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How the U.K. broke its own economy

theatlantic.com

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Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#291

Post by roenxi »

caseyy wrote: post #285
roenxi wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is how literally everything in a market gets priced. When you buy an X, the price of it naturally trends to match the most expensive X that will be sold. In this case X is a watt of energy. But you can substitute any good or service.

Can you explain this? In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer. In the goods market, individual buyers buy depending on their elasticity of demand unless the good has inelastic demand (rare). Neither matches what you seem to say.

> In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.

The lowest seller price is the highest demanded price among all the sellers. All the sellers bar one would typically be willing to sell for a slightly lower price. As it is said; prices are set on the margins.

Imagine that every seller has a secret price they are willing to sell for and that is some statistical distribution. The market price will be the highest price in that distribution that actually gets sold. Most sellers aren't selling for their secretly acceptable price, but for a higher price determined by the seller with the highest demands. The distribution, if it is ever discovered, becomes the supply curve.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#292

Post by yardstick »

sjducb wrote: post #10
pipes wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what was the alternative? Continue with the disaster of central planning. Which is the actual thing that destroyed British industry.

Go back to what the western world was doing in the 50’s. High tax and high public spending. In 1950 the US had a top marginal tax rate of 91%. The 50s were great, let’s do that again. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing...

That environment was directly proceeded by WW2, which required massive capital investment to rebuild Europe[1]. In the UK we were still rationing candy and meat during the early 50s[2]. So, I’m not particularly eager to recreate those conditions.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_King...

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#293

Post by notTooFarGone »

Manuel_D wrote: post #266
chrisbriard wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind Energy, like Solar Energy can be stored in Battery Energy Storage Systems to provide reliability to the grid in the event of shortages.

Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity. Intermittent sources don't just experie…

Nobody, really nobody asks for the whole world consumption to be stored in batteries.

This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light. You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. Who cares about the 5% of times where we have to burn natural gas to stabilise the grid.

95% renewable is orders of magnitude better than today. Anyone saying different is literally a grifter.

Also battery storage cost prognosis is 50% less in 5-6 years. Batteries are already cost effective and there are a lot of grid storage options build right now.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#294

Post by wzdd »

lenkite wrote: post #241
cycomanic wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have trouble believing you are being honest. Piling under wind turbines?! I have yet to see a dead bird under a wind turbine myself (but I acknowledge they do kill some). Published estimated averages are 4 to 18 birds per turbine per year [1]. Compare that to buildings (where we also don't pile up either) which kill man estimated 1 billion birds a year [2] [1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bi…

Yes, explicitly piling up under wind turbines. This was in the Western Ghats in India and my mother was sickened - (she used to be a regular trekker before Covid). I didn't initially believe her either. Btw, they were so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator". They change ecology drastically within a couple of years. “Our central discovery is that wind turbine…

> so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator"

This is using "top" in the sense of "apex", because turbines have no natural predators. The paper says you could imagine them as something at the top of the trophic web. The paper explores the impact on their prey populations.

That's opposed to "top" in the sense of "kills more than other predators" or whatever. I mention it because number-of-kills is what the rest of the discussion seems to be about.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#295

Post by Paul-Craft »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #288
cupcakecommons wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You distribute pv and wind over large areas and they get destroyed by weather, get dirty, require significant maintenance. If individuals want to have wind turbines or pv installations that's great - but these things are a giant mess at grid scale - absolutely awful.

Yeah of course distributed infrastructure is ... Bad??? Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems

Don't forget to factor in the possibility of lithium shortages in the next decade. Batteries don't solve anything if you can't build them.

https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#296

Post by seabass-labrax »

gottorf wrote: post #221
olddustytrail wrote: post #132

There was plenty of housing before the Thatcherite "right to buy". Pretending it was socialist politics that broke it is moronic.

Insofar as "socialist politics" make it harder for the supply of housing to rise to match demand, it is not moronic at all. Places in the UK where housing stock grows with population don't have it as bad as places that don't[0], i.e. London. Thatcher left office in 1990. The population of Greater London has grown by 44% since then. I don't think there has been a single decade since where the growth of housing stock k…

Alongside Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' policy that reduced the stock of social housing, there were also restrictions on how much new housing could be bought or built by local councils to replenish the availability of social housing. These restrictions had more or less remained the same until very recently. It was only during the Johnson government that the restrictions started to be lifted. Of course, the current Labour government are attempting to once again build new social housing, but it is easy to see why people look back and see Thatcher as being the cause of those three decades of social housing shortages.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#297

Post by Paul-Craft »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #247
WeylandYutani wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why the Netherlands builds them out in the sea. Just far enough so that you cannot see them. Even the biggest reactionary NIMBY has no complaints.As for wildlife come on man who the fuck cares?

Minus the last sentence, this is a great point. Do any downvoters have any issue with everything but the last sentence? If anything, the Netherlands is probably Europe's most intensely developed country. There is hardly a square meter that hasn't been carefully planned out over the last 500 years.

No, I don't have an issue with anything but the last sentence, but the down arrow is all or nothing. We're facing a biodiversity crisis of massive scale (call it the 6th mass extinction if you like). "Fuck wildlife" isn't an appropriate policy position.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#298

Post by stephen_g »

Manuel_D wrote: post #266
chrisbriard wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind Energy, like Solar Energy can be stored in Battery Energy Storage Systems to provide reliability to the grid in the event of shortages.

Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity. Intermittent sources don't just experie…

Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days.

There will likely always be some gas peaking but we're talking less than a percent per year (maybe a few single digit percent in some places where solar isn't as good but still not much).

1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#299

Post by jodrellblank »

lenkite wrote: post #163
giantg2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the large scale turbines. I'm sure small scale or other designs are OK. But screw the large turbines. Where I grew up they outsourced the jobs and then we were left with ugly giants ruining the once beautiful mountains. It's on par with strip mining (aesthetically).

Aren't these also massive mass bird slayers ? The last I read, over half a million birds were killed (official under-estimate) by wind turbines in UK alone every year

Humans in the UK killed and ate over 111,000,000 birds just in January 2025.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/poultry-and-poultry...

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#300

Post by Tiktaalik »

This article is severely tilted nonsense with a weird ideological bent.

The author sneers against regulatory rules to limit suburban sprawl but really none of that has anything to do with a housing shortage.

It is entirely possible to denser and taller buildings, having both compact communities, green space, farms and forest and also addressing housing needs. UK hinders its economy by declining to do so (as do so many other places with housing shortages).

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