a continent of peoples political opinions but I see renewables, storage and smart grids as really new tools that society previously had no access to, it's a massive carrot not a stick.
> I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development
Many of us believe that the alternative is a serious risk of severe climate change that would be much more disruptive. Not being able to use your washing machine at night is going to seem like the smallest of minor inconveniences if crops start failing and we don't have food, or cites end up underwater triggering mass migration into neighbouring areas and that leads to large scale societal conflict.
Of course, if you don't believe that those things will happen then caring about climate change seems irrational. But belief in (anthropogenic) climate change is the mainstream view on all sides of the political spectrum in most of Europe.
How do you explain that basically all European countries tax electricity much higher than fossil gas? Countries like Germany and the UK make the US look good when it comes to heat pump adoption.
More ironically, air conditioning is tolerated if powered by oil (like in cars), but not by electricity (like in buildings). At least Europe is better at EV adoption, but still far behind many parts of Asia.
That's because Germany can't afford the additional grid load from electric heating.
Maybe they should, idk actually invest in renewables at massive scale instead of telling the people of a purportedly rich country that they should have to ration energy like its wartime? Why do people in Europe accept quality of life hits for dumb fake arguments about degrowth when you could literally just build more renewables.
Germany over-invested in renewables and is now reaping what it has sown.
They're going to invest 30 billion euros in direct government _subsidies_ in adding 11GW of natural gas generation.
For comparison, this amount of money would buy 5GW of nuclear power generation. But nuclear power is basically free after the initial capital expenses, and natural gas generation will still require fuel (gas or maybe hydrogen).
Oil in cars is taxed higher than electricity in germany
No, I simply don't believe changing the time I wash my clothes is a solution to the climate problems.
It's crazy that you guys do.
> It's crazy that you guys do.
That's a very weak straw manning of their (admittedly not strongly stated) position.
You'd look better if you had a shot at steel manning where they're coming from rather than adopting such a weak and trivial rebuttal.
I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development.
The evidence for man-made climate change is quite compelling, and taking personal responsibility for your own impact on it isn't hard. I don't really see doing my washing at 6am as 'social and technological regression'. Quite the opposite actually - my washing machine has bluetooth and an app. I can tell it when to start.
The fact there isn't global pressure on corporations to be similarly responsible means my act of selflessness is ultimately a futile waste of time, but that's your kids and grandkids problem. I've chosen not to have kids, so I don't really care. I would suggest that choosing to have a family but not choosing to protect the environment as much as you can is an act of incredible selfishness towards your own children. They're the ones who'll have to live in a world with problems like water and food shortages. There is every chance that your grandchildren will die in a war over resources, and your view that tech is awesome will be little comfort to them.
> The evidence for man-made climate change is quite compelling
Sure
Where is the the evidence for me using the washing machine at the wrong time causing climate change?
As I said, I don't mind people claiming that washing clothes itself is bad for the environment (it contributes a little bit), but the idea that it's bad specifically because I wash it at a bad time? That's insane.
Thiel might have been right about the greens - the degrowth is so anti-human and destructive to society.
Thiel has never been right about anything, and never will be.
How do you become <100 richest people in the world without being right about anything?
Lack of conscience is a unique advantage.
At least on HN, it might be better to voice your antipathy toward Mr. Thiel in terms less easily mistaken for counterfactuals.
Meanwhile we wiped out 70% of wildlife population in 50 years and are slowly rendering our paradise of a planet hostile to human life...
Degrowrh is a mathematical and physical inevitability, the only choice you have is to prepare for it or not
Why is it inevitability? Couldn't we just use our tech advancements to move to cleaner energy, move heavy industry to the moon, and clean up the planet?
I was thinking more disassembling the planet for a Dyson swarm myself.
Biggest "Couldn't we just" I've seen. Why not terraform the sun while we're at it?
Why can't you just summon free energy out of a hat?
Degrowth will need to happen at some point. I believe people "with a growth mindset" are just hoping that by submitting to growth it won't happen in their lifetime.
China is literally summoning essentially free energy out of hat. It actually is extremely trivial. you just install solar panels like you arent living in 1950.
They installed the entire grid capacity of the US in 4 years and they are accelerating. THere is a path to infinite free energy, but youd rather worry about doing your laundry at night.
What I don't understand with this "technology will solve everything" mindset is the following:
Why do you find it more reasonable to build factories on the moon, rather than accept to live more austerely?
Because of all the people I've met in my life, I've never actually met someone who was willing to voluntarily lower their standard of living. I've never met someone who had AC in a hot place and gave it up, wanted lower internet speeds, less phone battery, or wanted to go from living in a nice house back to one with a leaky roof.
In fact, I've only ever met people who wanted more things and a higher quality of life. While many green/degrowth political policies are based around convincing people to consume less, I've met consumers and found that's not what they want. It's why most environmental policies fail, consumers want more things at a lower cost, and are willing to import goods from overseas if the environmental regulations at home prevent them from being created there.
For the future, it means degrowth policies will fail. The only solution to climate change is to develop and grow our way out of it. It will be easier to live on the moon than it will be to convince consumers to accept less than they have now.
> Couldn't we just use our tech advancements to move to cleaner energy, move heavy industry to the moon, and clean up the planet?
How exactly? This is sci fi... how much more technology do you need? it's obviously not going in the right direction so far, we're just piling up reneweable sources on top of fossil ones. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy-by-...
What's your plan? "Hey claude scrub the entire atmosphere to remove co2 from the past 200 years, make no mistake and use no energy"? "Hey codex send all our industries with razor thin margin to the moon, make no mistake and keep them as profitable as on earth"?
Look at atmospheric co2 scrubbers, the hot new thing, we can just keep polluting and clean it up am I right? Well, let's run the numbers:
We need 1 to 3 MWh of energy to remove 1t of co2
We produced 38.1 billion tonnes of it in 2025
Global electricity production in 2025: 30 TWh
We'd need to dedicate ~100% to 300% of our electricity production to simply offset our co2 production, even if we get it 10x better, and we won't because co2 is very stable and very dilute in the atmosphere (and also because it literally is below the minimum thermodynamic work to separate CO2 from air in ideal lab conditions), it's still completely retarded.
Every single technical solution to climate change completely falls apart when you run the numbers, the only argument left is "in the future we'll invent a magical tech that will save us so we have to accelerate"... might as well pray Jesus for help at that point
> Meanwhile we wiped out 70% of wildlife population in 50
Meanwhile you're lying about us wiping out 70% of wildlife population in 50 years.
I already replied in the other thread why.
What about the other points (granted they weren't in this post)
- climate change is having real measurable negative impacts already
- 90% of the shit we create is useless low quality junk and e-waste with a two years life expectancy
- green washing doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of industries are not compatible with long term sustainability
Yes, global warming is real and we need to fix it.
No, e-waste is not a serious issue on the scale of climate change. It would be nice to fix it, but either way its impact is fairly minor.
And I don't doubt that most industries will be sustainable within the next 30-50 years.
> sustainable within the next 30-50 years
If that's your definition of "sustainability" lmao... nothing is a problem if your horizon is 50 years
> "I was at a conference ... these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease"
For a long time (several decades) electricity demand has been decreasing in the UK, largely due to efficiency improvements. But now days pretty much everyone agrees that electricity demand will increase significantly in the future due to electrification. The UK has been planning for this for some time so if this guy was really from National Grid, he sounds like a bit of a rogue!
> "their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like"
No, nobody is suggesting that the grid will ever cut off power to anybody - certainly not domestic customers. The idea is that in a smart grid, big industrial customers often have the ability to temporarily reduce demand for heat or cooling or whatever. So if there is a signal from the grid that demand needs to be cut, automated industrial systems can (and already do) do that. The same goes for your car charging, water heating, etc. These things can automatically slow down during demand peaks in response to a signal from the grid, and you probably won't notice or care. You'll still be able to wash your dishes any time you want!
This is all definitely a good thing. A huge part of the cost of running the grid is in handling the biggest demand peaks, which might only occur for an hour or two per day a few times per year. If the peaks can be reduced and demand becomes smoother, then energy becomes cheaper.
And domestic providers like Octopus are also incentivising voluntary reduction (e.g. during saving sessions, which were National Grid experiments), or consumption when there is a glut of renewables with free energy, so if people want to save money they CAN load shift.
