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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> "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.
> 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..).
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The trouble is that one of the main drivers of low TFR is labor policies. Feminism and "empowerment" and "equal rights", it turns out, were basically submarine propaganda for ensuring that women all enter the workforce, rather than learn how to be wives and mothers, and bear children.
Girls and women in the workforce, or training for careers rather than motherhood, are not going to stop because the population drops off. They are not going to stop without unapologetic reversals of these labor and education policies. Even among religiously devout sectors of the West, woman are essentially being presented with no choice but to go into careers and abandon motherhood for all intents and purposes.
I see this all the time in my Roman Catholic milieu. The crux of preaching certainly encourages women never to neglect motherhood or family life, but there is no cleric who wouldn't encourage girls to enroll in colleges, to seek careers in teaching and health care, or to stop volunteering and serving in active ministry for their parish. Basically, the Church has been cajoled and beguiled into selling this lie to women that they really "can have it all" without really making any sacrifices, or giving up any one thing, to be the best mother and wife that they could be.
Ultimately a family can train a girl to be a mother, or a worker, not either/or. Look at boys in the West. I was formed to work in an office, to go have a career and make money, and absolutely useless at any domestic task, such as cooking, cleaning, personal finance. A family has precious few formative years to teach their boy or girl how to be a parent, or how to be a good worker-bee, and these paths usually turn out to be mutually exclusive.
This aspect of equality and diversity is not really ideological, but it is fueled by labor policies that, once enacted, are not easily reversed. You can see how such policies expand the labor pool, inflate the workforce nationwide, and give a distinct national advantage over any nation, culture, or ideology that chooses to protect women and continue fostering motherhood and traditional families.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, many successful people owe their success to tacit knowledge and subconscious preferences. Others have an inkling of why they succeed, but can't fully articulate it. This is why there won't be another Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet, no matter how much they've written or been studied.
It follows that some people are successful despite themselves. Every piece of explicit advice they give can be wrong. They succeed because they're not actually following their own advice even when they think they are.
Then there's the possibility that someone like Thiel pushes advice and ideas to manipulate people. It might be deliberately wrong, or more likely (in this cynical scenario) he might not care if it's right or wrong, just that it'll produce a particular effect.
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?
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
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
> 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.
There are comments here saying yes, rationing is planned.
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.
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)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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?
> "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...
> 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..).
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.
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.
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.
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...)
> 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
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
>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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 :-)
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...
> 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.
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.
And to what temperature do you set your AC in the summer?
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
Building more power plants seems like a pretty sane approach to me.
> 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.
Lime plaster with cork in it works, it's just a messy retrofit
Lime render with cork is the outside version
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach.
No, you're supposed to do the other way around.
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.
> 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.
That's a pretty solvable problem, since we're spending money to solve problems.
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.
Fair enough
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The trouble is that one of the main drivers of low TFR is labor policies. Feminism and "empowerment" and "equal rights", it turns out, were basically submarine propaganda for ensuring that women all enter the workforce, rather than learn how to be wives and mothers, and bear children.
Girls and women in the workforce, or training for careers rather than motherhood, are not going to stop because the population drops off. They are not going to stop without unapologetic reversals of these labor and education policies. Even among religiously devout sectors of the West, woman are essentially being presented with no choice but to go into careers and abandon motherhood for all intents and purposes.
I see this all the time in my Roman Catholic milieu. The crux of preaching certainly encourages women never to neglect motherhood or family life, but there is no cleric who wouldn't encourage girls to enroll in colleges, to seek careers in teaching and health care, or to stop volunteering and serving in active ministry for their parish. Basically, the Church has been cajoled and beguiled into selling this lie to women that they really "can have it all" without really making any sacrifices, or giving up any one thing, to be the best mother and wife that they could be.
Ultimately a family can train a girl to be a mother, or a worker, not either/or. Look at boys in the West. I was formed to work in an office, to go have a career and make money, and absolutely useless at any domestic task, such as cooking, cleaning, personal finance. A family has precious few formative years to teach their boy or girl how to be a parent, or how to be a good worker-bee, and these paths usually turn out to be mutually exclusive.
This aspect of equality and diversity is not really ideological, but it is fueled by labor policies that, once enacted, are not easily reversed. You can see how such policies expand the labor pool, inflate the workforce nationwide, and give a distinct national advantage over any nation, culture, or ideology that chooses to protect women and continue fostering motherhood and traditional families.
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.
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/
- 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?
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.
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.”
"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.
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.
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.
Surely you understand that infinite growth is impossible, and it will all come crashing down sooner or later.
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
But, climate change!
Climate changeis a reason to produce more not less. Ac isnt energy free
"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.
Will ac fix all the other things that come along? Like, extreme weather, droughts, flooding?
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.
> 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.
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....
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Can you provide a source for either of your claims?
Like a selfie of me at the conference?
How about some detail like the time, place or name of the conference, the name of the speaker or the title of the talk?
That could work.
I've only heard similar claims repeated by Reform.
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?
Just to play Devil's Advocate, many successful people owe their success to tacit knowledge and subconscious preferences. Others have an inkling of why they succeed, but can't fully articulate it. This is why there won't be another Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet, no matter how much they've written or been studied.
It follows that some people are successful despite themselves. Every piece of explicit advice they give can be wrong. They succeed because they're not actually following their own advice even when they think they are.
Then there's the possibility that someone like Thiel pushes advice and ideas to manipulate people. It might be deliberately wrong, or more likely (in this cynical scenario) he might not care if it's right or wrong, just that it'll produce a particular effect.
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.
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-...
> 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.
Europe did not replace coal with gas. The only country that did this worth mentioning is the US.
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...
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.
> "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.
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.
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!
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.
Why there weren't dimmer low pressure sodium lights?
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.
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.
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
In the summer. In the winter the heat from the bulbs would help heating the homes, offices, stores, etc.
Or you could use all the saved energy to run a heat pump, which is even more efficient.
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.
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.
Industrial output now is much higher in real terms than in the 70s.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Can't - building prohibits everything along those lines
In the UK, solar is fairly ineffective in the winter as the sun barely comes over the horizon for not many hours a day.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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/...
No it's a catastrophic failure of planning and institutional nerve.
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.
Explain. Nobodys going without power.
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.
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.
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.
What were the prices like relative to the rest of the world 20-40 years ago when most of that industry was offshored?
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?
My house is from the 1870s.
About half the homes I've lived in (maybe a dozen?) were built before WW1. Lots of Victorian conversions.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That’s both not what you said, and not how energy generation is measured.
> Chernobyl failed when operators attempted to raise the generator from 4 kw/h per capita to 5.7 kw/h per capita
How silly
I'm pretty sure electricity demand in the UK has been declining in absolute terms, not just per capita.
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.