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.
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.
I am in my fifties and have only spent 18 months or so in houses built after 1970 (both of which were, well… bad)
Grew up in a house built in the 50s, university dorm was built in the late 1800s, student housing was Edwardian at the latest except two houses I lived in as a postgrad, then a place built in 1720 or something, current place is 220 years old on the ground floor plus an Edwardian bit, and I suspect the first and second were first built in the late 1800s; nobody actually knows and it looks like it might have been substantially rebuilt.
The ground floor of this place gets cold; the upper floors have conservation-area sash windows but also ultra-modern insulation under the tiles.
I am trying to avoid listed buildings for the next place, but I would be a bit surprised if I bought anywhere as new as the 1970s! Kind of want an old interwar bungalow next.
No. The majority of it, still, was built before 1920.
(The ground floor of my house, which is quite damp, was built 220 years ago; this is not all that remarkable and my neighbours' houses are fifty years older)
1970s houses are pretty energy-efficient by comparison.
But it's worth noting that a surviving 100 year old house in the UK is likely to be warmer than a surviving 100 year old house in the USA; it is not only brick-built but it is also likely to be in a terrace of several houses.
The "newer" town in my area is a railway town — it is actually a very old settlement but it became a big important town when the railway arrived in 1842. Much of the housing in that town dates back to the Edwardian era at the latest and is small houses in brick terraces of ten or fifteen houses in a row (usually in staggered terraces of four or five).
These houses are all supplied with natural gas now, and they have increasingly well-insulated roofs (and loft conversion rooms), so they have become pretty energy efficient.
But in the early 1970s, many of them still would not have been on the town gas supply, they would have been burning a lot more coal, and therefore almost all their supplemental heating (cooking, much of their hot water) would have been electric.
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.
Maybe. Volatility I think, ceteris paribus, forces the clearing price up and wind is extremely volatile so there is only so much you can get with having more of it.
> 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.
Two of mine we in the same village over two years, so yes, not everywhere is reliable. It was the same failure twice. So, yes, not everywhere is that reliable.
On the other hand I have lived in multiple places of varying sorts and regions of England (from London to a village in the North) so I think most places have reliable power, especially towns and cities. Other people's experience is mostly the same.
The OP is asking about the 1970s because that's what the headline is comparing to. My point was the 1970s had a lot of problems going on (labour disputes, oil crisis, extreme weather) so it's not an ideal comparison point.
I don't think I can agree with this. CfDs are (typically) a 15 year contract. For each CfD the price actually increases, as a result of inflation adjustment, each year. Dudgeon wind farm got £161.71 per MWh when it began but today gets £220.95 per MWh because of inflation.
Strike prices came down from where they began, but have since bounced around. Hornsea Project 2 is selling today for £80.08 per MWh but CfDs signed this year for similar Wind Farms would be (in today's money) more like £90 per MWh. Much cheaper than Dudgeon, but they are not in fact just steadily reducing in price.
The big boon for CfDs is the certainty for both parties. In 2022 and to a lesser extent again now, fossil fuel prices went crazy and so the less dependent you are on those prices the better for you. If you'd locked in CCGT prices at 2024 levels for 15 years you'd be doing great... except your providers would be bankrupt because methane just isn't available at those prices.
To further highlight the certainty versus cheaper dimension here's an analysis of public CfD payments year by year.
In 2020 22.0 TWh of electricity = £2.3B subsidy so about £104 per MWh
In 2021 21.6 TWh = £1B or about £46 per MWh
In 2022 20.5 TWh = -£235M subsidy - it paid us £17 per MWh
In 2023 20.6 TWh = £1.4B subsidy so about £68 per MWh
In 2024 31.1 TWh = £2.4B equivalent to £76 per MWh
In 2025 35.8 TWh = £2.6B or £74 per MWh
And this year, so far, 26.7 TWh for £1.7B or £62 per MWh
These numbers are pretty big, but even 35.8 TWh is maybe 12% of generation, most of Britain's renewable energy is not subsidised, it just made enough sense in the free market to build, one trick CfDs were used for, which doesn't end up with the government spending any money on a "subsidy" but which does result in more actual generation is that a potential generator would sign the CfD contract and then use a provision intended for practical obstacles - the sand bank you wanted to put turbines on turns out to be unstable for example, to instead sell the power wholesale at prevailing prices and not get a subsidy. That CfD contract made their project easier to finance, but then the market offered more money and they accepted the risk/ reward choice with their finances in place. Banks may or may not be happy they made loans on this basis, we'll find out when these firms go back for another loan and either get a champagne welcome or very different terms.
* All "subsidy" numbers are net additions to the price paid by the "Free market" clearing auction for electricity. Because metric system we can convert the market prices to the kWh units familiar to a household bill payer as "units" of electricity £100 per MWh = 10p per kWh but remember the wholesale electricity is just on some windswept Yorkshire hilltop or something at that price, you need it delivered to your home which costs extra to do.
The thing I'd be very interested in seeing, but haven't found a way to get, is the actual bids for one of the half-hourly auctions. Even seeing one that happened a week ago and thus surely lacks ongoing commercial sensitivity, would be very interesting. I'd particularly like to see: A typical BESS morning, this morning's 0630 auction for example, and a windy night like 2330 on October 9th.
I feel as though there are things in that auction data which are obvious to the generators and maybe the network operator but are utterly opaque to the general public and might help understand why things are as they are or aren't how they might be.
This is what I was meaning. The fact the contracts are auctioned via competitive bidding (usually) leads to price minimisation. Overall it seems to be a well designed procurement system.
The Low Carbon Contracts Company has a terrible Power BI which attempts to turn this data into charts, you can get the Power BI to give you the CSV of raw CfD data and I process it with some Rust I wrote to get at the bits I want like OK, what if we only look at February and only at Solar projects ?
So that lets me write code for "How much Power did we buy this way in year X and how much did we pay for it?" or "If we ignore Drax, can we see what subsidies cost us in each Summer?" and that sort of thing.
You could do much the same in Excel, or indeed if you had your own Power BI - but I can write software, I'm not great at Excel and I refuse to write Power BI reports without being paid for it because it's awful.
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].
The main things that will reduce our power bills is a) upgrading the grid to improve transmission and reduce curtailment; and b) adding generation and storage capacity, reducing the amount of high-cost peak gas generation we use.
These things are in progress. A vast amount of generation and storage capacity came online this year and much more still to come. This will gradually take effect, oil conflicts notwithstanding.
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.
It's helped a lot by the fact that solar panels have become very cheap indeed, so the fact that we don't get as much sun as other places doesn't matter so much - it will still pay off, as long as you can actually use that energy effectively (which may require batteries or a decent export payment rate).
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.
This is the energy equivalent of saying "experts want to inject little bits of viruses into our kids, no wonder we're all so ill!"
It might get you upvotes on social media but it's 180 degrees wrong.
You've only implied it's unique to the UK but many people will explicitly make that claim to help stoke everyone's anger at the wrong things. Actually it's the standard way to price things in many markets, even outside of electricity and the UK.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While it is definitely true that original power drops were due to lower lumens, few things:
- reflective housing is super inefficient (~70% losses on the bounced light off typical material, at the top end expensive stuff still ~23%), still better than just losing the light upwards but not as many lumens on the road as a lab test would show
- Today LEDs are more efficient than sodium
Some math: 100W HPS cobra head lamp prdouces 9.5k lumens, including ballast it draws ~133W from the wall. Lab test shows about 70% of the lamp's light leaves the fixture (with the rest being lost in the housing) leading to ~7k lumens exiting. Roughly 53 lm/W.
LED cobra head lamps get like ~125 lm/W on the low end + fade much more slowly than sodium
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.
Not keeping up with the developed world is degrowth.
I hope Europeans remember their colonial history because with how they are managing their economies they are going to have it revisited on them in a generation or two.
People from the global south like you forget how far north Europe is. Much of Europe never needed it. Now maybe it does for a week or two per year. Things will change.
Fun fact: while there have been roughly 1,000 deaths this year in France attributed to extremely hot weather during the summer... there were more than 10,000 deaths (ten times as many) attributed to cold weather in the preceding winter.
Northern Europe's main problem, every year, is keeping people warm in the winter. Heat death in the summer is a novelty. Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe, because warming winters will save more people than hot summers kill.
> Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe, because warming winters will save more people than hot summers kill.
Is this informed by studies, or are you just assuming "global warming = higher average temperature = less cold"? Because that's not how the climate works. It's very well possible that global warming increases the number of cold-related deaths in Europe.
Ah, thanks. I feel like there's far too much uncertainty to state "Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe", but I'm not basing that on concrete data, so hopefully I'm wrong.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think your thought is as insightful as you think it is. You simply fell for the American Exceptionalism propaganda thinking that Americans are some special breed of humans. America is the richest country in the world. And for most of the 20th century average Americans had the most disposable income and the largest consumer base of all countries. Of course they led the way on adopting luxuries and reducing discomfort. The rest of the world followed as the price became attainable and their purchasing power increased.
50 years ago hot middle eastern countries had no AC. Not because they had some sort of symbiosis with nature and the summer heat. It was because the average AC costed the sum of 8-month of average income. As AC prices dropped, and the average income increased, having an AC became the norm.
Of course the richest people, richest economies get their first and to a non inquisitive or surface only thinking, it’s some how a unique was on discomfort or lust for luxury, when it’s just simple economics.
In absolute terms, yes. But per capita there are quite a few richer countries, like Switzerland, where people genuinely seem to brave the elements as part of their culture.
Sure, everyone adopts conveniences, but I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
The per capita numbers are more recent as opposed to be throughout the 20th century but even still the size of the Swiss market (in absolute terms) is tiny compared to the size of the American market. Unless the per-capita wealth or disposable income is 30x to make for the population size difference, the "reducing discomfort" goods market will still favor the larger (overall) richer and bigger markets then trickle down to smaller ones. I highly doubt the Swiss endure through cold winters by wearing more layers in doors and drinking lots of hot tea.
> I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
Sounds more like observational or cognitive bias tbh. For example, the Japanese market is notorious for building gizmos and machines for far less grand inconveniences that the weather or long-distance travel. They eat a lot of rice in Japan, so it makes sense they invented the rice cooker. To many Americans (today) who don't eat a lot of rice having an entire appliance for just cooking rice might seem like a crazy war on discomfort and too much of adopting convivences. What's next? a machine just for Turkish coffee?
> "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.
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.
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)
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.
Is there reason why retaining radiators is preferable to an air heat pump (either ducted air or mini-split)?
I guess it's cheaper to not have to install air ducting or indoor units if you can reuse existing pipes & radiators. But if you need to replace the radiators anyway, the cost might not be that much different? You'd get more precise temperature control, and cooling in the summer.
The roof cavity is not large enough for hidden ducting and the ceilings in older houses low enough that exposed ducting would be a head impact hazard. So you'd end up needing one installation per room. Expensive, especially when the expertise isn't there, and mostly used by commercial users.