And with more and more houses installing solar and battery, opting into shoring up the grid for a decent uplift in standard export rates would be of interest to many.
I use Octopus in NZ and I’m a big fan of what they’re doing compared to a lot of our other electricity retailers. Savings sessions in particular are great with a beefy home battery because exporting counts in the comparison average. Those are easy money-making opportunities for us.
Yup. Heating and cooling are 2 things that can be delayed in most cases with little negative effects. A hot water tank set at 60C isn't going to be harmed if it's allowed to cool to 55C due to high power demand it also doesn't instantly empty out with usage.
The same is true about climate control. 1 or 2C from the desired temperature is still pretty comfortable but can make a huge difference in power savings, particularly if it's coordinated.
That said, I suspect that the even better route for power companies to go down is installing more grid batteries. Those can directly address and smooth out high demand. Put them at the various substations and you can shut off the main grid to the substation temporarily under high load.
Aren't water tank set to a recommended minimum temperature to ensure no Legionella or comes in your pipes?
Of course. The likely scenario is that the water tank has a preset range of acceptable temperatures and uses demand forecast information to decide whether to heat to the upper end of the range or let it cool to the lower end. Nobody suggests that we let them cool to unsafe temperatures.
I'm not saying its impossible to achieve technically, just that there is a whole fleet of installed equipment and the comment I responded to made no mention of unsafe temperatures...
Unsafe temperatures happen at 42C. Pasteurization starts at 50C. A water heater that stays in the 60 to 55C range I mentioned never leaves the safe zone.
But further, once pasteurization has occurred (which takes 2 minutes at 60C), Abiogenesis doesn't happen. A water heater can safely go down to 36C after it's hit that 60C temperature. Not that it would.
So long as your water heater is hitting 60C once a day and stays above 42C, you have very little risk of developing dangerous levels of Legionella in the tank.
Remember the currently common margins account for the fact that you actually use some of the water every now and then. That water in the tank will regularly cross the merely transiently safe temperature range, by design.
Once silicon is in control (which is where responding grid requests to delay consumption is more or less necessarily heading) you could even achieve better (worst-case) safety margins at reduced (total) power consumption. Because the machinery no longer needs to be designed around two "dumb" thermo switches and do a little extra in case layers of varying temperature manifest after two or more spaced periods of consumption. With continuous monitoring in software, you can integrate the worst-case bacterial growth based on time elapsed outside the "practically safe" temperature ranges. Then the tank always knows what is needed, and can both operate on tighter margins and reliably know when reducing or delaying power draw is ok.
They have to be _brought_ to that temperature periodically, but they don't have to stay at it; if they did you'd never actually be able to use the water (as that tends to drop the tank temperature, dramatically).
Its ok if the tank is heated up to 60C once per week to avoid Legionella.
Here is a recent article about a small town in western Massachusetts. The headline is about the natural gas feeds be at saturation for the town. Buried in the article is a comment about our electricity also being bumping against capacity. National Grid is the electric provider.
I have been expanding solar thermal because it’s free of both of these constraints.
https://www.iberkshires.com/story/83932/Williamstown-s-Gas-S...
H
To emphasise your point, this is already happening. It's not theoretical. Data Centres across the world can already get signals from their grid, and will do things like proactively switch to local generators.
Nearly 20 years ago I had such a wonderful debugging experience when the power grid where I lived sent a "switch to backup" message and then milliseconds later a cancellation. The colo's power system got jammed between generator and mains electricity and everything rapidly ran out of UPS backup power and died. I found so many dependency loops between servers that day, took me hours to get things back up and running.
The Tories sold off the national grid, it’s a public listed company now. They don’t want to build infrastructure, they want to maximise shareholder value.
Privatization might be an avoidable disaster, but nationalization is virtually guaranteed to make things worse. See: every time anything has ever been nationalized. There was a reason these things were sold of in the first place.
> There was a reason these things were sold of in the first place.
Privatize profits, socialize costs. That is the main reason for nationalization. Western nations would not be so much in debt if they had assets. All assets were sold during neoliberal policies and the state was stripped from income. That is not going well, is it?
Re-nationalization is the only option to have solvent states.
>Privatize profits, socialize costs
I hate that as well, it's anti free markets. It will always exist to some degree since infrastructure is necessary, but there has to be more accoutability. But i'm a Thatcherite in that I believe government should be as small as possible. They have no business being employers, owning property etc. Whatever they do own should be justified, and you cannot justify having a major proportion of the population and national industries and companies run by government as was the case in Britain in the 70's and early 80's.
The alternative philosophy, basically socialism and socialism adjacent ideas that all critical national infrustructure should be run by the government imho relies at it's core the idea that it's just and proper for this to be the case since the government is the collectivevoice of the people, and the government owning something is as though the citizens of the nation own it. Which is... for lack of nicer words, major copium.
Then you have the other point, which is connected with the first, that more often then not nationalized industries are terribly run. And that's by design. In some cases nationalizing something may be necessary, but that should always be veiwed as a last resort, something to be avoided.
> government should be as small as possible.
Government should represent the people. To make it as small as possible just makes the voice of the people the smaller possible.
> They have no business being employers, owning property etc.
What is owned by the state is owned by all citizens. A state that owns nothing is a poor state that needs to borrow money and eventually default and fail.
> more often then not nationalized industries are terribly run
That is not true. Many countries have national corporations that run better and give better services that for profit ones. Look at the USA education system as an example of for-profit failing. The countries that run national corporations badly, are the countries that just plainly run badly, and are corrupt. Their private sector is no better that their public one.
Except that in housing, water and rail they weren't actually terrible run. And for example in rail they were improving a lot. In terms of telecom the British Telecom had a forward thinking plan to deploy a advanced fiber network.
The question is sometimes, were they terrible run or did they just suffer from bad investment?
Because often they got little money but also had universal service requirements.
Badly privatizing these companies made things worse, not better. Just nationalizing monopolizes is a bad idea, as well as just smashing them into 100s of pieces and leaving behind a mess (see railways).
Also those countries that did things well, see Telecoms in the Nordics, or rail in Switzerland often did it state lead.
And ironically, for example rail required more subsidies after privatization. While also losing the amazing research and forward thinking organization that was British Rail.
I would argue improving these national industries would have been far easier and more successful then privatizing them. And ironically often cheaper.
Nationalization might be an avoidable disaster, but privatization is virtually guaranteed to make things worse. See: every time anything has ever been privatized. There was a reason these things were owned by the government in the first place.
I'm making the assumption that by National Grid, you mean the UK's electricity system operator, with National Grid (private company) being replaced by a NESO (public company).
> had in mind that electricity demand should decrease
Does this mean the speaker wanted demand to decrease? The UK forecasts from the Future Energy Scenarios [1] show demand increasing (see page 21).
> intermittent availability of power.
I'm assuming this was related to demand side response. Page 37 of the Future Energy Scenarios pdf contains an overview of this.
I worked at an EV smart charging start up (Kaluza) between 2019-2022 and my experience doesn't line up with a couple of your points:
> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like
During my time at Kaluza the customer could charge their EV whenever they wanted.
> you will have to adapt to when there is spare power,
The customer set their minimum state-of-charge (0-100%) and we would always have it charged to that amount by a specified time, irrespective of demand. We aimed to charge the customer's EV when demand was low (there are UK markets we can sell this ability to - these markets may have changed since I was there), which would save them money, but meeting the minimum SoC was the most important thing.
> This is just a regression in technological progress
Reducing peak demand reduces the amount of infrastructure you need and makes better use of what you have. IMO it's a good upgrade that makes much better use of the assets on the grid.
Vehicle-to-Grid (or Home) charging takes this up a level by feeding power back to the grid. This "What’s next for Vehicle-to-Everything?" PDF [2] is 4 years old now, but has some good data on V2G and the benefits it brings.
1. https://www.neso.energy/document/364541/download
2. https://info.kaluza.com/hubfs/What%E2%80%99s%20next%20for%20....
National Grid can mean NGED, NGET or NESO, god I love the UK. 2/3 of those are completely cuckoo regarding long term planning so not surprising to hear those comments.
> 2/3 of those are completely cuckoo regarding long term planning
The network operators or the system operator? Hard to do any form of sane long term planning when the regulator changes their mind every 5 years.
Thanks. We have insane stupid politcians in charge of our energy, like the Tories and Ed Miliband who recently failed upwards into the Foreign Office. These guys couldn't care less about consumers and are obsessed with the enviroment and carbon.
