181–190 of 353 posts
Some of these are "costs" which reduce costs elsewhere. Smart meters for example, though rollout has hit snags and they've become targets for weird conspiracy theories, they are basically designed to give better real time info on electricity demand which helps with managing the grid. This in theory should save money elsewhere. Similarly for CfD. Yes the government may on net be paying a subsidy to get wind power buil…
Direct investment with ownership - that would make money for the tax payer but would be "socialism".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you have to admit english people have a weird tick when it comes to poverty. you worship poor people. and yes, you guys willingly live like you are poor when you guys are definitely not poor
Not for long I suspect. There has been a rather marked exodus of millionaires from Britain since July as a result of a range of fiscal changes promised by the government. Some significant businesses have decided to relocate. Unrelated to this: now it's been found that a majority of Brits receive more in benefits than they contribute in taxes. Not a good outlook. Meanwhile it's estimated that the richest 1% of earners…
This has been the case for decades. It's not news.
It is substantially less than PG&E California prices, which average around 50-55 cents.
> The UK has achieved the fastest rate of grid decarbonisation among advanced economies. A lot of this progress occurred when renewables were still expensive, so we are stuck with a cost hangover. Luckily, renewables are getting much cheaper, so the tradeoffs in future policy are very different. A silver lining at least. I’m old, so won’t see the benefits of this I’m sure, but it’s still nice to know we’ve made some…
The UK has 30GW of wind capacity. Two weeks ago wind was generating 1.8GW (5% of demand at the time). The benefits of a power source are only somewhat theoretical when you can't rely on it being there when you need it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It eliminates the need for staff to manually read them and guarantees they are read correctly every month.
That is the sales pitch, the error rate on the overcharging side is infinitely larger than that of mechanical meters. Not a fun lottery to win.
The same author wrote the blog post that was on the front page here recently about the plummeting cost of solar [0]. I really like his posts, readable by someone like me who is way below layman on the subject, but I think also pretty interesting to someone with experience in the field. [0] https://climate.benjames.io/solar-off-grid/
We don't even get that much sun in summer, today sunrise was at 0842, sunset at 1540 - so not even 7 hrs of daylight. Even then it was a very dull day.
So in the period (winter) when we most need power, local solar is essentially useless.
Local wind may be better, but the economics for it don't really work - requiring 100% gas turbine backup, and high costs due to intermittent use of said turbines .
Some of these are "costs" which reduce costs elsewhere. Smart meters for example, though rollout has hit snags and they've become targets for weird conspiracy theories, they are basically designed to give better real time info on electricity demand which helps with managing the grid. This in theory should save money elsewhere. Similarly for CfD. Yes the government may on net be paying a subsidy to get wind power buil…
Maybe, but the long term planning has been atrocious, millions of smart meters already need replacing because of the 3g switch off. It's massively wasteful if they are all going to need replacing again in 10 years when 4g is switched off. Not to mention the concerns about electricity companies remotely forcing meters into prepayment mode or switching off people's electricity supply.
3G is being discontinued first because it uses more power and is inefficient for data. 2G on the other hand uses less power, allows phones without VoLTE support to make calls, and IoT devices to use (slow) data. Over the next year or so we should see networks restricting data over 2G/EDGE for regular devices (calls only), keeping the data side just for IoT.
The rate shown is 29p which comes to 36 cents. It is substantially less than PG&E California prices, which average around 50-55 cents.
An important reason that power is expensive in the UK is that it doesn't use zonal pricing and is effectively not giving the right price signals to consumers of power to move closer to where the cheap power is (e.g. data centers) or to conserve power when power is expensive; or producers of power to invest in power generation closer to where the power is scarce and expensive. Another point to make is that the nationa…
> Greg Jackson from Octopus (who are the largest energy operator in the UK) has been calling for this for some time. I don't live there but his name comes up a lot in several of the clean energy podcasts I follow. Smart person that has a lot of sensible things to say on this topic. I've got a lot of time for Octopus, which is an odd thing to say about a utility company. It's amazing how much of a difference it can ma…