Hmm. We actually have both, retrofitted about 5 years ago. The indoor units of our mini-split downstairs (Toshiba) are actually very quiet - barely audible unless you really crank up the fan speed.
In our case we couldn't install ducting downstairs (not enough gap between the floors), but it was simple and cheap to do so upstairs because there was attic / roof cavity space in which to run the ducting.
The mini-split also gives you precise temperature control in each room, where as our ducted system only has a single thermostat and on/off control in each room. This is problematic for the bedrooms, which tend to overheat at night in the winter when bedroom doors are closed, while it remains cooler in the hallway where the thermostat is. I'm currently looking into an upgraded control system ("Airtouch 5") which should solve this by putting wireless thermostats in each room.
> 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..).
> Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
I'm not saying _everybody_ must use less AC/clothes dryer/whatever. Grids are remarkably complex machines and are incredibly expensive to upgrade--which we should do! We should have done that ages ago, but the second best time to plant a tree is now. However, that's not an instantaneous process and requires quite a lot of political willpower to achieve, let alone the capex to bring new generation plants online.
In the meantime, as you've noted, people die without access to critical infra, i.e. AC in heatwaves. If the options facing grid operators are "rolling brownouts to keep from blowing up a transformer" or "educate people on time-of-day use re: peak load to reduce grid strain," the latter is often dismissed out of hand when it seems a perfectly sane approach to maximizing the utility of existing systems.
> deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc
Solar has a tremendous to "democratize" access to resources [0], we should absolutely incentivize its adoption as much as possible... but changing regulatory or tax environments is difficult. *We should still do that,* but altering behavior is (comparatively) free, so long as you can get past people being personally offended for being asked to not water their lawn every day in July.
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 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
New builds are already much smaller than previous generations' housing, to increase margins for developers. Smaller than that, we'll basically be like rats.
They can, but then their COP is like... 2. Which is not great. Coupled with high units costs, need to make math is it even worth it compared to just electric heating.
There has been research into Thin Wall Insulation for this very reason, and that would be a good start for much of the Victorian housing stock (e.g. Cork Spray which is permiable so avoids the problems of sealing up these older buildings).
From a T&M standpoint it's affordable to use external insulation and cladding to safely insulate these old houses. But that runs afoul of planning/landmark laws (some places even mandate single-pane windows!) So some Brits freeze to death rather than hide some history. Their choice to make, I guess.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Every washer, even basic ones, I've owned that were made post-2000 had a delay start function. Even my most basic one that just had dials to select options, it had a 2/4/6/8-hour delay dial. I figured it was a common feature by now.
A 2-hour granularity delay start would drive me insane. Better than nothing though. And maybe the dial one works with a timer on the outlet too, as the program is mechanically selected.
Yep and I do it. But the point is that if everyone sets it to be done at 8am, you move the demand window to 6-8am. All o care about is that I can put it away when I wake up so if my energy company said “your electricity is cheap between4 and 6, go for it” my dishwasher, washing machine, hot water tank could all go at that time
> 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.
Bit of a logical fallacy. Not avoiding ALL tedious inconveniences doesn't mean that being wealthy can't avoid MOST tedious inconveniences. You can have a weekly cleaner and a holiday house in the south of france and dry your clothes at night.
> 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.
> "Let's consume more" for the poor. It is a grotesque argument.
OP was making a fair point that not everybody has the same amount of time and energy (or money) to tolerate shifts in their routine, which in the context of a "personal vs collective responsibility" style argument is entirely reasonable.
By the same token, if only the _rich_ have the freedom to make such behavior changes for the sake of conservation it will only ever have a token impact, and in many cases the "correct" level to make an efficiency pitch at is the community: a decent light rail system will always outperform everyone driving their own vehicle to work/the store/downtown in terms of space and energy efficiency.
...but, to get people to buy into such "collectivist" systems, you often have to get them to contend with some perceived reduction in personal convenience: yes, a train doesn't need a parking lot and uses less gas per passenger-mile, but then you're beholden to the train schedule. It's exactly _that_ sentiment that I find frustrating in advocating for sustainable civic design.
To OP's point: whatever that "collectivist" option is necessarily has to contend that standards of accessibility and convenience are not constant across the population. That doesn't inherently mean "the poor should consume more," but that "hang dry your laundry" isn't an option for everyone in the current dominant socioeconomic structure.
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.
One measure of progress is not having to think about something. I don't want to have to think about when to wash my clothes or my dishes or whatever. I want to push the button and have it go. I'd be willing to make a concession for an EV since it consumes a lot of power, but it should be automatically controlled and not make me think.
If we're going to electrify everything, we need a clean, plentiful, reliable electrical supply. There is no technical obstacle to having this.
Saying "we can save $1000 per person in capital costs, they just need to deal with 5 extra minor inconveniences per day" is not how you run a developed country.
Then you can pay a bit more for the battery capacity and others can take the discount to deal with the minor inconveniences. It works out for everybody.
You can timeshift your power consumption, but in many cases you can not timeshift industry power consumption, especially heavy industry power consumption. For example it takes few hours to start a big plastics injection plant, it takes few days to heat an aluminum smelter. High quality glass production needs few weeks of uninterrupted power supply. Iron blast furnaces run without interruption for years.
But for example, cement production can be turned on and off quite easily, and is turned on and off on demand by the grid electric operators to help with grid stabilization (cement producers are paid for this grid stabilization service).
It drives me up a fucking wall that you think this is a preferable strategy to just idk, installing some solar or wind? Why is this so difficult. We have the technology for practiciatlly infinite cheap energy but we just wont build it. Are the Chinese the only people that arent too stupid to understand this?
It's not a "preferable" strategy, it's one that can (and should) be deployed in tandem with expanding our renewable generation and doing more "at scale" conservation of commercial resource use.
We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0], _and yet_ we're not even capitalizing on that gain as much as we could because people don't want to tolerate the behavior changes necessary to do so.
My beef isn't with expanding capacity, it's with that being the _only_ solution that's considered to match supply to demand instead of doing anything to manage demand.
> We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0]
no we arent. China added the entire capacity of the US grid in solar in the last 4 years and they are accelerating. That is bananas. We've barely increased total grid capacity in the last 20 years. It should be a national embarrassment. Energy abundance is possible, and one of the greatest ways to improve peoples lives. There are no energy poor countries that are rich.
Half the state of Nevada should be a solar farm at this point if anyone actually cared about climate change, and that would do 10x to imrpve peoples lives than telling them not to use the dryer.
again, the degrowth mindset relies on a fundamental paucity of imagination and will to actually solve the problem.
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.
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.
My mother moved to a brand new apartment. Everything is electric- heating and cooking. Gues what? Her bills went down.
That is the power of modern construction techniques.
Unfortunately this is out of reach of poorer people and it would takes a hundred years before all the old housing stock is replaced. But it's nice progress for the happy few.
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.
> 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.
Your parents never taught you how to balance a checkbook? That's just basic arithmetic, are you sure you were "formed to work in an office" when you can't even manage your own finances? Sounds like you weren't formed for anything, not even basic self-care.
Balancing a checkbook isn't really the problem. It's running a household on a budget (whatever it is), making sure you still have enough at the end of the month to pay for school lunches and toilet paper, and don't do something stupid like borrowing from the 401k to buy a boat or an RV.
At such a high concordance as to see ideologies disappear from the population? Or is it more likely that ideologies and people's beliefs are from social and environmental feedback?
The point isn't where you learn about an ideology, it's that they die off just as easily as genes do when they are outcompeted. Do you know anyone that claims to be a Physiocracist? Or even a much more famous example in the Spartan political order which disappeared with their nation.
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.
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.
Look you can make an argument that slightly more domestic oil production could have happened. But lets actually be realistic. Even best case you don't get that much and it takes a long time.
And its in no way going to solve any of the actual long term energy issues in the UK.
For example, if you assume limited government resources, massive investment in North Sea fossil is just inherently stupid.
Allowing some private exploration and production would be tiny and barley relevant to solve any problem. The right wing people who advocate this as some kind of 'solution' are more delusional then any 'leftist'.
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.
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.
And it's missing the word "monitored". And then you read the methodology:
> The LPI measures changes in the sizes of 35,803 populations of 5,790 vertebrate species (amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles) that have been monitored over time. The latest LPI shows a decline of 73% (73.2%). This means that the size of these populations fell by, on average, 73% between 1970 and 2022.
> This doesn’t mean that there are 73% fewer wild animals in total today than in 1970. The LPI measures changes in relative abundance, not the total number of animals. Changes in small populations with few individuals are averaged with changes in large populations of thousands of animals. Nor does it mean that 73% of species or populations are declining. In fact, around half of the studied populations are stable or increasing – but these gains are outweighed by the greater magnitude of losses elsewhere when calculating a global average.
"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 a bouncer.
But yes I do agree about the impossibility of communication.
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
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.
Nothing weird about it. They themselves have all their needs comfortably met, which is what matters. Other people have to learn to just accept their lot in life and not try climbing.
The degrowth mindset has existed for at least 50-60 years on the left, it merely bubbles to the surface more prominently from time to time. It was extremely popular ideologically in the late 1960s and 1970s.
For some on the left, they view humans as parasites. It starts as self-hate internally and expands outwards to encompass humanity more generally ('I love animals, I hate people'). Humans have to modify their environment to exist (shelter, farming, hunting, et al.), so the people that hold that ideology, you will find, they comprehensively hate any modification of the environment by humans, ie they want humans to cease to exist, rooted first in their own desire to not exist (they hate their own existence first and foremost).
The world is at all times overflowing with people that hate existing. They're miserable sad sacks and they desperately want everyone to drown in it with them. Sometimes that gets formalized into projected ideology used as a weapon against the rest of humanity.
Degrowth will need to happen at some point. I believe that people "with a growth mindset" are just hoping that by submitting to growth they believe it won't happen in their lifetime.
Which is a fair gamble to be frank, I don't blame them.
I don't see what is so hard to understand at all, it is mostly ecologically minded.
Human production and consumption (in a broad sense) is generating/leading to ecological catastrophes. Some people believe technology will solve the problem, some people believe the easier solution is to stop producing as much.
Unfortunately, that means letting go of some privileges and not everybody will agree on what to let go.
This is why we should rename them to regressive. They somehow think going back to pre-industrialisation can work while they still keep their smartphones that they use to absorb their latest TikTok fuelled outrage, somehow incapable of understanding that they're not "de-industrialising", they're _exporting_ it to to other countries that are massively industrialising on their behalf, and now have tremendous power over them. Including via TikTok brainmelting slop.
> 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.
My utility company does a program where they'll pay you to raise your thermostat a couple degrees when there's the most grid stress and the spot price of electricity is super high. You can also have your thermostat do extra pre-cooling in advance of these events.