On the surface it sounds like a good thing to worry about the enviroment, but in reality government policy is insane and stupid. As one example, the UK in it's wisdom don't allow North Sea oil extraction, the Norweigans do. And guess who we are buying electricity from? On top of that, the UK's overall contribution to carbon emissions are insignificant compared to China. We just pay more money for electricity for no good reason. Obviously we use less electricity, we can't afford it. And Labour enviromentalists see that as a win.
> guess who we are buying electricity from?
France, mostly.
They are not morons, they simply understand the future better than you do. I don't care when my clothes or my dishes are washed, I am not at home most of the day. This will win out because it's now and will continue to be the cheapest way to produce energy. The way these things will work, they will ve completely automated, it's something you can do today with mainstream consumer appliances.
You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries.
In nearly every case, this is actually "we'll take 35% of your bill if you agree to let us sometimes turn off your A/C and clothes dryer between 5pm-8pm". It doesn't require everyone to take the deal, just enough people who want to save money. You can take the discount and use your own battery if you want, or you can pay full price so the power company can. And some will live with the mild inconvenience in exchange for money (which most of us are forced to do in so many different ways).
This is just charging people the costs of their decisions. That's capitalism at its best.
It’s also about using finer grained pricing periods (an hour or 15 minutes) with the market price visible to the user - so people are aware that running their clothes dryer (or charging their car) at one time is cheaper than others.
The UK introduced cheaper nighttime electricity (and storage heaters that could use it) - economy7 at the end of the 70’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
Part of the ambition is to increase balancing services (such as battery storage) to reduce the reliance on big always-on generators or fossil-fuel-powered suppliers and increase the ability to leverage variable-output renewables like wind and solar.
One of the key challenges is electricity distribution, with a number of key transmission bottlenecks: a notable one is Scotland/England, where Scotland renewables generate more power than necessary, but not all of it can be exported to England as their isn't enough capacity across that transmission section.
Transmission capacity growth is now the key priority for the grid, with policies and plans optimised to address the bottlenecks in distribution.
> Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).
Demand on the national grid probably should; as home solar (yes, even in stereotypically dark and cloudy UK), wind etc becomes more and more viable I think a mix of on-site and grid electricity will be increasingly common.
> I saw the same messaging in France
The grid operators are definitely not saying that in France, in fact they are spending hundreds of billion (€100B each for both RTE and Enedis) to accommodate for a growth in electricity consumption due to electrification, and are lamenting that the policies don't encourage electrification fast enough.
> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like
Curious what was actually said. I can imagine some smarter pricing incentives being put in place to move demand around. If so, you should know that versions of that have been happening for decades.
The decline in energy from 2003-present lines up nicely with the phase out of incandescent lights in favour of CFLs and of CFLs in favour of LEDs.
Lets say a house typically had 5 60W bulbs on for 8hrs a day, now replaced with an 8W bulb. That would be a 2 kWH reduction, which roughly corresponds to the drop shown in the data.
EDIT: actually now that I think about it, 2kWh per-household is probably less than 1kWh per-capita. It's still a good chunk though!
Power management (ACPI) in desktop computers also arrived in the late 1990s. Power saving sleep modes have a big impact.
Computer fleets across a country do not upgrade immediately so the lag may contribute.
And ACPI was just one energy saving initiative of that era.
There is also a substantial saving in household appliances from all the EU laws as well that have pretty substantially cut power consumption, including a lot of computers and devices at idle.
The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.
There has been a decline heavy industry and the article says industrial consumption has declined a quarter since 2005. Deindustrialisation is the major driver.
In the summer. In the winter the heat from the bulbs would help heating the homes, offices, stores, etc.
Heating the ceiling with the light is an extremely inefficient approach to heating a room.
Recently installed a bunch of incandescent bulbs because I had them at the bottom of a drawer.
I was surprised how the small amount of infrared from them makes rooms feel more pleasant to be in. It's a warmth on the skin, rather like having a fireplace going.
If I weren't paying the electricity bill, I would totally fit them everywhere.
100W of heat is like having another person in the room.
It's nothing at all like having a fireplace going - unless they're on fire, in which case both of you have a problem.
I suspect the bulb is better at radiating that heat to my skin though
This sensation of warmth while being in a nominally cold room can also be created with microwaves. A couple of such systems were designed when microwaves were the new hotness. Turns out it might cause cataracts, though.
the heat rises out of your baseboard just the same. If you’re heating your house resistive electric, you can just leave everything powered on all winter.
Or you could use all the saved energy to run a heat pump, which is even more efficient.
Street Lighting. Sodium lamps used 250-500W and LEDs are 50-150W. Councils have been replacing the former with the latter ever since it was possible, as the savings were apparent after only a few years (and, the early investors could sell the old bulbs to authorities who did not have the funds to invest)
Notably low pressure sodium is more lumens per watt than a typical LED.
The main energy saver is simply that the newer LED lights are dimmer!
You’re leaving out the part where the sodium lights wasted a lot of their lumens by tossing them into the sky. LEDs can be dimmer because they can be directionally controlled.
That's trivially solved with a reflective housing, which nearly all sodium lamps I've ever seen had.
While it is definitely true that original power drops were due to lower lumens, few things:
- reflective housing is super inefficient (~70% losses on the bounced light off typical material, at the top end expensive stuff still ~23%), still better than just losing the light upwards but not as many lumens on the road as a lab test would show
- Today LEDs are more efficient than sodium
Some math: 100W HPS cobra head lamp prdouces 9.5k lumens, including ballast it draws ~133W from the wall. Lab test shows about 70% of the lamp's light leaves the fixture (with the rest being lost in the housing) leading to ~7k lumens exiting. Roughly 53 lm/W.
LED cobra head lamps get like ~125 lm/W on the low end + fade much more slowly than sodium
Don't low-pressure sodium lamps get like >2x efficiency gains over HPS?
They do.
People don't like them mostly because they're orange.
Astronomers definitely do like them because they're orange, and they can filter it out of their photos.
Why there weren't dimmer low pressure sodium lights?
You’re right a lot of this will be domestic lighting changing.
That said, UK manufacturing decline also correlates with this as that’s very energy intensive. Also don’t rule out fridges, old 90s fridges were very energy intensive compared to today.
> Improved efficiency is also supporting reduced use in the industrial sector – as has a general decline in GB industry and associated intensive electricity use
https://energy.drax.com/intelligence/2024-the-year-electrici...
> This is part of a larger trend. Demand has been falling by 5 TWh per year since 2005. Improving efficiency (lighting, televisions, fridges, etc.), fewer homes using electric heating, and deindustrialisation all play a part
https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/?p=2065
Let's get this straight: yes, there's been a reduction in demand and increases in efficiency, but electricity is objectively extremely expensive in the UK now. Energy is being heavily imported.
This has disastrous consequences for businesses and the economy. It is the number one biggest problem facing the UK economy after the huge government debt and crippling taxes... although there are a number of other problems I could mention.
Are clothes dryers common in the UK? After moving to Japan it took me a few weeks to get used to not using one, and now looking back I can't help but think of what an enormously stupid waste of energy they are.
Does the famously damp UK climate make a difference here?
To drying clothes!? No, we're much more likely to dry clothes outside than Americans. They dry just fine outside even in mid October; a bit more slowly than that after that, but when I was a kid I remember washing going on the line on warm days in early December.
We do have electric tumble dryers, condenser dryers, washer dryers.
(Indeed, the progressive switch to condensers may be part of power consumption dropping.)
AFAIK The UK's climate is about equivalent to New York State.
They are a stupid waste of energy if you live alone and want to suffer for the sake of environment.
If you have a family of four, the clothes dryer is an ENORMOUS time-saver. I'll never voluntarily live in an apartment that doesn't have one. No way I'm sacrificing my quality of life.
I don't really mind hanging clothes, it doesn't take that long. You still have to fold and stash away clothes, and often they are crinkly out of the dryer, and don't last as long.
What it does save is space that you need to hang clothes.
During winter I also like that it provides some moisture so the air won't get too dry.
edit: so basically we only use our dryer if there's a ton of laundry to hang, plus sometimes for towels or bed sheets/blankets.
Whats so bizarre about non-americans is just how beaten down you are about these types of topics. You are post rationalizing why you shouldnt have access to modern technology. Youre so defeated you just cant understand how insane you sound.
