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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

#521

Post by brohee »

Manuel_D wrote: post #261
cycomanic wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capacity factor is calculated into lcoe, what's your point? Moreover, downtime for wind turbines is much less of an issue for a grid than large power plants (even with a significantly higher capacity factor), because you run into much bigger issues if your GW plant is down, compared to a couple of MW (and no the probabilities of all your renewables mix going down at the same time is very low, unless you're Luxemburg)…

Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy. Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy lik…

The effect of overcapacity is null or negative price, which has the property to make more storage viable (who cares if it only gives back 25% if the input is free or very cheap), so I'd say intermittent sources overcapacity is an enabler of on grid storage.

E.g. today in Germany you can buy MWh at 14€ at 13:00 and sell it back at 180€ at 18:00. I didn't look all of Europe but it looked like the biggest spread today... You can make money with crappy storage under those conditions...

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

#522

Post by walthamstow »

benmmurphy wrote: post #459
walthamstow wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't forget it, it's not a deduction from my salary. You don't pay 42% of your salary. Employee NI went down by 2pts last year, employer NI is going up by 1.2pts this year.

Employee NICs and employer NICs are effectively the same thing, they just have different names. Your employer has a bucket of money to pay employees with. Some of this money is given to the government and some of this money is given to their employees. Saying the money given to the government is on behalf of the employee or the employer is mostly irrelevant. There are cases where it is relevant if the employee or emp…

I think when doing casual person-to-person comparisons, like on here, it is actually easier to compare payslips.

Most importantly, I don't believe that if employer NI went away tomorrow that money would come to me in increased salary. Including it as a tax on me makes the assumption that it would.

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

#523

Post by amai »

"More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union."

Catastrophic? If I have to pay 33% more for electricity now than in 2010? And if corrected for inflation the electricity costs in Germany are actually going down. There is some obvious spin in this article which is distracting from the real issue:

It's the housing, stupid!

What is really catastrophic also in Germany is the increase of rents and housing prices.

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

#525

Post by 127 »

amai wrote: post #523

"More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union." Catastrophic? If I have to pay 33% more for electricity now than in 2010? And if corrected for inflation the electricity costs in Ge…

Sure, if you don't care about climate change at all you can just activate and build coal power plants.

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

#526

Post by robertlagrant »

jordanwallwork wrote: post #514
robertlagrant wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this sort of response. The context is the average person. What do you mean in that context?

I think you misread it. The context was, _not low_ (ie. high) for the average person. For someone with a higher than average wealth however, £5k isn't all that much, especially if it could potentially protect the value of their assets

I was referring to the "not that expensive".

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

#527

Post by rickdeckard »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #515
rickdeckard wrote: post #480

"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth." I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real…

In the year ending June 2024 the net migration into the UK was 728,000. That is the root cause. The government (and this hasn't started with the current government) has a policy of high immigration then makes noise about the need of doing more to solve the "housing crisis"...

Coincidentally that's also roughly the birth-rate of the UK 20 years prior (2004: 715,996 [0]), a group of people I assume also arrived on the housing-market by now.

The population (and this hasn't started with the current population) has a tendency to shag around and then make noise about the need of housing (and food, and education, and...)

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

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

#529

Post by [deleted] »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #515
rickdeckard wrote: post #480

"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth." I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real…

In the year ending June 2024 the net migration into the UK was 728,000. That is the root cause. The government (and this hasn't started with the current government) has a policy of high immigration then makes noise about the need of doing more to solve the "housing crisis"...

[deleted]

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

#530

Post by stringsandchars »

quantum_panda wrote: post #451
Rovanion wrote: post #363

This article is plain wrong. It ignores that the largest amount of housing ever built in Britain was council housing post war through to Thatcher.

But the quality of what was built was worse than what the commies built in the Eastern Europe. That's quite an achievement!

> But the quality of what was built was worse than what the commies built in the Eastern Europe.

The rural council housing built in post-war UK was of really high quality: these houses were built for durability and community. They were solid brick or stone construction, and had large gardens to promote self-sufficiency. I grew up in one of these houses, and my parents grew enough vegetables in the enormous garden that we only needed meat and dairy from the store.

The article is an awful jumble of free-market junk, and as others have mentioned, doesn't mention Brexit or privatization as two of the main causes of economic stagnation.

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