People in my area HATE it. They hate giving up control (even though you can still manually lower your thermostat if you get too warm), and feel like the power company is doing some sort of scam even though it's a win/win/win (you make money, electric company saves money, homes are precooled with solar instead of burning fossil fuels).
Yep, it's probably not terribly hard to leave either, most of the one's I've seen aren't.
I dunno how you can make it more palletable, when they're already paying you monthly, it already does pre-cooling (or pre-heating), and you can also override it. And you might not even be home.
Counties tend to use kore power in the day, thus electricity tends to be cheaper at night when there less demand.
Personally I’m happy to. Charge my car at night when it’s 1/3 the price and use the h used capacity rather than pay higher bills to build more nuclear plants.
This is nothing new in the U.K., “economy seven” was a thing 50 years ago.
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.
The UK largely did - there was a "dash for gas" throughout the 1990s, a response to the decline of UK-mined coal and the availability of North Sea gas.
Coal is no longer used, and the remaining mothballed coal power stations were demolished a couple of years ago. North Sea gas is now in decline, and is rapidly being replaced by renewables for electricity generation but we'll still rely on (expensive!) LNG imports to make up the difference until the end of the decade.
It did not. Germany's percentage of gas use for electricity stayed mostly flat. In absolutely numbers it went down because of less electricity use. Energy Charts from Fraunhofer publishes this data [1].
> "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 argument, 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.
How do you explain that basically all European countries tax electricity much higher than fossil gas? Countries like Germany and the UK make the US look good when it comes to heat pump adoption.
More ironically, air conditioning is tolerated if powered by oil (like in cars), but not by electricity (like in buildings). At least Europe is better at EV adoption, but still far behind many parts of Asia.
Maybe they should, idk actually invest in renewables at massive scale instead of telling the people of a purportedly rich country that they should have to ration energy like its wartime? Why do people in Europe accept quality of life hits for dumb fake arguments about degrowth when you could literally just build more renewables.
Germany over-invested in renewables and is now reaping what it has sown.
They're going to invest 30 billion euros in direct government _subsidies_ in adding 11GW of natural gas generation.
For comparison, this amount of money would buy 5GW of nuclear power generation. But nuclear power is basically free after the initial capital expenses, and natural gas generation will still require fuel (gas or maybe hydrogen).
I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development.
The evidence for man-made climate change is quite compelling, and taking personal responsibility for your own impact on it isn't hard. I don't really see doing my washing at 6am as 'social and technological regression'. Quite the opposite actually - my washing machine has bluetooth and an app. I can tell it when to start.
The fact there isn't global pressure on corporations to be similarly responsible means my act of selflessness is ultimately a futile waste of time, but that's your kids and grandkids problem. I've chosen not to have kids, so I don't really care. I would suggest that choosing to have a family but not choosing to protect the environment as much as you can is an act of incredible selfishness towards your own children. They're the ones who'll have to live in a world with problems like water and food shortages. There is every chance that your grandchildren will die in a war over resources, and your view that tech is awesome will be little comfort to them.
> The evidence for man-made climate change is quite compelling
Sure
Where is the the evidence for me using the washing machine at the wrong time causing climate change?
As I said, I don't mind people claiming that washing clothes itself is bad for the environment (it contributes a little bit), but the idea that it's bad specifically because I wash it at a bad time? That's insane.
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?
Why can't you just summon free energy out of a hat?
Degrowth will need to happen at some point. I believe people "with a growth mindset" are just hoping that by submitting to growth it won't happen in their lifetime.
China is literally summoning essentially free energy out of hat. It actually is extremely trivial. you just install solar panels like you arent living in 1950.
They installed the entire grid capacity of the US in 4 years and they are accelerating. THere is a path to infinite free energy, but youd rather worry about doing your laundry at night.
Because of all the people I've met in my life, I've never actually met someone who was willing to voluntarily lower their standard of living. I've never met someone who had AC in a hot place and gave it up, wanted lower internet speeds, less phone battery, or wanted to go from living in a nice house back to one with a leaky roof.
In fact, I've only ever met people who wanted more things and a higher quality of life. While many green/degrowth political policies are based around convincing people to consume less, I've met consumers and found that's not what they want. It's why most environmental policies fail, consumers want more things at a lower cost, and are willing to import goods from overseas if the environmental regulations at home prevent them from being created there.
For the future, it means degrowth policies will fail. The only solution to climate change is to develop and grow our way out of it. It will be easier to live on the moon than it will be to convince consumers to accept less than they have now.
What's your plan? "Hey claude scrub the entire atmosphere to remove co2 from the past 200 years, make no mistake and use no energy"? "Hey codex send all our industries with razor thin margin to the moon, make no mistake and keep them as profitable as on earth"?
Look at atmospheric co2 scrubbers, the hot new thing, we can just keep polluting and clean it up am I right? Well, let's run the numbers:
We need 1 to 3 MWh of energy to remove 1t of co2
We produced 38.1 billion tonnes of it in 2025
Global electricity production in 2025: 30 TWh
We'd need to dedicate ~100% to 300% of our electricity production to simply offset our co2 production, even if we get it 10x better, and we won't because co2 is very stable and very dilute in the atmosphere (and also because it literally is below the minimum thermodynamic work to separate CO2 from air in ideal lab conditions), it's still completely retarded.
Every single technical solution to climate change completely falls apart when you run the numbers, the only argument left is "in the future we'll invent a magical tech that will save us so we have to accelerate"... might as well pray Jesus for help at that point
Thiel himself is worse then these greens, as he wants growth controlled only by him and his oligarchy. He is anti-science christian nationalists who wants government control of all education and all science and make sure it doesn't say anything about christian nationalism.
His growth would go to him and then he would graceful give some 'alms' to the 'deserving poor' meaning only 'good white christens who do not advocate for anything he doesn't like'.
Peter Thiel is literally human scum of the worst kind. He literally has his hand in all destruction of modern western society, and is trying to go back to 11th century emperor aligned with a compliant pope, but extend this over the whole world.
> "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.
Of course. The likely scenario is that the water tank has a preset range of acceptable temperatures and uses demand forecast information to decide whether to heat to the upper end of the range or let it cool to the lower end. Nobody suggests that we let them cool to unsafe temperatures.
Remember the currently common margins account for the fact that you actually use some of the water every now and then. That water in the tank will regularly cross the merely transiently safe temperature range, by design.
Once silicon is in control (which is where responding grid requests to delay consumption is more or less necessarily heading) you could even achieve better (worst-case) safety margins at reduced (total) power consumption. Because the machinery no longer needs to be designed around two "dumb" thermo switches and do a little extra in case layers of varying temperature manifest after two or more spaced periods of consumption. With continuous monitoring in software, you can integrate the worst-case bacterial growth based on time elapsed outside the "practically safe" temperature ranges. Then the tank always knows what is needed, and can both operate on tighter margins and reliably know when reducing or delaying power draw is ok.
They have to be _brought_ to that temperature periodically, but they don't have to stay at it; if they did you'd never actually be able to use the water (as that tends to drop the tank temperature, dramatically).
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.
To emphasise your point, this is already happening. It's not theoretical. Data Centres across the world can already get signals from their grid, and will do things like proactively switch to local generators.
Nearly 20 years ago I had such a wonderful debugging experience when the power grid where I lived sent a "switch to backup" message and then milliseconds later a cancellation. The colo's power system got jammed between generator and mains electricity and everything rapidly ran out of UPS backup power and died. I found so many dependency loops between servers that day, took me hours to get things back up and running.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
National Grid can mean NGED, NGET or NESO, god I love the UK. 2/3 of those are completely cuckoo regarding long term planning so not surprising to hear those comments.
system operator and the transmission operator, system operator keep throwing a wrench into pre-made plans, transmission operator are a complete monopoly who bully their way around
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.
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.
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.
In nearly every case, this is actually "we'll take 35% of your bill if you agree to let us sometimes turn off your A/C and clothes dryer between 5pm-8pm". It doesn't require everyone to take the deal, just enough people who want to save money. You can take the discount and use your own battery if you want, or you can pay full price so the power company can. And some will live with the mild inconvenience in exchange for money (which most of us are forced to do in so many different ways).
This is just charging people the costs of their decisions. That's capitalism at its best.
It’s also about using finer grained pricing periods (an hour or 15 minutes) with the market price visible to the user - so people are aware that running their clothes dryer (or charging their car) at one time is cheaper than others.
The UK introduced cheaper nighttime electricity (and storage heaters that could use it) - economy7 at the end of the 70’s
Part of the ambition is to increase balancing services (such as battery storage) to reduce the reliance on big always-on generators or fossil-fuel-powered suppliers and increase the ability to leverage variable-output renewables like wind and solar.
One of the key challenges is electricity distribution, with a number of key transmission bottlenecks: a notable one is Scotland/England, where Scotland renewables generate more power than necessary, but not all of it can be exported to England as their isn't enough capacity across that transmission section.
Transmission capacity growth is now the key priority for the grid, with policies and plans optimised to address the bottlenecks in distribution.
> 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).
Demand on the national grid probably should; as home solar (yes, even in stereotypically dark and cloudy UK), wind etc becomes more and more viable I think a mix of on-site and grid electricity will be increasingly common.
The grid operators are definitely not saying that in France, in fact they are spending hundreds of billion (€100B each for both RTE and Enedis) to accommodate for a growth in electricity consumption due to electrification, and are lamenting that the policies don't encourage electrification fast enough.
> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like
Curious what was actually said. I can imagine some smarter pricing incentives being put in place to move demand around. If so, you should know that versions of that have been happening for decades.
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.
It's true that industry has been massively moving out of the UK for the last 50 years, so energy demand has gone down, but that just means that the proportion of energy generation costs are higher for the population.
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.
Actually the UK has had a ridiculous number of resources despite its small size. It had good mineral wealth from coal to copper to tin (which was mined in the region before the Roman Empire) to some oil and so on. Its mineral wealth contrasts with the Japanese home islands which had little. It has some decent arable land (although it keeps building on it) and better rainfall than some areas.
It also seems to be blessed with few natural disasters such as major earthquakes, volcanoes, larger tornadoes 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.
It's the deindustrialisation, and it happened under Thatcher.
We used to be the workshop of the world. Compared to blast furnaces people don't use much energy at all personally, even when illuminated by incandescent light bulbs.
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.
Standard of life and energy consumption are clearly correlated, though in the long-term improved efficiency makes this hard to evaluate.
The fact is, the UK has undergone a nearly complete deindustrialization in that period. e.g 'cars made per capita' is about 1/3 what it was. Domestic white goods are gone. Commercial shipbuilding is gone. Consumer electronics is gone. Domestic textiles are gone. Steel smelting (and nearly recycling) and machine tools are gone. For centuries(decades) these things were quintessentially British.
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. 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 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 in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?
That’s a different metric - “million tonnes of oil equivalent”. That’s not the same as electricity consumption - that’s the total amount of energy used in all kinds of industrial processes.