> I don't really mind hanging clothes, it doesn't take that long.
I mean sure, but i still would rather not do it. I could wash my dishes by hand too, its not reallly that big of a deal, but i dont because we have technology. We have solutions to all these things, and your politicians have somehow convinced you that its fine that you cant use them. Bizzaro.
Spending time in Japan was how I learned that I don't want to live without a clothes dryer.
Fairly common in houses with the space for them, but they often come in washer/dryer combos if you don't have the space. These are about as effective as using a hairdryer to dry your clothes and take about 3hrs after the initial wash.
The tumble dryer I had in the US could do a full load dry in about 25-30 mins. Maybe it was significantly more wasteful in terms of energy.
Modern dryers are also far more efficient than the old ones; a heat pump dryer uses about a third the power of a conventional condenser, and even less than that of a vented.
And heat pump ones take twice as long, so the savings aren't huge. They also lie about your clothes being dry, so thrice as long perhaps
Not sure how you can call it stupid. They perform a role which is valued by a lot of people, especially those living in apartments.
That's exactly why we convert things to money - so we don't use arbitrary measurements. An energy use is not "wasteful", it can only be expensive. Which is worth or not, depending on particular conditions.
I guess I'm just an oddball. Spending 5 minutes to hang my clothes seems like a tiny price to pay to save a ton of energy the way the rest of most of the world does. But I guess the HN crowd are mostly gated community techies who can't be bothered to walk three blocks to a supermarket, either. So I'm yelling at clouds here
I moved to the UK, and also got a dryer at that point.
The weather in the UK can be very humid, and if you don't have much of a garden, it can be impossible to dry your clothes at times. We've had times where our living room was full of clothes for more than a few days, and it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't really dry anyway.
So we've invested in dehumidifiers and a dryer, and it made our life a lot more comfortable.
The UK has huge problems with mould growth caused by damp. Drying clothes indoors is one of the causes. Energy is expensive so people don't heat their homes properly. Those two things combined cause mould which leads to severe health problems.
Dryers output heat, so it is possible to kill 2 birds with one stone here. I know several people who use dryers at strategic times to heat their house.
A dehumidifier solves both problems. Put your damp clothes in a room with a dehumidifier and they're dry by the morning. You can also use it when it's wet to keep the room humidity down to 50%.
Like others said, weather and conditions. During summers here clothes dry in an hour during the day, and they're half ironed to boot. In the winters however... I still remember bringing my jeans back inside as a slab of ice, and having foggy windows due to drying indoors.
They're not really. I only live with my partner and don't have kids, and even then we've got to have clothes airers around the house all the time. If we had kids then it'd become unfeasible to have that much washing blocking the house
The linked iea data shows that the reduction is roughly 50/50 industrial and residential. So the deindustrialisation narrative is part of the story but improved efficiency at home is also a significant factor.
Dying from heatstroke in the summer is a third.
This only works if the UK had a bunch of ACs in the 80s but got rid of them all in the last couple decades because of some vague degrowth bogeyman.
Not keeping up with the developed world is degrowth.
I hope Europeans remember their colonial history because with how they are managing their economies they are going to have it revisited on them in a generation or two.
Because of no AC?
People from the global south like you forget how far north Europe is. Much of Europe never needed it. Now maybe it does for a week or two per year. Things will change.
Apart from thousands of people dying each year.
Fun fact: while there have been roughly 1,000 deaths this year in France attributed to extremely hot weather during the summer... there were more than 10,000 deaths (ten times as many) attributed to cold weather in the preceding winter.
Northern Europe's main problem, every year, is keeping people warm in the winter. Heat death in the summer is a novelty. Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe, because warming winters will save more people than hot summers kill.
On the other hand, people on the equator are FUCKED: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/change-heat-death-rate?ta...
> Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe, because warming winters will save more people than hot summers kill.
Is this informed by studies, or are you just assuming "global warming = higher average temperature = less cold"? Because that's not how the climate works. It's very well possible that global warming increases the number of cold-related deaths in Europe.
I'm going by the data source of the chart of estimated mortality which I linked, which is from https://horizons.hdr.undp.org/
Ah, thanks. I feel like there's far too much uncertainty to state "Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe", but I'm not basing that on concrete data, so hopefully I'm wrong.
How do you figure? Unless we all had air con in the 80s and then removed it
Industrial output now is much higher in real terms than in the 70s.
"The United Kingdom needs less electricity per person than in the 1970s" would be an alternative title.
An alternate, less accurate title.
The wealth of a nation is directly related to how much energy is available to it.
Financial services, film studios, and pharmaceuticals use a lot less energy than steel and shipbuilding. The UK economy is 80% services, and heavy industry has mostly disappeared, aside from cars and aerospace. The UK is far richer than it was in the 1970s, but it doesn't make many ships.
Your description might be right on paper that it’s richer today than it was in the 1970s but I believe dismantling the industry has been detrimental for the UK and Europe in general. I frequently visit the UK and it doesn’t strike me as a particularly prosperous country(although the rich seem to live well).
Seems generally like a good thing? I know the biggest difference I can think of in my lifetime is just how much better insulated houses are. Not on a par with Scandinavia, but still massively improved from even the peak electricity consumption period in the charts of 2005. I wonder how much that contributes to the overall reduction in demand.
Only 9% of the UK is electric only heating [1], so I suspect heating is not a large driver here.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
Just an observation, but my first thought was how energy demand strongly correlates with economic growth and wondered if the article could be cast in that light. Might be fun to overlay that graph with UK gilt rates
edit: helpful robot boyfriend plotted it https://i.imgur.com/Hp199vV.png
That link is particularly helpful for UK users, "Content not available in your region".
Isn’t most of the housing in the UK from the 1970’s too?
No? It would be pretty remarkable if the majority of all UK housing was built in a single decade. If you meant to say 'from before the 1970s' then that might be a more defensible claim. But old houses can be upgraded with double glazing, insulation, etc.
About half the homes I've lived in (maybe a dozen?) were built before WW1. Lots of Victorian conversions.
I am in my fifties and have only spent 18 months or so in houses built after 1970 (both of which were, well… bad)
Grew up in a house built in the 50s, university dorm was built in the late 1800s, student housing was Edwardian at the latest except two houses I lived in as a postgrad, then a place built in 1720 or something, current place is 220 years old on the ground floor plus an Edwardian bit, and I suspect the first and second were first built in the late 1800s; nobody actually knows and it looks like it might have been substantially rebuilt.
The ground floor of this place gets cold; the upper floors have conservation-area sash windows but also ultra-modern insulation under the tiles.
I am trying to avoid listed buildings for the next place, but I would be a bit surprised if I bought anywhere as new as the 1970s! Kind of want an old interwar bungalow next.
My house is from the 1870s.
No. The majority of it, still, was built before 1945 (median is 1920 or something)
(The ground floor of my house, which is, to be fair, quite damp, was built 220 years ago; this is not all that remarkable and my neighbours' houses are fifty years older)
1970s houses are pretty energy-efficient by comparison.
But it's worth noting that a surviving 100 year old house in the UK is likely to be warmer than a surviving 100 year old house in the USA; it is not only brick-built but it is also likely to be in a terrace of several houses, so it has some of the heat retention advantage of an apartment.
The "newer" town in my area is a railway town — it is actually a very old settlement but it became a big important town when the railway arrived in the early 1840s. Much of the housing in that town dates back to the 1860s through to the Edwardian era at the latest and is small houses in brick terraces of ten or fifteen houses in a row (usually in staggered terraces of four or five).
These houses are all supplied with natural gas now, and they have increasingly well-insulated roofs (and loft conversion rooms), double and triple glazing, so they have become warmer and pretty energy efficient.
But in the early 1970s, many of them still would not have been on the town gas supply, they would have been burning a lot more coal, and therefore almost all their supplemental heating (cooking, much of their hot water) would have been electric.
(Edited: 1920 is the median)
No it's a catastrophic failure of planning and institutional nerve.
Explain. Nobodys going without power.
UK has some of the highest costs of power in the world. There's a lot of demand destruction there, a lot of industries left. due to high costs.
What were the prices like relative to the rest of the world 20-40 years ago when most of that industry was offshored?
