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.
> "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...
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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