The data across the board supports the notion that reduction in electricity is an industrial phenomenon overall, there is no data to suggest this is a 'consumer green activity' phenom - not even the link you provided.
All of think links here, the person you are responding to, mine (above) and your own directly point towards reduction in industrial use.
Dont think this is the right way of looking at it.
Two things were happening at the same time: deindustrialization and electrification. Industries and the economy used to depend more on machines and oil. That was getting replaced by reliance on electricity. If electricity generation was cheap enough, we might have seen the total energy usage get transformed one for one into electricity usage. But that didn’t happen and energy usage overall went down. That’s deindustrialization.
Of course it could have other reasons like labour costs and so on.
No, literally the evidence you provided does not support the 50/50 thesis, moreover, the data does show that residential reduction is a marginal - and you're probably failing to take into consideration the UK has grown by more than 10M people during that period aka this is 'per capita' - not aggregate.
This government data is must more substantial than that link, and it puts the ratio at 70% reduction in electricity due to deindustrialization.
Moreover - the OP's comment was a blatant lie - by ignoring deindustrialization - plus a bit of a thrown slander aka the 'Telegaph' nonsense.
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 a lot of HN and YC-aligned people that don't believe this, despite the empirical evidence of the last few decades.
To take the stupidest version of the argument (not going to sugarcoat it, I think it was embarrassingly stupid) there was Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto where he called for a 1000x increase in energy production from nuclear fission and fusion. I quote directly:
"We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well."
Driving energy costs to near zero drives down the cost for literally every other process, manufacturing or extractive or services. A 1000x increase in energy practically lets you extract so much material for cheaper that the cost of materials, and the associated logistics, goes down.
The point of using energy is not to use energy. What matters is the services that energy delivers, be it a hot shower, a drive to the grocery store, a new house, a squillion tokens of AI computation. If we can get the services we want more cheaply by energy more efficiently, this is a good thing, not a disaster for humanity.
For completeness, I acknowledge that there are people for whom energy usage is inherently bad, which is equally silly. What matters are the downside impacts of the energy use, not the energy use itself.
My point was that even if you drive costs to 1000x, you're not somehow magically going to reduce consumption. Human output will match those efficiency gains in other forms. Imagine things like synthetic diamond jewelry being the norm, thermal pyrolysis of methane and CO2 into plain carbon, mining deeper underground for precious minerals, etc. A person in the 1890s could not have envisioned the things that would happen just 30 years later, enabled by cheap electricity.
And my point is that life has gotten better for 30 years despite Energy Line Goes Sideways, and what we care about is the life getting better part, not which direction the line goes.
If you want to see true evidence of this, look at the rebates power companies offer.
In all the places I’ve lived there are generally large incentive programs to convert air conditioners and old heaters to heat pumps, and other efficient appliance replacements, install better insulation, etc. because that rebate dollar stretches a lot further than building new power plants, transmission lines, etc.
If you cannot understand how a huge increase in energy might be useful you should probably not go around calling other people stupid. We are not going to get carbon removal and desalination at scale to fix the already baked-in consequences of climate change by making our water heaters more efficient. Efficiency is good but there is more to life than the status quo.
I am aware of the need for carbon removal and (some) desalination, but 1000x-ing our energy production is ludicrous stuff. The waste heat from energy production on that scale would render Earth uninhabitable.
That's incorrect. It's in the order of 25% of the heat reaching the Earth's surface, or maybe 35-40 watts of heat per square metre.
That's roughly ten times the warming effect of doubling CO2.
Now, I don't have a climate model handy to simulate this in detail but I would suggest "render the Earth uninhabitable" is a close enough approximation to the actual effects to suggest it's a terrible idea and anyone seriously proposing it should be laughed out of the room until they've done their homework.
Well given that cheap energy follows Jevon's paradox, it makes complete sense. If each unit of energy becomes cheaper to produce (which renewables are driving today), then you should see more consumption of that cheap energy into economic activity. Economic progress is easily coupled with increased energy use.
The US has a lot of wiggle room wrt energy consumption because it has ceded the role of being the world's factory to China. At the same time, the US is the world's data center and software development hub, and the world's finance hub, and the world's bank. What does the UK have in comparison?
The numbers today in the developed works don't back it up. It's Jevons Paradox btw, the person that came up with it was called Jevons, not Jevon.
The US has a lot of wiggle room because it uses almost 2x electricity per capita than e.g. Germany. People don't need electricity, they need light and cooling. If you do the math, that is hundreds of GW of free "new" capacity just by getting the same value for less energy. Obviously you can't do 1/1 comparisons, a lot of people in the US use AC whereas they don't in Europe. But overall the US could get more efficient in energy use. People buy new appliances all the time, make them be more energy efficient. Or don't and let the market sort it out. "The solution to high prices are high prices".
Same with AI. It is becoming much more efficient and cheaper. This will result in a much, much higher demand. Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.
That the energy demand is sinking is based on the fact that most industries got outsourced to China.
No, it is not. For example, gasoline use per capita in the US peaked in 1978 and the economy went up around a gazillion percent since then. There are now millions of EVs in Europe and electricity use has declined in the last twenty years and this has nothing to do with the hand wavy "deindustrialization". Why would it not? The light bulbs I have today use 10x less electricity, the induction stove I have uses significantly less energy, I bought a fridge last year that uses 3x less electricity than the previous one, the TV died three years ago, the new one uses an estimated 50kwh per year of normal use, and the old one used 200. The EU has new standards where the devices on stand by are not allowed to draw more than 3kwh (I think) etc. And obviously manufacturers will not make efficient stand by devices for the EU and then make inefficient ones for the rest of the world in purpose. The same is true for other forms. My building replaced the gas boiler used for heating and warm water in general. The winter was tougher than the one before, I switched to working from home and heated a lot more. My gas use stayed flat.
When your logic collides with hard numbers I would stick to the numbers and reconsider the logic. Here is an idea: will I run my dishwasher 3x more often just because it is now 3x more efficient? Will I run my fridge more often because it is more efficient? Difficult, it already runs 24/7. Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?
So as you see although there is obviously some validity in the OBSERVATION that is Jevons Paradox, it is not a hard rule. There comes a point where it stops being true.
„Economic Growth Is Closely Tied to Energy Consumption“, Slide 3:
“This rather strange situation arises because the standard calculation misses energy embodied in imported goods.”
"Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?"
Nope. But now you have a computer, maybe two, a cell phone, an ebook reader, a tablet, take international flights and use Bitcoin and AI.
Your anegdotal evidence falls on its face as well: I have two TVs now instead of one, and my electricity consumption went down. This includes moving mid year from an office to work from home. So one laptop charging every day, and one monitor. I even bought a printer which I did not have previously. That's because the two TVs combined, made 2023 and 2025, use less electricity than the one I had before, made 2011. The addition of a laptop, monitor and printer were negligent compared to the savings I made with my new fridge.
Your argument was Jevons Paradox, that consumption goes up as use gets more efficient. My counter argument was that my fridge got more efficient, but it will be difficult to use it more often since it by design runs all the time. Your counter argument was that I will now have more computers and whatnot and will still use more electricity. I replied to you that even this anecdotal evidence falls on its face because I actually have the data and that my electricity use went down despite moving to full time work from home. I think this sums it up nicely.
I also stated previously that we have the data even on a large scale. Electricity use in the EU went down in the last 20 years and this even with millions of EVs now compared to then. Even Norway which now for years sells almost exclusively EVs has had just a mild bump in electricity use compared to a decade before. This implies that The efficiency savings made elsewhere held. My hypothesis would be it's because at a certain point it's impossible to use something more than you already are (see fridge, dishwasher, induction stove, computers, TVs etc) and thus efficiency gains there will hold. The same pattern is observed with American gasoline use -- as the gas guzzlers of the 70s died off during the oil crisis, per capita gas use fell and practically never recovered. This despite the fact that this use case is quite comparable to coal and you could easily argue that with better mileage people will drive more. And they probably do, but still the gasoline use fell.
So obviously, Jevons Paradox did not hold in these substantial cases and should not be viewed as law of nature. It's an interesting observation that makes sense, but obviously has its limits.
It's not a good look that the UK seemingly isn't installing air conditioning, decarbonizing heating, or adopting electric vehicles. Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first.
What makes you think that the U.K. isn't adopting electric vehicles? I can tell you from direct visual observation that people are. The little green numberplate rectangles are fairly common, now.
EV adoption in the UK is huge right now, heat pump adoption is happening (though could be faster).
Air conditioning is a weird one, because it’s only been necessary in residential properties for a couple of years, and really still only necessary for a couple of days a year, so a fixed installation isn’t cost effective. Portable units are becoming more popular.
AC has been a requirement in most commercial premises for years. Decades, perhaps.
Air conditioners are heat pumps. Not all heat pumps are air conditioners.
Common installations reuse the wet systems we have and are air to water, which was until recently the only thing the grants covered (and now it’s still lower for a2a).
UK typically uses air-to-water heat pumps with convection radiators. The passive radiators are useless for cooling, and condensation on pipes in walls can be a problem.
Look, I know that actuuuualy and technically it's the same type of technology working on the same principle. The thing I have ( Daalderop 5G WPU) mainly works as floor heating (and great at that), but it's the size of a fridge and has it's own utility closet and a pipe underground for whatever thermal medium it uses and it's own separate meter (for reasons of regulatory kind). And it's a district wide deployment where I don't even own the thing.
Most importantly it's not the same in the way of me not feeling the chill. It's stupid, as I know the house is cooler than the outsides, but the actual split system delivers the cold air right to where I feel it and this thing just makes the ambient temperature down to 25c without me even noticing.
I don't want to know what it costs to install (I got it with the house), but split system costed lol nothing in eastern european dollars and took some guys less than half a day and zero permits to install too. For better or worse the heat pump doesn't live in the same locale I had that.
A water/water heat pump is absolutely not the same thing the other commenters are talking about. They're mostly talking about an air/air heat pump, where it's literally all the same parts but has a reversing valve so it can either be hot/cold or cold/hot among the coils with fans blowing through them.
This is more like what they're talking about, but they do come in a lot of shapes and sizes and can be more or less integrated into central systems.
I have one and it is? We keep our house very cool in the summer using it and it works just as well as an in window AC that we use in the bedroom. Maybe what you have is different somehow.
So is a refrigerator; all the other considerations make saying "I have a heat pump therefore I have AC" in this context a bit like a Mexican saying "I am American".
Like, sure, but the word has a specific and a general meaning, conventional use is only the specific meaning.
With a heat pump asked central heating system run in cooling mode condensate can form at your pipes in the wall and your radiators or floor when using under floor heating. So you have to limit its cooling power to prevent that.
With an AC the advantage is that the condensate is forming inside the AC when cooling the air.
I guess the issue is that American heat pumps use central air handlers. There is a coil inside and outside the house a fan that blows air across each coil. The inside fan pulls air from around the house and then blows hot or cold air through vents. It sounds like British heat pumps just push hot water through pipes. We use insulation over the refrigerant pipes to prevent condensation from forming in the walls. The length of the run is also kept as short as possible to reduce losses.