Which industries? If you're going to make that claim be specific. The UK has deindustrialised since the 70s which was nothing to do with electricity costs or availability. Any recent industries leaving are not covered by the stats here so would be pretty irrelevant, which means you're not talking about those, you're talking about something else for it to cover the period between the 70s and now.
4,000 people lost their livelihoods in Hull last month with the owner explicitly citing electricity costs as the reason. More or less every single steel producer, and even refineries, are just gone.
Even parliament acknowledges the effect this has had: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/139767/pdf/
That is the most astoundingly smug and tone-deaf question I have ever heard.
Yeah this doesn't answer the question does it. It's not even what this topic is about. Closing something a couple of months ago isnt moving the needle on the post literally talking about since the 1970s, which is the point I was very clear about making to hopefully avoid someones "well last month X happened" argument which as you full well know is nothing remotely to do with the topic at hand, however sad it may be that people have lost their jobs, which is also not the topic at hand.
Please debate in good faith.
We have expensive, potentially unreliable (if an interconnect fails we are completely fucked so certainly fragile), energy.
Energy is what allows modernity to function, we have made it so expensive that no one can make anything in Britain just in time for hard power and manufacturing to be really important again.
Chemicals, metals, pottery, glass,fertiliser etc are all basically impossible to do competitively in Britain.
Energy has only been expensive recently, and there has been zero issue with power supply beyond silly tabloid fear mongering. So between the 70s and lets say 10 years ago, the argument for expensive power really does not hold true.
There are so many great companies that were in existence in Britain that were as good as any company in the world. And most of them have folded up like a cheap suit. Note: the Brits aren’t alone. The thing that hurts is that Great Britain had access to the North Sea oil and basically squandered it. Their partner/peer across the North Sea, Norway, had a plan and they executed very well to the derision of many economic purists/conservatives even today because they didn’t give the gentry class the share they wanted.
There are many companies that have folded or who are in reduced circumstances in the United States. Many of them were dominant after the war. And they were on top of their game, but despite being on the top, the management team wanted to set themselves up and just wanted to milk the proceeds and primarily stick them into their pockets.
US Steel, Xerox, Kodak, IBM, Intel Microsoft, Motorola Schaumburg, Illinois let’s be honest, most of these companies stagnated at the top, in many areas of modern technology, being on top isn’t the end it’s just the start. of an endless process on a treadmill for as long as you are in existence, as a company. Which is the main reason why Apple had better take the design and engineering of memory in house the treadmill never stops.
The Tory ban on onshore wind is probably responsible for several percent of the price all by itself.
Hopefully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Green_Links will get built and start having an effect before the next election.
Maybe. Volatility I think, ceteris paribus, forces the clearing price up and wind is extremely volatile so there is only so much you can get with having more of it.
But since ceteris ain't paribus, this analysis is woefully incomplete.
It can be good or bad depending on what's driving the change. Improving efficiency, assuming it comes at a reasonable cost, is generally good.
If people are just going without, then that's generally bad.
They arent going without. Blackouts/brownouts are exceptionally rare in the UK.
That's fine for residential customers. But if there isn't cheap, reliable excess capacity then that inhibits industrial growth. Low economic growth rates cause everyone to go without.
The UK doesn't really rely on industrial growth for the economic growth it has.
Right, that's one of the reasons why UK economic growth has been so anemic.
The UK deindustrialize themselves they stopped making things that reduced the energy that the used to use.
That's not the only way to go without. Cutting back on your electricity usage because your utility bill is getting too high is another way to do it.
Sometimes that's fine if you're just reducing waste. However other times it could mean that you can't keep your house at a reasonable temperature because you can't afford to run your heater/air conditioning enough. That's a form of going without.
jevon's paradox says that improved efficiencies would increase consumption
I see a lot of comments here see "per capita" and think "residential consumption" - but the decrease is more indicating of general deindustrialization
If houses get more efficient that doesn’t mean we build more houses? A case where jevons paradox doesn’t apply?
houses using less energy means energy is cheaper for everyone else, f.e. industry
Construction becoming cheaper and higher quality caused us to use way more space per person than 100 or 50 years ago.
Seems an odd way to say it.
Wouldn't it be more natural to say that the UK USES less electricity per person than in the 1970's ?
My favourite story is that it was someone’s job to watch for the end of Eastenders to trigger a dam release to generate surplus electricity for everyone to put their kettle on to make tea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
Energy capacity = economic capacity, in one chart:
https://x.com/a16z/status/2108950777440165999?
There are no low electricity, rich countries.
I sincerely hope the UK is able to muddle its way through its current host of challenges.
Interesting - I had never associated the rate of energy consumption with jingoism, but based on some of the comments here it clearly is.
I guess it’s sort of a “I drive a large inefficient car and that’s a good thing” kind of situation? Excessive unnecessary production and consumption is a positive trait?
Certainly doesn't help that AI datacenters use energy consumption as a stand-in for scale, so now the "line must go up" market growth psychology is spreading into power consumption overall as a bigger = better thing.
Do you have any sources that this is actually the case in the industry in any decision making?
Standard of life and energy consumption are clearly correlated, though in the long-term improved efficiency makes this hard to evaluate.
The fact is, the UK has undergone a nearly complete deindustrialization in that period. e.g 'cars made per capita' is about 1/3 what it was. Domestic white goods are gone. Commercial shipbuilding is gone. Consumer electronics is gone. Domestic textiles are gone. Steel smelting (and nearly recycling) and machine tools are gone. For centuries(decades) these things were quintessentially British.
Offshore wind already under construction should take it back to the peak.
If the Hinckley point C had been on schedule that would account for about one fifth of the gap between the peak and current level. Instead it'll come online in 5 years.
This is around the same time the UK is forecast to become a net exporter of electricity.
This isn't related to demand, but is relevant to the discussion around price. A number of of transmission links are being built to transfer electricity from Scotland to England [1] with the first 2 coming online in 2029.
They will help reduce costs by reducing:
1. Wind generation being curtailed.
2. Gas generation used to replace the curtailed wind (referred to as turn-up).
Based on the GB Transmission Constraints site data the costs as of Oct 2026 curtailment costs 257.96 £m and turn-up is 1,378.91 £m.
The article "Transmission Network Unavailability – the Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain" [3] article provides a good analysis.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Green_Links
2. https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/curtailment
3. https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
It’s just plain expensive thanks to the shitty price everything by most expensive source method. Of course people minimise use
Currently paying 0.33 usd a unit.
Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off.
Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.
One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
Well whatever the hell they're doing on pricing it's not working. Having huge amounts of wind, strong interconnects, gas fields near by and still ending up tied for 3rd most expensive elec is ridiculous. Especially given how good storage is looking relative to gas lately [0].
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1x0tds4/4hour_b...
The main things that will reduce our power bills is a) upgrading the grid to improve transmission and reduce curtailment; and b) adding generation and storage capacity, reducing the amount of high-cost peak gas generation we use.
These things are in progress. A vast amount of generation and storage capacity came online this year and much more still to come. This will gradually take effect, oil conflicts notwithstanding.
Look into a battery + inverter + optional solar on a time of use tariff, you can be always off peak. Payback probably isn't very long.
Solar is great. I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense.
In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?
There are other reasons to do this, but purely on the financial side, I'd want to see the numbers on this one. Again, this isn't about solar, the claim was about battery + inverter + time-of-use paying for itself.
Grid scale BESS (battery energy storage system) in the UK is growing fast, because it makes financial sense. There's one that just expanded from 100MWh/100Mw to 475MWh/350MW: https://www.pacificgreen.com/energy-parks/energy-park-case-s... . It's easy to run the numbers, easier to make a payback calculator with AI. Take a look at the Anker E5000 / Ecoflow Stream 5000, and run the numbers yourself, I'd be interested to see what the payback would be for you.
> I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense.
Ever? Batteries are 10x cheaper today than they were ~a decade ago. If that trend continues for even a little longer, they'll be absolute no-brainer like solar is today within the next 5 years.
2026 seems to be roughly the break-even point. And whether it's worth it depends on where you live (greatly affects the cost of both installing a system, and buying energy from the grid).
Home batteries are much quicker to pay off than solar at the moment. This is largely due to being able to do strong arbitrage between import and export prices at different times of day, and some high guaranteed consumer export tariffs.
There’s no guarantee things will stay that way though, not least because the more storage added to the grid, the more those arbitrage opportunities get soaked up.
> In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?
