421–430 of 784 posts
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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...
So are we going to ignore Sodium Ion batteries then that are looking to enter mass production?
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The article is about how bad land and energy policies (essentially central planning)—dating from the post-war period—are holding back the British economy. Is that neoliberalism?
In fairness, whilst the article isn't without merit, it's authored by some of the only people in the UK that actually describe themselves as neoliberal. Which is why it's focusing on "green belt" planning policy and ignoring the fact that local government built 150k houses per annum back when we actually built enough houses, something which "neoliberal" policy introduced by Thatcher essentially made impossible, and w…
Well you had 728,000 people coming in last year. It'll have to be a bit more i fear.
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This happens everywhere in enterprise and government because policies and processes are designed to avoid mistakes or embarassment at any cost (because those risks are internalised by the bureacracy and therefore "real") but do not account for the cost of not being able to get anything done, because those are externalised and everyone involved in the various committees and review processes gets paid regardless. I wis…
> I wish there were better ways to align incentives here. I have a crazy idea that might work to hold organizations accountable if they never get anything done.
The last government intentionally banned the cheapest source of energy, onshore wind, from being built in England, by making it so that a single complaint could stop a project. I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.
As we can see down thread, people have got into a terrible mess of duelling propaganda and gone mad about wind power. We can have cheap clean energy, it requires a small amount of change, oh no, let's destroy everything instead. I'm going to start suggesting that planning should have a local referendum: approve this set of projects and you'll get cheaper electricity. Disapprove and your bill goes up. Democratic choic…
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Not really, growth in the UK has effectively stalled since 2008, quite a few years before Brexit. I’m sure Brexit hasn’t helped, but it seems that the economic stewardship of the coalition and post-coalition governments was also lacking. I don’t know what the UK can do about it, but it’s been stuck in a spiral of economic stagnation for over 15 years now.
That’s the time the Conservative Party were voted in and imposed “austerity”. This involved scaling back government spending and scratching their heads wondering why growth is stalled.
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This seems disingenuous twice: 1. You're welcome to argue that, but you haven't here. You've just stated it. 2. You shouldn't supplant one topic with another. High energy prices kill people, because energy drives the cost of everything, and people can direct less value into things that keep them healthy if they're spending a greater proportion of their income on survival. You can say "also air should be clean", fine,…
No, I would argue I am correctly framing externalized costs ie the tragedy of the commons.
Adding a separate topic seems like a distraction. Everyone knows about negative externalities. I don't think we need to rehearse the same points to obscure the specific one I'm asking about.
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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 di…
> This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light. I responded to a comment stating that excess storage can be stored in batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249008 I'd suggest reading the comments people are responding to before calling them bullshit. > You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. "only" 12 hours of storage i…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time. This excludes large wind farms that add to base load if you average over the world. There is always wind somewhere around you.
Realistically if we reach 5Twh storage we are able to be >90% renewable.
Having 5Twh of storage is of course not an easy feat if estimates are correct we will have 6.5TWh battery production in 2030. If we amount for 10% of that used in grid storage we would need a decade for a 90%+ renewable grid. There is no faster method. It is realistic.
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(Link from the Adam Smith Institute, a neoliberal thinktank)
The story of British Leyland is enough to scare anyone w/ even half a brain away from ever allowing British politicians to have even the least bit of influence over a company that competes anywhere near the consumer space.
Or how in the Thatcher era, the government began to privatise and divest the most valuable parts of the company (and arguably a huge amount of British soft power) for little return to the taxpayer?
Notably it sold Mini to BMW, Leyland to DAF, Jaguar and Land Rover to Ford.
Privately-run Ford nearly went bust in the 2000s and famously had to be bailed out by the US taxpayer, but they sold off Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata in the process.
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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 sol…
> 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. That's still a gap two orders of magnitude larger than existing standards: > Meanwhile, reliability standards in industrialized countries are typica…
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This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Wild bird populations are potentially at risk, and extinction of a population has massive ecological consequences. Commercially raised chickens and the horrors they are exposed to are completely unrelated to that.
I would hardly call it "utterly irrelevant" that in a discussion about "killing birds is bad" someone mentions that it is not usually considered bad to kill birds for food.