Most British homes haven't been built to support AC. Retro-fitting a heatpump for heating is relatively straightforward, as the heating delivery mechanism (pipes to transmit hot water to wall-mounted radiators) is already in place.
Although you could pipe cool water through the radiators, it's an ineffective form of cooling compared to blown-air systems, and retro-fitting a blown-air system is much more costly than a heating-only heat pump.
You can't just pump the cold water through the heating elements, because of condensation. The correct installation, requires special heating, cooling elements that include fans (it helps with the cooling) and drainage for the condensation.
I have "cooled floors", so basically heated floors but you can reverse the circuit in summer. Condensation really isn't an issue unless the temperature difference is massive, say room temperature being 28 degrees C and then kicking the system into high gear trying to get to 20 degrees C.
Once room and floor temperature match, condensation doesn't occur anymore as long as you keep it running.
You need a radiator with a built-in electric fan, this will all but eliminate the condensation.
However it will not cool like an A/C unit, only something like 5°C reduction. This can be enough to get a decent night's sleep during a summer heatwave.
We're talking about retrofitting to existing typical UK radiators. If I was buying new radiators (and paying an electrician to run electricity to them!) then I would want a better return on investment than cooling from 35C to 30C.
I visited a building once that had "cold panels" covering about half of the drop ceiling. Supposedly they made a difference in summer but I suppose they needed the massive surface area.
I've had a cooling/heating heatpump fitted. Adding a couple of wall units bumped the price by about £1500, although the whole thing was softened by the grant for getting rid of an oil fired boiler.
While our house is relatibvely small and we kept the units (which also do heating as well) confined to the main living space, it wasn't especially burdensome. The bulk of the work was installing the behemoth of a hot water tank!
Did you consider going with instant hot water at the sink/basin/shower/bath? My house is also relatively small and has little room for a huge hot water tank.
Original comment mentioned £ so they are in the UK. It's possible and not super uncommon to have electric showers in the UK because the 230V provides enough power for water heating unlike the US.
I'm currently investigating options for kitchen sinks and such. It feels quite silly to have a long length of pipe leading from a central source for a small amount of warm water to wash my hands.
Boiling water taps like Quooker and similar are pretty good.
There's a limit: you can fill a medium saucepan with boiling water, but large/industrial-kitchen pans will exhaust the boiling water and you'll need to wait for the next batch.
Belatedly, no, but I think our installer may have (possibly as a result of the free money!) wildly overspecified the tank which I suspect we will never empty even if we actually tried.
Daikin (and presumably others, but they're the ones we went with) do have integrated tanks/heatpump internal units. It might be worth having a think about your actual needs and it may be that there is a solution.
My experience with electric hot water taps is that they've been universally awful and only a last resort, but equally the state of the art may have moved on since I last looked!
They can be, and in many places that get both too hot and too cold they're built that way as standard, but in places that are usually too hot or usually too cold, they're often built one way to save a bit of complexity.
This is only the beginning. Soon people will realize that a mini-split install isn't that much more expensive than a portable AC, but is a lot more convenient.
The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.
> decarbonizing heating
What does this mean? More renewables? If efficiency reduces energy demands then it directly results in less carbon.
> electric vehicles
Aren't people already adopting electric vehicles? Do you think that the government should introduce a scheme to persuade people to buy electric vehicles? Does the availability of charging for electric vehicles need improving?
> Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first
Efficiency means saving money. In what circumstance could efficiency be bad? The grid responds to demand, unused electricity means higher prices for consumers. One of biggest issues right now in the UK is cost of living crisis, so raising electricity prices would be universally hated. How does making the grid less efficient increase growth?
I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid. Buildings are engineered to trap heat, so the heat doesn't dissipate at night and every day the indoor temperature rises, and rises...
At least they removed the need for planning permission recently. The problem is that the places that need AC the most (flats) will probably not be able to get it until the leasehold system has been abolished.
> > decarbonizing heating
> What does this mean?
Presumably it means heating using electric heat pumps rather than gas boilers. This also solves the AC problem. I don't think this is viable for most people. Heating was never the problem anyway, at least in the south winters are mild.
> I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable
well, i live in lincolnshire and used to live in london. i usually have a fan on for a few weeks over summer, but that's it. where in the UK did you live that the summers were so unbearable?
That's only a few weeks a year. The UK isn't Florida yet. And besides modern AC is incredibly efficient. The stuff that's cleared to sell in Europe has incredibly high standards.
It's fine if temperatures get lower during the night, but 25°C at night and 35°C during the day leaves little for cooling the infrastructure (roads, buildings), and constant warm temperatures are unbearable if you cannot even get in the shade when you want to cool off. Then, 35°C is also very hard to manage with high humidity.
I think you're right, and in addition to that there is also a lot we could do other than AC. Just having some shade from trees already helps a lot. Modern cities can be a man-made hellscape with regards to heat. But we did that to ourselves.
> UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid.
Not to be that guy, in the last 20 years, 27 was considered a heatwave.
> Buildings are engineered to trap heat,
I mean Victorian buildings were engineered to let in light, and have good ventilation. Hence why each room has a huge sash window, an airbrick and a fireplace.
A common scenario is to have unshaded solid walls exposed to afternoon sun. Without insulation the inside of the house can be high all through the night. A good effect of insulation in summer is to prevent that effect. Important to note that it would be standard to allow cooling airflow in the morning.
> The more insulation you have the less the indoor temperature is affected by the outside temperature.
Insulation isn't magic, over many days of hot weather eventually the building will reach equilibrium with the average outside temperature. This means it will be cooler indoors than outdoors during the day, and hotter indoors than outdoors at night.
However, the nights are specifically when you want a residential building to be cooler, assuming the inhabitants are not at home during the day. So the insulation actually makes the building hotter from the perspective of the inhabitants.
Very few places "need" air conditioning but it doesn't take very days where it's 80+ outside and hotter inside to convince me that the per-day cost of AC is worth it. And that level of heat is nothing new.
It can be considered a medical necessity for people with certain conditions like anhidrosis, asthma, COPD, kidneys disease, or cardiovascular issues. It's also a huge medical benefit for people with terrible allergies who wouldn't be able to open a window even when that'd normally help cool the house.
> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.
We are? It’s becoming more common and we had a few bad summers and earlier this year too. The heat wave a few years back killed my dad.
Given there’s a push to swap heating systems for more efficient ones, air con units are being looked at a lot more.
> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it?
We had 6 heat waves this summer. Parents were booking hotels just to keep their kids cool
We also had heatwaves in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018. 2024 wasn't bad but was still the 4th hottest year on record.
You can absolutely bet the better-off middle classes are installing aircon. I know many. If more people could afford it they would get it
It's the humidity too not just the heat. And how after 3 or 4 days of high temps, our houses just do not cool down at night because they act like radiators. Humid 25c+ nights suck for us
People overestimate the energy usage of EVs. Average usage 2-3000 kWh/year, but there's about 1 car per 2 people in the UK, so EVs would not reverse the trend even at 100% adoption, and they're currently at about 20-25% of new cars sold and 5% of miles driven in the UK (in comparison, to say, the US, where it's 5%/1%).
I can't speak for the UK, but A big thing is that in the last 20-25ish years at least in a US home the big ones for me as far as efficiency improvements are
- CRTs got replaced by LCDs, and LCDs even 25 years ago were maybe around half the wattage
- CFLs and then LED Light bulbs replacing older filament bulbs.
- The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.
With the smaller thought of:
- Set-top appliances like rice cookers and air-fryers that tend to be better for smaller everyday cooking than a full-on oven or stovetop.
And it's fun to think about, e.x. I remember when I had to move back in 15-ish years ago my parents (very politely!) complained about the power bill increase until I went ahead and did the one-time cost of switching all the bulbs I could to LED. That change alone managed to cover the PC, monitors, and TV I had at the time.
Realistically, your average citizen is using less power than they were even 40 years ago, even with all the additional technology they have.
In terms of computing efficiency the big gain is that people use their smartphones drastically more than they do a personal computer at home, on average. And smartphones are hyper efficient compared to personal computers or laptops. An average use laptop will use ~30-60 times more energy than a once-daily charged smartphone across a year.
That also goes for people watching things on their smartphones instead of a 65" television.
Yeah, I forgot about the smartphone shift in that comment.
Even people who have laptops, the shift to smartphones and tablets for much (maybe most? IDK I'm still a laptop person at minimum when I write this so it's hard to say) of their computing/communication is another order of magnitude change for sure.
As another side note/anecdata, I still remember the amazement where the aftermath of a nasty (mostly wind) storm in 2017 caused major outages in my region. I had just moved into an apartment and due to the lagging maintenance around makeready/treetrim it took the better part of a week to get power back. Thankfully however, I had a fully charged, fancy-ish APS Backup unit [0] that was able to keep my Surface Pro 3 and 4G Hotspot charged enough to at least not feel totally in the dark. It was crazy to see how even with both charging the 'time remaining' indicator said I could have used both way more than I even needed to.
In the 90s I’d change bulbs all the time - about once a month. I don’t remember the last time I changed a bulb. I don’t think my teenager has ever had the opportunity to.
I have a bunch of third generation Philips Hue bulbs, from around 2016. They weren't cheap. But I've had them all this time, and I brought them along when I moved house.
Haven't burnt out a single bulb yet.
I understand that this has caused some challenges for the Philips Hue division. They had extremely satisfied customers but not many repeat buys.
It costs 6 euro. I'm _fairly_ sure that incandescent 100Ws didn't cost six cents. I bought a few of these (actually a cheaper non-dimmable model which is no longer on Ikea's confusing website, from a cursory search) in 2016, when I moved. They're still working fine.
I used to buy incandescent bulbs 4 for a dollar shortly before they were banned.
Throughout the house, I need to replace a regular screw-in LED bulb probably every other month or so. I don't know what brand they are, they are light bulbs I picked off the shelf at Target or Walmart. Life is too short to worry about light bulb brands. Until now.
My experience is completely different. I've only had to replace two LED bulbs in the past six years. At the last place I lived, I swapped the CFLs in some of the fixtures (overhead lamps mostly) for LEDs and then swapped them back, taking the LEDs with me, when I moved. I've got a desk lamp in my laundry room that's been on nearly continuously for six years and that came from my last place as well.
Depending on the quality you can get a LED bulb ranging from 1 euro to 5 for the best one. The incandescent bulbs did not cost much lower, and adjusted for inflation, did cost almost the same, but you had to replace them much more often.
To me computers doesn't really have an effect on the data (for how much a computer costs, and how little time in the past it was used, considering the internet was dial-up and was the real cost of using it that made sure you weren't always online).
To me the difference is that we moved to more efficient ways to generate heat, more specifically from electric resistive heating to heat pumps. Both in home heating but also appliances (e.g. cloth driers).