They... are? https://www.energy-storage.news/another-record-breaking-year...
Other people have made the point, but: the ability of companies to deploy batteries is limited by planning permission (ie the indigenous British NIMBY). Home solar and batteries are planning exempt, so they can be deployed more quickly and cheaply.
In the UK, solar is fairly ineffective in the winter as the sun barely comes over the horizon for not many hours a day.
True, but if you get cheap power from solar for the rest of the year, and charge the battery from the grid off peak when there's no solar to charge, you should end up paying less than just the standard rate.
I import more than I export in December and January, but for every other month of the year it’s the reverse by some margin. My annual electricity bill is net negative, and the installation cost will be paid off in 7 years. The numbers would be even better in, say, Spain, but they are perfectly adequate here, despite suboptimal latitude.
Incidentally, the grid only knows about my exports. Self-consumption manifests as demand reduction, so UK solar production and electricity consumption is probably higher than aggregate figures suggest.
It's helped a lot by the fact that solar panels have become very cheap indeed, so the fact that we don't get as much sun as other places doesn't matter so much - it will still pay off, as long as you can actually use that energy effectively (which may require batteries or a decent export payment rate).
Has anyone done this on the cheap? I've gotten a few quotes with a payback period of 8-12 years, which isn't great.
Yeah, I bought an inverter from eBay, and a battery from AliExpress. Also signed up to axle energy to reduce payback period. Most people would need an electrician to connect it though. If you just asked an electrician for a new circuit with a simple route to an isolator, it wouldn't be expensive.
Can't - building prohibits everything along those lines
The spot price is set according to the most expensive source but that is not the same thing as the price the consumer pays.
So for example, for wind power the consumer effectively pays the CfD strike price, largely irrespective of the spot price.
Fwiw, I do agree we have a problem with power being too expensive, but it's more complex than just the consumer pays the most expensive source.
I can think of any number of reasons for this.
The rise of gas central heating means that less electricity is used for supplemental heating.
We've gone from 70% of houses using coal to heat in the 1970s, which meant a lot more electric supplemental heating, to 70% using "town gas" central heating, which means less.
Combined with that, those lethal electric bar fires are a thing of the past, and the ones that remain have been replaced by efficient oil-filled radiators and at least somewhat more efficient storage heaters. Also many fewer houses rely on electric immersion heaters for water.
Houses are better insulated. And it is a lot warmer (actually shockingly so — 1.5C more on the mean maximum daily temperature in winter) so there is much less supplemental electric heating needed.
Cooker hobs are not the horribly inefficient hot metal ring element things they used to be — halogen, induction and gas hobs have replaced them, more use of microwaves etc.
LED lighting.
Solar (assuming it is not included in the numbers).
Even things like electric kettle elements are modestly more efficient (more sealed-element kettles), an energy efficiency drive in the 90s persuaded people to only boil the water they needed.
And talking of kettles, we drink only a third as much tea per person as we did in the 1970s, and while we drink much more coffee, it has not closed the gap. That is a _massive_ amount of electricity consumption; the average person in the 1970s drank around 25 cups of tea per week, now the average is as low as eight (which is frankly weird)
Residential gas and efficiency are big components, but why ignore the elephant in the room - the seismic deindustrialization of the UK since the 70s? Industry was the largest consumer of electricity in the 70s, is more electrified now, yet still uses less electricity due to its dramatically smaller output.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm also not addressing it. I don't know that much about it. I do remember living in the 1970s; I just don't remember deindustrialisation well enough to speak of it (though I do remember I used to walk past a literal blacksmith and a stonemason to school).
I don't actually think the deindustrialisation of the UK is any sort of elephant in the room, as it goes. This is a small, tightly packed country and our physical quality of life has improved radically with the deindustrialisation of towns (and indeed, in this timeframe, the destruction of the last of the appalling housing that it forced on people).
Interesting point of view. The UK was considered the 'Workshop of the World' for generations though, and this was associated at the time with the wealth and relatively very high standard of living (and housing). This all fell apart in the 70s and most agree that housing and standard of living in the UK have not been improving as quickly since when compared to e.g. the new 'Workshop(s) of the World' as in Japan, Taiwan, Korean, now China.
Comparing rates of improvement is a bit silly, isn't it? They start from different places. I live very modestly but suspect my standard of living is still rather more comfortable than the average Chinese person.
The average standard of housing in the UK compared to the early 1970s is night and day different. People were still living in appalling slum conditions when I was young. That stuff has gone. It's just completely weird to suggest that we're stuck back there.
I don't know who the "most" who "agree" are. But if this is going to turn out to be another thing where people use air conditioning or car ownership or drying clothes outside or whatever as proxies to call people poor or left behind… ehh.
Even though I live in a weird, small, mostly 200 year old house which is sometimes cold and a little damp (and share walls with three neighbours!) in a cluttered corner of a fading British town, I would rather live here than in the average American house in the average American town. Quality of life is so much more complex than buildings.
(I would like a little more space when I next move. So I can dry clothes outdoors)
To be honest you seem to want to read a lot more into what I'm saying than I (not an American) intend. I don't think the notion that China has improved in standard of living much more than the UK since the 70s requires citations, but it is fair to ask if comparing rates of improvement is meaningful - probably not really.
I'm genuinely surprised that you view the UK's industrial past so negatively - as the cause and not the solution to slums. It was the national pride and joy at the time and people celebrated it for raising their standard of living (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition). The terraced houses of the 1800's were actually built in part due to government initiative to improve housing for the working class beyond what was possible in comparable European cities. You even state that your own house from the UK's industrial heyday is up to modern standards! That's quite an achievement!
Would you apply this same logic (that industrialization degrades housing) to China - where the replacement of slums by modern apartments is usually seen to be a consequence of the vast industrial capacity?
Of course, the improved material standards of living from industrialization come at the cost of air quality and pollution - but these are likely solvable problems in the long-term.
The slums were literally caused by industrialisation.
In what sense?
Slums existed globally long before industrialisation (antiquity). The buildings which replaced the slums were built with the outputs of industry, and were bought by workers earning good wages from industrial jobs.
In Britain people were forced to move into cities due to enclosure - industrialisation saved them from the elite-imposed death sentence (which forced my ancestors to leave). It's an heroic story.
Again, would you say that Chinese industrialisation causes slums in China? Would you say that the demolition of slums in China, to be replaced by modern buildings, is assisted or inhibited by Chinese industrialisation? Would a similar country with less industry (e.g. India) have more or less slums? Would standards be better in Chinese or Indian slums?
Left wing thought is rooted in the idea that industrialisation allowed workers to create vast material wealth but did not give them their fair share. Now we have progressive Thatcherites apparently.
I am referring to the tenement slums that were built in the early industrial era. Vast, vast swathes of awful factory and mine worker housing, unsanitary, full of disease.
These persisted until the labour movements forced by then extremely wealthy industrialists to build something better; railway worker houses for example were usually built better and in smaller terraces (because they needed to be dotted around, rather than concentrated near factories). And then you have e.g. the biscuit factory worker houses in Reading, built by the more enlightened Huntley & Palmer factory.
But much of what was built from the late 1780s until the late 1880s was often of absolutely appalling quality.
The problem I have with HN is this belief that things were bad and then along came industrialisation and everyone had better lives — it is tosh. Dangerously misguided tosh that is being used to support the idea that protests against AI are misguided, that Luddites were only vandals, that the industrial era made everyone healthier and happier and freed them from farm labour.
It took a hundred years before their lives were on average better.
And there were industrial workers houses of appalling quality — the ones that didn't get bombed out in WWII — still in existence until I was eleven or twelve years old in the eighties.
Deindustrialization is a bit of a meme. The UK still makes "stuff", quite a lot of stuff, and quite high value. It's just that it's less visible. Much of it is actually related to electrification, including power turbines. High value small run stuff like satellites or scientific instruments.
It looks less like men with hammers and more like mixed-gender teams in lab coats, and that makes it invisible for ~some reason~.
> Deindustrialization is a bit of a meme
I realise now I'm arguing with people who actually know very little at all about Britain's industrial history. Britain held a comparable position to current China or the US (high tech and bulk volume) manufacturing for ~100 years despite being about 2% of the world's population (and competing with the US, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, etc).
That sounds ludicrous now - it was ludicrous then too. Yet it really happened, and it really is over.
> mixed-gender teams in lab coats
Women (working-class women) were actually an essential part of the industrial workforce during that time and dominated some of the industries like textile manufacturing. Only as the middle class grew with prosperity did this even begin to change at all. Laws were passed to limit their working hours to 60 a week and prevent them from working in underground mining. There were many lady engineers and inventors too, beginning the in the late 19th (peak) and accelerating with early 20th (WWI).
England was famous not for 'men with hammers' but for highly skilled craftsmen, inventors, and engineers who produced the bulk of the most sophisticated manufactured goods in the world - textiles, steam engines and turbines, ocean liners, scientific instruments, mechanical and then electronic calculators, chemicals and dyes, weaponry, steel and other metals, mining and heavy industrial equipment, electric motors and generators, radios and televisions, radar, photography and cameras, engines, cars, even tyres, plastics, cement. These are all industries with the British created and dominated.
They didn't just 'make stuff' -> they were the 'workshop of the world'. They made 20% of the world's goods while representing 2% of the population
> power turbines
Actually, they don't make their steam turbines, wind turbines or gas turbines anymore (except for jet engines). Steam and gas turbines were invented in the UK and produced there commercially.
> scientific instrument
The UK once dominated scientific instrument making. It is ridiculous now to contend that they are serious player in this field. Optical glass and various types of microscopes, (even flat glass), fibre optics, electron microscopes. All invented in the UK, commercially produced in the UK, and now gone (since the 70s).
> I realise now I'm arguing with people who actually know very little at all about Britain's industrial history.
No, you're not. We know all this stuff (I studied economics at school, and we are taught all about our industrial history again and again and again from the age of about eight onwards).
You seem to suggest that we're somehow oblivious or ill-educated about this. We are not. We just do not think that it is meaningful to pretend that we are not mostly a services and knowledge-driven economy.
It is stupid to keep prattling on about what was lost to very much physically larger countries with more room for every kind of factory complex, poorer workers, poorer pollution controls, corrupt central-planning autocracies, and worse human rights.
Of course technology does that. Of course the expertise eventually collects nearer the manufacturing. Of course we no longer do that kind of work.
But you are not comparing like with like on any level, and you are actually being ahistorical yourself in misleading ways.
It was in fact not ludicrous at all that the early years of the British industrial revolution, that started in the UK, could meet the demand of an unindustrialised world, was it? It's just about being first and having lots of space to grow into.
In the 21st century we now have a services-led economy. And there are dolphins in the Thames again.
At any rate this feels like it is just more HN anti-British sentiment wrapped up in intellectualism. It's tedious and it ignores a lot more about British history than it takes in, while eliding that contemporary progress elsewhere is dependent on human rights often no better than early 18th Century Britain, on planned economies Britain has never had, and on state-corporate corruption that is beginning to put even our worst product, the East India Company, in the shade.
(FWIW there is still precision optics manufacture in the UK, including Taylor Hobson, a company that has been doing this for 140 years, there is still electronics manufacture, we have several firms that make us the leading manufacturers of small satellites in Europe, we are still AFAIK the centre of excellence of microsatellites, we may no longer have ARM owned in the UK but the chips are still designed here. And I think "except for jet engines" is kind of deserving of a particularly hilarious asterisk)
which in short means the real-gdp has gone down since the 1970s.
some people will talk about efficiency etc.
but one true metric more than easily fakeable GDP numbers is electricity production and electricity consumption per capita.
a growing economy simply uses more electricity / energy - to move people, goods, get more work done etc.
Electricity consumption isn’t a good measure of Services.
If you shut down a steel mill and replace it with ARM, GDP is up but energy consumption is down.
This is great, maybe!
There are lots of factors that feed into this: lots of solar, batteries, more efficiency, improved insulation.
Some others: increase of heat pumps, energy poverty, reduction in industrial energy (both due to good and bad reasons)
Ultimately though, its not about how much energy per capita, its about the sources of energy, and how effectively they are used... my heat pump uses infinity more electricity than my boiler, but far more effectively uses the underlying energy source.
Not unsurprising, excluding grid efficiency and industrial demand, its also just households. More and more places are getting batteries wherever possible, plug in solar is also avaialble. The amount of demand I don't forsee increasing at all unless people start getting air source heatpumps.
The incandescent to LED switch is a major factor, but most things have become more efficient, a Sky box uses 30x less power than the 90s.
No wonder, with the industrial collapse and increase in prices.
Events: UK using less energy and decarbonising the production? Commentors: OUTRAGE
These days, if you say anything positive about Britain, you'll be arrested and thrown in jail
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark does not approve this
I mean it makes sense.
Demand was on a constant down trends. From PCs, servers over light bulbs to electric based heating (heat pumps and IR heat lamps instead of "direct" electric heating + better insulation) everything has got _way_ more efficient. But also a lot of high energy need industry has moved of from the UK (or most 1st world countries) for decades by now.
A short (not proper) lookup show that even if you where to replace _all_ cars in the UK with electric cars the total need for that would be 30TWh/y while the UK produces ~322TWh/y so less then a 10% increase (in relation to production, not consumption).
The only thing which has caused a mayor hickup more or less all countries long term plan for electricity production is AI.
But not because GPGPU compute is that inefficient, it has gotten way more efficient. But instead because of how insanely much compute AI needs.
> how insanely much compute AI needs
Needs isn’t quite the right term as AI energy use is way higher than the market actually supports.
A large fraction of AI’s energy use is pure bubble me too redundancy. A long list of companies are doing essentially the same training with essentially the same data. When grok dies all that training goes away independent of any use of AI by consumers.
Similarly, by subsidizing usage with VC funds you get a lot of demand that goes away at market rates.
This is a huge positive and not hard to understand.
Massive increases in efficiency across the board. It’s hard to find non condensing dryers nowadays, almost every boiler heats water in demand, and our very old housing stock is increasingly being triple glazed and insulated.
Very high energy costs due to energy privatization accelerated things. People cannot afford to waste energy in the UK.
The US is learning that lesson now for similar reasons. Trump is doing more to drive efficiency than any number of “green” candidates.
Using less energy and decarbonising the grid? OUTRAGE!
Yeah, it's a bit depressing in the UK these days. Growing up in the 90s we learnt we were one of the richest countries in the world. Now we are slowly accepting that's just not true any more. We probably won't be a "poor" country for a while, but we're all having to learn to live with less than our parents had, both relative to the rest of the world and in absolute terms (smaller houses, longer commutes, more traffic, more pollution, more noise, less nature, worse healthcare etc)
Still the fifth largest economy in the world: https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
Now, where is all the wealth going? Perhaps a more pertinent question.
> more traffic, more pollution
More traffic, less pollution (see ULEZ controversy)
> worse healthcare
better healthcare, despite the terrible waiting list problems and the NHS dentistry issue, life expectancy continues to creep upwards.
This is directly correlated to prosperity, just like the number of push-ups you can dot turns out to be a very high-fidelity indicator of your overall health. Obviously, a significant part of the UK politics has been directly aiming at destroying the UK economy and the UK identity.
What matters is not total production but price and ability to meet demand.
And maybe even more importantly electricity paid for by the poor and industry.
What also matters to me is to how much hardship such as health issues does this production lead. Coal energy would for example cause health costs.
Generally its better to look at total energy, not electricity.
but doesn't the transtion to EV will increase the demand also, in the future?
I wonder if they're paying less than the 70s?
In the '70s you weren't guaranteed to get the electricity you paid for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
> From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Services deemed essential (e.g. hospitals, telephone switchboards, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses) were exempt. Television companies were required to cease broadcasting at 22:30 to conserve electricity [...] The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974.
But nonetheless: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...
We're currently paying a lot more than usual because:
1) we have to pay off operators for the billions of foreign investment they put into new wind and solar farms and grid storage batteries. If we didn't tempt them with a good RoI, they'd invest elsewhere, and we'd still be burning coal. The cost of this is going down year on year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
2) we're paying for new transmission capacity and replacing worn out transmission route. The fact we don't already have it, which we could've had by charging more for electricity in the 2000s and building it out decades ago, is why today we face enormous curtailment costs today, as we can't get all this wind power from where it's generated to where it's consumed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottlene...