And of course there is climate change, not only we generate heat more efficiently (an heat pump uses at least 1/3 to the power to generate the same amount of heat) but also the climate is less cold, thus less heat required. That is the big difference, not bulbs or computers.
Of course for nations that are more hot in the summer (e.g. my, Italy) the reverse applies, that is more power used because of air conditioning, that 30 years ago nobody had and now it's required since last summer was 25/38C outside for 2 months straight.
> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
If I search for "retail electricity price trends uk" I'm starting to see reports coming out of the UK like "UK electricity prices are now among the highest in the developed world." and "Household electricity prices have risen by almost 150% since 2010, and business electricity prices by nearly 175%" [0]. And now we see things like they've dropped below their 1970s per capita consumption.
That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much. It doesn't sound like an efficiency gain. Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff. It looks like they don't have enough energy and people are getting squeezed. I'd expect to see political instability in such an environment but the last time I checked only one of the major parties seemed to be in the process of collapsing (down from 2 in April) so they are doing better than expected on that front; I would expect riots in the streets with these sort of trends.
> Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff.
Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
Most appliances don't see much increased use from efficiency. And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency; other factors drive use changes there.
Somehow you’ve missed the drastic intensification of street, parking and building lighting at night not to mention headlights. People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.
Street lighting already had very efficient bulbs so I think that's caused by other factors. And headlights seem like other factors too. Building lighting I'm not sure but that's more like a doubling.
It's tough to say the exact multiplier but I've walked around at night a lot for years, and there has been a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights, as well as a move away from motion sensors toward permanently on.
It's the same here in Germany, and I very much dislike this development. We used to get so much beautiful fireflies in the summer here. Now they're mostly gone, and that's probably only the most visible damage.
True, but besides insecticides and habitat destruction it is possible that the strong nocturnal lighting, which disorients insects, has contributed to this.
Where I live, in Europe, when I was a child there was a great abundance of insects of many different kinds. If I did a walk around my home I could see insects from perhaps at least 10 different orders.
Nowadays, the only insects that are still abundant are the true bugs (Hemiptera) why all others have mostly disappeared (a few, like mosquitoes, may still be seen from time to time). I do not know the reason, but I assume that the true bugs might be more resistant to insecticides.
And locally a lot of harm is done through leaf removal. Fireflies lay their eggs in leaf litter, if that gets raked up & removed those firefly eggs don't survive.
> a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights
I think the number of lights is about the same at least where I live in the UK, the big change is the light is now bright white not the yellow of the older sodium vapour lights.
I kinda miss that but mostly because it wasn't as bright and is what I grew up with, you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.
> you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.
IN fact white light is MUCH MUCH less effective. Red light doesn't affect your night vision, and yellow isn't much behind. White light means you can see very well where the light it, but you can't see beyond that radius and so more light is needed. I don't need to see colors at night (where white it good), I just need to see the dangers in time to avoid them, and so white is much worse for the goal.
Just to make it worse, it takes nearly an hour for your eyes to fully adjust to dark after leaving white light. So if the lights go off or you have to leave the place where they are shining you can't see as well.
White light is only good when you have enough of it that everything you want to see for the next hour is fully illuminated. If there is any exception to that, then you shouldn't have white lite.
> drastic intensification of street, parking and building lighting
We got an increase in lighting whether we like it or not but for lower overall consumption.
> not to mention headlights
40 years ago the highest powered headlight halogen bulbs consumed 80-100W per bulb. so you were looking at 150-200W for low/high beams. A pair of modern laser headlights now gives you 5 times more light for a fifth of the electricity. The limit is safety in traffic.
> People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.
They consume so little that even wasting is still cheaper lower consumption than in the days of incandescent lights.
You concluded rationing before having evidence of real demand in the sense of need or even desire from the people. The less data you have, the more potential answers fit in the gaps.
Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it? Or do they already get more but with less electricity? I get twice the light I had 20+ years ago with a third of the electricity consumption. I get way more computing power with less electricity too. Same with my TV, my fridge, etc. Excluding the switch from gas powered kitchen appliances which drove my electricity consumption up, everything else went down in consumption while giving me more.
Do I mathematically want or need more? Am limited by the price of electricity, or by the price of the bigger/better product? Maybe I'd want a walk in fridge or a 3m tall TV but the electricity isn't the limiting factor. I need an extra room and taller ceilings first. Do I want more light? No. Do I need any of the things I mentioned? Also no.
The increase in price could equally be the providers extracting the maximum value from the consumers. Current consumption could be exactly as much as the consumers want or need to consume, and the providers sell for as high as they can before that demand drops. We need more data to answer this and we don't have it now. SO your answer is your bias put in words, not the certainty you want to make it sound like.
What is obsession with the light, that's like lowest consumer of electricity, also telly doesn't use much unless it's a really big one. Heating, cooking and appliances use the most, and people are definitely careful when using those, especially heating during the winter. Seems like you don't live in the UK.
Because the comment triggering this branch suggested improvements in efficiency must imply wanting to consume more. Light is one of those things. It's not the only thing I mentioned, you just chose to skip the others to make your job of arguing easier.
> Heating, cooking and appliances use the most
Even there you get more for less. Induction stove are way more efficient than the old heating elements. Heat pumps are way more efficient than a boiler. But most heating isn't electric. Natural gas, oil, or wood were always far more common. In the UK today almost 75% of heating is gas. Electricity is less than 10% so it contributes little to the topic of the article. [0]
Now let's get to the confounding factors which go down the pit of ignorance. Natural gas was always subsidized everywhere in the world whether you know it or not. District heating is almost the same story. Where I live there are still "heating electricity" plans so people get a better price if they happen to use electrical heating because the provider knows that small number of people will suffer if that costs too much.
Another confounding factor, the push for extreme efficiency. Heat pumps have some big limitations that nobody wants but choose to live with for the sake of efficiency and self sufficiency. Because people also install solar panels on their roof and power their appliances without anyone ever reporting how much more heating or cooking was provided with 0 load on the grid.
> Seems like you don't live in the UK.
I do not, I just chose to know what I'm talking about and not rely on being in a specific place to know the real situation. No offence.
It is historic, electric lighting was the first major application for electricity in households.
"
Electric lighting is highly desirable. The light is much brighter than oil or gas lamps, and there is no soot. Although early electricity was very expensive compared to the 21st century, it was far cheaper and more convenient than oil or gas lighting. Electric lighting was so much safer than oil or gas that some companies were able to pay for the electricity with the insurance savings.
"
> Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it?
Well, yes? That seems somewhat uncontroversial? There are a lot of people out there who need more electricity and can't afford it. Electricity is one of the most fungible forms of energy, with infinite electricity we could all live like kings. It'd be very comfortable.
That is also the explanation for a lot of the issues your post goes to. If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead. And the way the math shakes out is it'd normally be economically optimum to increase their access to a good standard of living by giving them more energy than you gave up. These effects are over the entire economy.
And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd. If I were relying on HN comment threads I'd believe households in the UK were composed of nothing but light-bulbs and consumed nothing but the same given how much of a focus they are of the energy policy.
Yeah, if electricity dropped in price by 50% I don't think my usage would change in any significant way. There's no way in hell I'd use over twice as much and trigger Jevon's paradox.
Thinking about what happens when prices approach zero makes it hard to make realistic predictions. Yeah infinite power would change everything, but for realistic price shifts there are very different price elasticities for different use cases.
Also roenxi I mentioned things other than lights, but lights happen to be a super clear example of Jevon's paradox not happening over a very significant amount of power usage so of course they'll get brought up.
Cheap electricity would change your usage in indirect way:
Cost of electricity is a significant part in aluminum production. Cheap electricity, cheap aluminum, more cars made from aluminum instead of currently cheap steel.
Cheap reliable electricity would enable cheap hydrogen production, which could replace many uses of fossil fuels. Cheap hydrogen, cheap ammonia production, cheaper nitrogen fertilizers.
Speak for yourself. The price of electricity immediately & directly effects the setup/operation of small business. I know home businesses that (juicing plants) that became non-viable on the basis of electricity alone.
Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". I'm not saying you're wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand like for anything else on the market. You focused on arguing weaker interpretation of what I said, discussing infinities, and obsessing about why people bring up lights.
> And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd
Easy, light used to consume a lot. Actually by some statistics [0] it was close to 15% of household consumption just a few decades ago. Is 15% so insignificant that mentioning it is ridiculous?
Personal anecdata, I can use more but I realistically (not in "infinite energy" world) want and need exactly as much as I use.
> Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand.
Supply/demand and prices are rationing. Prices represent the limit on how much of a resource someone can use before there is reason to believe they should stop. It's happens to be best form of rationing we have, the other methods tend to lead to disincentives to improve the situation (consider, for example, how the market rations out limited supplies of RAM right now - prices go up and people who pay get the RAM and all the money going to RAM producers gives them resources and incentive to build new capacity to produce more RAM). There isn't a limit on demand for electricity other than the price, it does literally everything. At the extreme case, if it were somehow cheap enough, we'd be able to use it to fabricate new matter. But every step of the way there are population-level opportunities to use more energy to get more comfortable if there is enough of it.
I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree; I don't see what is negative about the use of the word rationing. There are finite resources, some people won't have as much as they could use. There needs to be some system to work out who gets what; it isn't easy to get away from that. I recommend prices, but other methods have been tried. The alternatives tend to work badly and are not recommended.
But when prices go up 100-200%, that suggests the market is rationing pretty hard.
Yes absolutely more electricity is kind of the cornerstone of industrial production and comfortable living. If you make it cheaper you have more goodness
There are diminishing returns on more. My life wouldn't be better if I was using more electric for the things I already do. Sure I could leave my lights on all day, but by turning the lights off I save more than enough money which I can use for something else as to be worth the effort to flipping the switch when I leave the room.
All the things I see that would allow me to use more electric are not worth it - I'd rather spend my money on something else. My life would be better for an electric animated sculpture in my front year - but not by nearly enough that it would be worth building and so I don't have it.
Again though, diminishing returns. My life would be better if Bolivia puts in better transit to in their mountain villages - but not by much since I currently believe I will never go there and so it is a just in case. Even for the people who live in those places the population may be so small as to not be worth the investment even if energy was free.
You said: "Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff."
And that doesn't happen at all with light bulbs. The cheapness caused a mild increase in lighting, but people are using way less electricity on lights now.
I mean, sure. They might use more electricity for lighting or less. How much electricity gets used for lighting isn't really the point here. More electricity gets used.
Seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox has a pretty good explanation. This isn't a new effect, it's been an established consideration related to energy efficiency since the 1850s.
If light bulbs get more efficient, and someone uses more electricity on something else, that's not Jevon's paradox, that's a coincidence because there's a million things using electricity and some go up and some go down. There's no significant causal relationship between the two. (Mostly little fluctuations in electric prices that even out over the years as supply is built to match demand.)