3) our market arrangement is based on everyone bidding to supply power, and we pay everyone who generates the same rate as the highest necessary bidder. Thus the moment that there isn't enough wind power, or there is but it can't get to the region it's needed (see point 2), in come the gas turbines and given that Russia's trying to destroy Ukraine, gas is astronomically expensive. The sooner we solve our bottlenecks and decommission all the gas turbines, the better.
Only for three months, and then only due to a labor dispute.
Are those numbers already corrected for inflation?
Electricity in the UK has been reliable my entire life. Lived in the UK for 30 of the last 50 years and can remember four or five power cuts.
We’ve had 5 that I know about this year (village)
Fair enough, but that would surely be the result of local 'last mile' type infrastructure issues on a tiny scale, rather than wholesale electricity production (not being able to supply a whole city despite all the distribution infrastructure being in place), which is the topic of the article and threads.
Sure, a squirrel fries itself on a line. A tree branch falls on a line.
But the raw infrastructure was super reliable in the 70s. If anything we've used digital systems to chip away at the safety margins of the original designs
Two of mine we in the same village over two years, so yes, not everywhere is reliable. It was the same failure twice. So, yes, not everywhere is that reliable.
On the other hand I have lived in multiple places of varying sorts and regions of England (from London to a village in the North) so I think most places have reliable power, especially towns and cities. Other people's experience is mostly the same.
The numbers are in today's money.
The OP is asking about the 1970s because that's what the headline is comparing to. My point was the 1970s had a lot of problems going on (labour disputes, oil crisis, extreme weather) so it's not an ideal comparison point.
> The cost of this is going down year on year
I don't think I can agree with this. CfDs are (typically) a 15 year contract. For each CfD the price actually increases, as a result of inflation adjustment, each year. Dudgeon wind farm got £161.71 per MWh when it began but today gets £220.95 per MWh because of inflation.
Strike prices came down from where they began, but have since bounced around. Hornsea Project 2 is selling today for £80.08 per MWh but CfDs signed this year for similar Wind Farms would be (in today's money) more like £90 per MWh. Much cheaper than Dudgeon, but they are not in fact just steadily reducing in price.
The big boon for CfDs is the certainty for both parties. In 2022 and to a lesser extent again now, fossil fuel prices went crazy and so the less dependent you are on those prices the better for you. If you'd locked in CCGT prices at 2024 levels for 15 years you'd be doing great... except your providers would be bankrupt because methane just isn't available at those prices.
To further highlight the certainty versus cheaper dimension here's an analysis of public CfD payments year by year.
In 2020 22.0 TWh of electricity = £2.3B subsidy so about £104 per MWh
In 2021 21.6 TWh = £1B or about £46 per MWh
In 2022 20.5 TWh = -£235M subsidy - it paid us £17 per MWh
In 2023 20.6 TWh = £1.4B subsidy so about £68 per MWh
In 2024 31.1 TWh = £2.4B equivalent to £76 per MWh
In 2025 35.8 TWh = £2.6B or £74 per MWh
And this year, so far, 26.7 TWh for £1.7B or £62 per MWh
These numbers are pretty big, but even 35.8 TWh is maybe 12% of generation, most of Britain's renewable energy is not subsidised, it just made enough sense in the free market to build, one trick CfDs were used for, which doesn't end up with the government spending any money on a "subsidy" but which does result in more actual generation is that a potential generator would sign the CfD contract and then use a provision intended for practical obstacles - the sand bank you wanted to put turbines on turns out to be unstable for example, to instead sell the power wholesale at prevailing prices and not get a subsidy. That CfD contract made their project easier to finance, but then the market offered more money and they accepted the risk/ reward choice with their finances in place. Banks may or may not be happy they made loans on this basis, we'll find out when these firms go back for another loan and either get a champagne welcome or very different terms.
* All "subsidy" numbers are net additions to the price paid by the "Free market" clearing auction for electricity. Because metric system we can convert the market prices to the kWh units familiar to a household bill payer as "units" of electricity £100 per MWh = 10p per kWh but remember the wholesale electricity is just on some windswept Yorkshire hilltop or something at that price, you need it delivered to your home which costs extra to do.
I appreciate the details.
> you need it delivered to your home which costs extra to do
If indeed that can be done at all!
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
The thing I'd be very interested in seeing, but haven't found a way to get, is the actual bids for one of the half-hourly auctions. Even seeing one that happened a week ago and thus surely lacks ongoing commercial sensitivity, would be very interesting. I'd particularly like to see: A typical BESS morning, this morning's 0630 auction for example, and a windy night like 2330 on October 9th.
I feel as though there are things in that auction data which are obvious to the generators and maybe the network operator but are utterly opaque to the general public and might help understand why things are as they are or aren't how they might be.
I'd like to see that too. The site https://wastedwind.energy/ leads to the author's other site https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/ with per-site data, but it's not showing the whole mix or the auctions themselves.
> Strike prices came down from where they began
This is what I was meaning. The fact the contracts are auctioned via competitive bidding (usually) leads to price minimisation. Overall it seems to be a well designed procurement system.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-dif...
Anyway, thanks for the additional details, they were very informative.
The Low Carbon Contracts Company has a terrible Power BI which attempts to turn this data into charts, you can get the Power BI to give you the CSV of raw CfD data and I process it with some Rust I wrote to get at the bits I want like OK, what if we only look at February and only at Solar projects ?
https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/resources/scheme-dashboard...
So that lets me write code for "How much Electricity did we buy this way in year X and how much did we pay for it?" or "If we ignore Drax, can we see what subsidies cost us in each Summer?" and that sort of thing.
You could do much the same in Excel, or indeed if you had your own Power BI - but I can write software, I'm not great at Excel and I refuse to write Power BI reports without being paid for it because it's awful.
Less coal lying around?
Isn't this a good thing? I mean, is there a direct correlation between electricity usage and country = better?
Over the 20th century, people switched from fuel based lighting, heating and cooking to electric, and acquired laundry machines, dishwashers, fridges, TVs, air conditioning etc etc. So electricity was a pretty good proxy for a certain aspect of quality of life. It might be a less useful measure in the developed world in the 21st century as we have kind of plateaued on energy-intensive appliances and are more focused on efficiency, and because other aspects of quality of life like pollution, work, mental health etc may be more salient.
I mean, what do you expect out of a resource poor island? The only reason the UK was on the map is because it has intelligent, well spoken people that could make deals and exploit the resources of their colonies. That’s not enough when you don’t have colonies. It’s reverting to the mean.
Seems like a bit of misconception given it has coal (more relevant historically), iron, North Sea gas, a temperate climate, fisheries and coastline, plenty of arable land and more recently massive potential for renewable energy.
Actually the UK has had a ridiculous number of resources despite its small size. It had good mineral wealth from coal to copper to tin (which was mined in the region before the Roman Empire) to some oil and so on. A lot of that is depleted but its mineral wealth contrasts with the Japanese home islands which had little. It has some decent arable land (although it keeps building on it) and better rainfall than some areas.
It also seems to be blessed with few natural disasters such as major earthquakes, volcanoes, larger tornadoes etc.
Yes, and this is why the living standard is falling.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.1855
We may genuinely have the worst energy market in the developed world. It's going to get cheaper and reliable any day soon - George monbiot told me so it must be true.
If you import 12 million people in 20 years, your energy generation, water provision, and housing affordability are all going to fall off a cliff vs demand.
Why would energy generation fall off a cliff if the population increases by 12 million? How does that makes sense?
It’s measured per capita
I'm pretty sure electricity demand in the UK has been declining in absolute terms, not just per capita.
Due to industry leaving.
That’s both not what you said, and not how energy generation is measured.
> Chernobyl failed when operators attempted to raise the generator output from 4 kw/h per capita to 5.7 kw/h per capita
How silly
That’s a hypothesis that would make sense if this were per-capita alone but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/...
It's true that industry has been massively moving out of the UK for the last 50 years, so energy demand has gone down, but that just means that the proportion of energy generation costs are higher for the population.
Energy policy in Europe/UK is completely moronic. At some point in the past places like France and Germany had the most modern and technology advanced grids (nuclear) and were energy independent. Then the leftists/green came and destroyed it all, only to buy gas from Russia and the Middle East because renewables aren't enough during the winter and when demand is high. So now Germans pay the highest electricity prices in the world and still don't have AC (it's everywhere in China now). The left literally turned Germany into a third world country.
Wasn't it fear of a Fukushima type event rather than Green policy that was the final nail in the coffin of German nuclear?
It was a combination.