Jevon's paradox is when a specific use case gets more efficient, so you do more of that use case, so much so that the extra use overwhelms the efficiency. It happens in many situations but definitely not all. You have a curve between how much you use and how much value you get, and the steepness of that curve decides Jevon's. For lighting in the past few decades, there's no Jevon's. The changes in light bulbs have caused a big reduction in electricity use. If we were stuck on incandescents we'd be using a lot more electricity total.
And then the article discusses that even if Jevons paradox doesn't hold, we'd reasonably expect more efficient energy use to lead to more energy consumption. Energy is an absolutely classic field where it improvements in efficiency isn't a likely cause for dropping use.
The UK doesn't look like it is experiencing an efficiency utopia; it looks like it has a relatively poor population among the developed countries and they're suffering from an advanced energy shortage. They costs appear to be going crazy, they're deindustrialising. That isn't efficiency.
> And then the article discusses that even if Jevons paradox doesn't hold, we'd reasonably expect more efficient energy use to lead to more energy consumption.
That's still the Jevons paradox.
> There isn't any reason to use less energy; if there are efficiency improvements then all else equal it makes the most sense to produce the same amount of energy and trade the excess into higher real living standards. Economies are good at sniffing that equilibrium out.
Massively wrong. Using more energy gives you sub-linear returns in value; you already got the lowest hanging fruit. For many uses you ramp up and use more power than before, but many uses you let your power bill drop.
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To put it differently, read your own article. Right at the top it says "if demand is sufficiently price elastic".
And then as you get through the article you get down to the section on the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate where start getting observations out of the academy that energy use goes up on efficiency increases even if Jevons' paradox doesn't trigger, and the section on energy conservation policy where the situation gets muddy but there isn't any reason to believe that improving energy efficiency would lead to lower energy use.
There is no way that the dropping per capita energy efficiency in the UK is being driven by efficiency gains, there is no theoretical reason to expect the two to pair up in the first place and it is clearly an energy squeeze when you look at the situation in context of the political and other real economic indicators. If the UK could drop 33% of its electricity use while maintaining a healthy economy that'd be a miracle on par if not exceeding what China managed in the last 50 years. That is simply not the situation, nobody seems to be talking about the vast improvements to QoL being driven by their vast surplus that has theoretically developed in the efficiency scenario [0]. As I learned in this comments section the UKians are literally rioting in the streets which is, sadly, not a surprise given their energy statistics and the head-in-sand strategy that seems to go hand in hand.
[0] I also feel great temptation to allege that people in the UK have been forced into straits so dire that they subsist on a diet of lightbulbs, but my will is strong.
Khazzoom–Brookes is basically the idea that Jevons is more true than not, on average, in the electricity market. And it's not even settled.
> There is no way that the dropping per capita energy efficiency in the UK is being driven by efficiency gains
I don't want to get too far into that analysis. I just really dislike how you came in here talking about Jevons like it's a guarantee in every situation. And dressing it up as "mathematically speaking". That math only applies for specific shapes of demand curve. Whether or not the UK is seeing a squeeze, your original argument and a lot of the followups were deeply flawed.
My original argument is mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff. And I don't see any reason to budge from that point; I'm still confident it is true and if you've pointed out a flaw I didn't see it. The evidence coming out of the UK case makes it quite obvious that they're being squeezed and the influence of the squeeze is what is causing drops in use.
If there is evidence that the country has freed up a third of its electricity for other uses and just run out of things to do with it then that is going to, without doubt, be one for the history books and would be a level of success that would be well worth talking about. The signalling out of the UK isn't "we're swimming in electricity, what do we do with all this power now that more efficiencies have been found? Lets go bitcoins and aluminium to find a use for these power plants!", it'd a pretty clear "we can't produce as much electricity as we once did, we don't have the resources, usage has to drop, heavy industry please leave".
If the cost of stuff goes down, people will consume more stuff.
But let's say the cost of Y (in electricity or money) drops 25%. If that makes people consume 60% more Y, then spending rises. But if it only makes people consume 15% more Y, then spending drops. Both results are plausible.
There's no mathematical reason to assume the demand increase is bigger than the price drop.
If I could suddenly make each gallon of household water use go 10x as far, I'd do somewhere between 1-2x as much stuff with water as before. This would mean I'm only consuming 10-20% as much water as before. Would you be different?
On the other hand more stoves are electric now rather than gas, new builds frequently have air source heating where they would've had gas or oil boilers, more cars are electric; all of which are huge percentages of a household's total energy consumption compared to something like lighting.
Not necessarily. In the bad old days folks would draw a continuous kW or more in the evenings just for lighting. 8kWh for an evening of lighting, or 1kWh for dinner, and 1kWh for lighting.
As for gas or oil boilers - oil is uncommon except in rural areas - gas is far more common but not as ubiquitous in the past as you’d think - many folks heated their homes with resistive electric radiators or IR heaters - so a heat pump is a huge efficiency win.
1950: Lighting was 30% of total electrical demand [1]
1993-1997: 112 TWh, 9% of demand [2]
2020: 81 TWh, 6% of demand [3]
Couldn't find total used in 1950 but the point remains: Lighting used to be a major source of consumption and now it's pretty minor, and at least the trends in the last 30 years have been driven by efficiency gains, particularly following the energy crisis in the 70s.
> And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency;
I mean not really.
Old aircon was off/on which mean that at temperatures near the target efficiency drops. (as in turning on for a few minutes, it takes a while to move the settle heat around)
Moving from fixed speed ac motors to "inverter driven" (brushless motors) means that AC can be run at a speed other than 100% or 0%. Yes, CoP hasn't increased 6x, but newer aircons have higher CoP over a wider range of temperatures.
moving from Plasma TVs to LED/oled is about a 2-3x improvement in efficiency.
Laptops are anywhere between 2 and 10x less power than desktop (caveats apply)
then double glazing has a large effect on heat rejection/storage. Non-coated glass lets in something like 1kw/m2 of heat, coated glass can reject anywhere up to 70% of that.
An old 100 W incandescent bulb produced about 1500 lumens, and now a LED bulb of 12 or 13 W can produce slightly more than that.
In the now distant past, I used only 100 W incandescent bulbs, all of which had been replaced more than a decade ago with 13 W LED bulbs, so I have benefited from this 8x reduction in energy consumption.
The other significant reduction in electrical energy consumption happened when I replaced a many-decades-old refrigerator with a modern high-efficiency refrigerator.
Compared with a half century ago when I was a child, now I consume additional electrical energy with some computers, one or two of which are almost always on, and with a microwave oven used for cooking, but the additional energy consumption is normally less than what is saved by modern lighting and refrigeration technologies.
What I don't get though is that with increased household efficiency and presumably an increase in population (i.e, density which usually lowers cost), and the benefits of efficiency improvements to generation and distribution... why is household energy spending is UP, even accounting for inflation?
Households use about 20% less electricity today than in 1985; per person kwh is also down. But household expenditure is up by 20% in real terms and cost per kwh is up by 50%
40 years of technological progress and prices went up :(
In 1970 the UK electricity grid and gwnerating capacity had been state owned since 1948, and was basically run by civil servants. This lasted until 1990-91 when it was all privatised by the Thatcher and Major governments (both Conservative).
Now in 2026 the main generators are EDF (French state owned), RWE (German), and Scottish Power (Spanish owned). These companies tend not to publish executive pay, but back in 2012 the CEO of EDF in the UK was being paid £1.2 million a year.
I would submit that all this has some bearing on why the prices have gone up.
In the US, it's due to the cost of the grid, the part of the utility bill that PUCs allow utilities to charge a fixed rate of profit. So if utilities take 20% on that grid "maintenance" project, the utility drives up the price as high as possible.
This is why distributed solar is actually cheaper than utility scale solar all-in: you need less of that very very expensive grid, even if you pay 3x on the initial install costs.
I think 100 W incandescent are too bright; I use 5 W incandescent lights (usually only one at a time, sometimes two if one is insufficient). I also find LED lighting (and flurescent) to be irritating (and they actually use a bit more power, 8 W instead of the 5 W that the incandescent light uses), so I don't use them.
However, I think that often you should not need to be overly reliant on electric power. If you have enough windows then you should not need electric light in the day time, if the incandescent light in the winter time also provides heat, if you have candles when needed, moon light (depending on the phase of the moon), etc, and I can write by hand and many things can be done without a computer (including, walk to where you need to go; I do not have a car so I walk if it is close enough or car pooling with someone else if far away), etc.
>Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
I want more than 6x as much light as I had in the incandescent bulb era. Indoor lighting is usually very dim compared to outdoor lighting, and that makes it harder to see things. As I get older and my eyes degrade I expect I'll want even more light. People running offices understand this and provide more lighting than typical for homes. See:
Even air conditioners have improved as we've moved away from having multiple leaky window air conditioners to mini-splits and central (though I would still think that's an increase in overall energy use).
which is why i think looking at raw electricity usage doesnt make much sense in a globalized world.
Consumption of final products, and exports are what make more sense to look at to see if lives are better today than the 1970's, which the article implies it isn't.
It makes sense to look at electricity usage. It tells the full story of the UK’s deindustrialisation policy starting under Thatcher and continuing under all governments, and recently under Theresa May’s net zero policies (also supported by all governments). There’s no reason aluminium smelting can’t come back to the UK with a proper energy policy of expanded nuclear power, more fracking, more renewables etc
We import very little Al from China; it turns out mostly to come from the UAE, which will have absolutely terrible CO2 emissions, as well as greener countries like Iceland and Norway.
It looks like we need to invest in local recycling (which, yes, needs cheap energy, but not as much as primary Al) in order to make more of a circular economy rather than just exporting vast volumes of scrap.
Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization. And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.
It's just an immense right wing noise machine which makes it impossible to actually focus on finding solutions. We're back to people who want to improve electricity per capita by decapitating people.
People hate electricity prices, but they hate electricity infrastructure as well. They hate pylons, they hate renewables, they hate nuclear. People hate pollution and hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity). Every solution will encounter angry blockers, often angry about things that aren't even real (anti-5G lunatics). And they want to blame everything on foreigners. Absolutely childish behavior of our """elite""", the dead hand of which sits on our media and most of our parties.
I think everything that needs to be said in this thread probably already has been by someone. Re-litigating the same issues.
> hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity)
Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.
And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.
Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.
Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.
Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!
There's also a huge racial undertone to the whole London anti-ULEZ 'debate' as Sadiq Khan is a muslim
Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Despite anti-ULEZ folk claiming it's hugely unpopular Kahn convincing won the next mayoral election including some boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ zone expansion
I think you overstate this. While there are wingnuts on Twitter who hate Khan for who he is, massively more people hate him - any politician, not just him - for dipping into their pocket and taking their money. "For the greater good".
Even the most beloved politican on the planet will become the most hated as soon as the propose increasing taxes, or increasing household costs. Which is why they're always looking for the sneakiest way to do it.
> Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Alternatively, the central authority with all the money (Johnson's government) tells the devolved authority (Mayor of London) it doesn't like handing out free money, so what if our lockdown has decimated your cashbox income... so in exchange for money now to keep the lights on during this pandemic, I demand you make more of your own money in future, by fining people and by driving up public transport usage in your area. Also, I know how unpopular it is, which is why I delayed it when I was Mayor of London, so good luck at the polls ha ha!
On the other hand, the Uxbridge and Ruislip by-election. Should've been a shoo-in for Labour, given it was disgraced Partygate BoJo stepping down. Labour won another by-election on the same day. But not this one. Reason? Most likely local anger over ULEZ expansion, even though that's the responsibility of the (Labour) Mayor, not the Labour Party generally.
> Both Labour's leader, Keir Starmer, and deputy leader, Angela Rayner, blamed opposition to ULEZ, with Starmer suggesting the Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan should rethink the policy. Khan defended the policy and Starmer soon sought to heal the rift. The defeated Labour candidate, Beales, also criticised the ULEZ policy.
So someone paid the electoral price for Khan's policy, it just wasn't him.
Diesel cars/vans. In 2001, the government cut yearly road tax to £20 for cars/vans emitting less than 110g/km of CO2. Many car/van diesel engines can meet this but few petrol engines can. The road tax normally costs £180-£300, so a £160+ saving every year.
So a lot of people moved to diesel cars/vans from 2001 onward.
Then in 2019, the Ultra Low Emission Zone was set around central London, which issued daily fines to:
- petrol cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 4 standards (most vehicles pre-2006)
- diesel cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 6 standards (most vehicles pre-2015)
This didn't bother that many people, because central London already has a daily congestion charge, so anyone taking a vehicle in there already had business to justify it. Most people get around central London by train/tube/bus/taxi, it's the best served city in the UK for public transport. There was also a scrappage scheme offering up to £9500 for replacing the vehicle.
What bothered a LOT of people, though, is the widening of the ULEZ area, first to the inner London orbital in 2021 and then to the whole of Greater London (9 million people) in 2023, regardless of whether they went to central London or not. The outer boroughs, aren't as well served by public transport as central London is, and car/van ownership and use is much higher than central London. And of course, the scrappage scheme was cut down to a maximum of £2000, which is not a lot.
You can perhaps see why there was so much opprobrium.
There wasn't 'much opprobrium', there were a bunch of radicalised mainly white men opposing it who made a lot of noise backed by right wing newspapers who want to criticise Kahn for Tory government policy
Kahn won the next election including outer boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ expansion
I don't know why you want to bring race into this. The split is along car ownership/non-ownership, or city-oriented vs countryside-oriented. The outer boroughs more often need to use cars, and work/visit outside the M25, than the people in inner boroughs. Uxbridge is 85% white, so you can expect an issue facing everyone there to be "mainly white".
What the election map on your article shows is a bunch of outer boroughs ("some"?) choosing the Tory candidate over the Labour one, there just weren't enough of them overall. Elections aren't usually single-issue, and there's probably enough value in reelecting Kahn (or his opponents are odious enough), that forcing a large number of people to set their money on fire didn't entirely wreck his chances.
But you'll note that lessons have been learned. Back in 2019, the IEA were demanding the complete ban of gas boilers by 2026. The government never adopted such a policy, it's only too well aware at how much needless cost and effort it'd put the entire country through by making 80% of households throw out their heating system and buy another one, for the sake of the planet. So that's why the closest the government got to that was proposing in 2020/2021 maybe banning them by 2035. And now? The government is reassuring people that it won't ban gas boilers; not in 2026, not in 2035, not in 2050, not ever. It saw what banning cars in London kicked off. It doesn't want that for itself.
Reduced fuel duty for diesel came in in 2001 (25yrs ago) and was removed following the scandal of manufacturers cheating the emissions tests in 2015 (11 yrs ago)
Social media is a catalyst that only works because material conditions are bad. If everyone is happy, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they just laugh it off. If everyone is angry, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they burn down a mosque.
It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.
Considering the number of people involved in the hotel arson attacks who have "previous", including domestic violence convictions, I think you can say that they themselves are unhappy, but that's not quite the same thing.
> fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves
I think we can agree on this. It's not that the UK is in any way a poor country in total, but it is an unequal one. And open to the negative effects of inequality from the outside - see the involvement of UAE oligarchs in Man City fraud, for example.
The establishment view is that riots and racism are right wing agitators and foreign power influenced. The people look to rival immigrants and conspiracies, united by anxiety and fear.
They are both looking for scapegoats. This has unfortunately lead to so many atrocities in history.
I question to what degree people are riled up over economic difficulty being scapegoated onto immigrants like the comment chains below seem to claim.
This explanation seems to ignore much more obvious motivations. Most of the recent violent protests were triggered by concerns about immigrants committing violent crime and sexual offenses or harassment, often following concrete incidents.
Public safety seems like the clear primary motivation here.
One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.
However, I think that glossing over the primary concern to claim that the outrage is essentially engineered, will not convince the public. At least that's my opinion.
> One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.
Which elites, possibly? The anti-immigrant views are represented by fringe parties (albeit ones that are getting more votes than many would be comfortable with) and all sorts of mainstream political leaders are constantly condemning them. Social media is the only reason the stories spread, practically speaking; international news barely even cares about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ceuta_migrant_crisis (where the number of people involved approximately matched the population of Ceuta itself).
At any rate, I can't say I particularly hear these protesters, or their representatives, talking about economic factors all that much. Certainly it comes up, but only with explicit reference to biased government policy and not as just some natural pie-sharing effect.
I'm also not sure, but I heard arguments that politicians and eg. Musk are trying to use immigration to distract the public from wealth inequality for example.
Or that politicians are not trying to solve immigration issues in order to stay in power.
Really I've heard all kinds of theories used to discount the actual issues or the motivations of those who make politics about immigration.
Most of them are likely nonsense with maybe a kernel of truth here and there, but that's just how politics are, right?
Because some of the worsening life conditions are caused by migration.
On other fronts it may provide a benefit but people need to get their head out of their ass if they don't think some qualms are legitimate.
To what degree? I'm sure migration is statistically responsible for some percentage of worsening life conditions, but I doubt it's the biggest cause for anything specific getting worse. The far bigger cause is the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent extraction by the powerful.
If migration is responsible for 5% of an issue, and other causes are responsible for 95%, it's far too easy to make the population imagine the numbers are swapped.
I can't respond to your point about problems in big cities, since you don't specify what they are, but rural areas have a whole host of problems that cities don't face, so I'm gonna need more than a vague assertion.
Though it still won't help your argument, because 1) correlation != causation, and 2) there are literally thousands of comparable correlations, so why is it immigrants, and not any of the others?
Because there is a VERY clear causal relationship between population increase and increased competition for housing and jobs. You'd have to be blind and deaf not to see that.
"Inequality" cannot reasonably be blamed for Rotherham or any other similar situations; it cannot be blamed for the findings of Lowe's report; it cannot be blamed for any of the video evidence recently surfacing of clear two-tier policing.
Rounding things off to "migration" is ignoring the state's role in all of this, deliberately, in order to present complainants as racist.
Except that most evidence points against that. The people who don't live next to immigrants are generally much more angry then those that do. And the general places where people are angry about living conditions are former industrial economic heartland that have de-industrialized for reasons that have literally zero to do immigration.
Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.
It's funny how you can jump around between ideas, without ever letting the same standards be applied by anyone else. What are you trying to gain out of these discussions?
Because to me, it sure looks like you're only here to spread your agenda, and not to have any meaningful conversations.
>>Through fear and little actual contact with "the others" though.
I have a rape gang enquiry report you should read.
>>Awww, you guys have stopped citing Luton then?
Not sure what "guys" you are referring to. I'm referring to the fact that dropping 1,250 male asylum seekers from countries with a completely different culture (such that need to be given brochures saying women need to consent to sex) next to a village with a population of 350 is one of the most appalling ideas ever.
Because its a well known pattern that anybody who spends 5min looking at the data knows. Most immigrants live in cities that mostly vote left. The places that vote right are rural places that barley have immigrants.
Hence you have places like Fox news run coverage about cities all the time, telling you how they are lawless places full of crime. Scaring rural people about what all these immigrants will do once they final start to move to bum-fuck nowhere.
You seem the same pattern in most democracies.
There is no correlation between contact with immigrants and anti-immigrant voting.
>>There is no correlation between contact with immigrants and anti-immigrant voting.
There is anti-immigration voting, not anti-immigrant voting. But if an area is predominantly immigrant-populated, where are you expecting the right wing votes in that area to come from?
You don't think since the Boris Wave there has been a surge in politicians taking anti-immigration positions?
Most places are not primarily immigrant, unless you believe that everybody that isn't voting Reform is an immigrant.
> You don't think since the Boris Wave there has been a surge in politicians taking anti-immigration positions?
That's not what we are arguing about. No question that the avg. level of opposition to immigration has gone up.
But interestingly again this is not actually correlated with how many immigrants are arriving, and the popularity of these politicians isn't actually correlated with how good they actually did on immigration.
Boris himself being in power while there was a lot of immigration but he remained popular with the base.
Because most people don't have any actual understanding of immigration issues or look at any kind of data.
>Boris himself being in power while there was a lot of immigration but he remained popular with the base.
He actively caused a large part of that migration of the boris wave with policies which were recommended against by at least 2 reports which they had requested and fellow front line politician such as suella.
This after running on a partially anti migration mandate.
He gets plenty of shit for it and lost popularity with anyone that cares about the matter.
>Because most people don't have any actual understanding of immigration issues or look at any kind of data.
By which metrics that they should all care about has it been doing well for people of the existing nations in europe?
> He gets plenty of shit for it and lost popularity with anyone that cares about the matter.
Maybe among well-informed people who closely follow immigration policy, but not necessarily among the broader Conservative base.
This illustrates my point: much of the political debate about immigration is driven by perceptions rather than actual policy outcomes. Johnson talked about restricting immigration, which was popular with his base, but many voters had little understanding of what his government was actually doing. Literally just anti-immigration vibes.
And the political scandals that ultimately brought him down were largely unrelated to immigration. And he would have been the best for the Tories to have a chance in the election.
> By which metrics that they should all care about has it been doing well for people of the existing nations in europe?
Nice attempt at shifting the goalposts while not so subtly implying that immigration is responsible for all these other issues.
That wasn't the argument. The argument was about whether anti-immigration sentiment and political support for anti-immigration politicians actually correlate with immigration levels and policy outcomes.
> I listed some examples of ones that aren't so great in an earlier comment in this comment tree.
You mean the racist rants based on completely made up stuff or serious misinterpretation of a few data-points while completely ignoring the much more important much more actual relevant issues?
This gets pointed at here in Belgium as well....except the share that is a migrant, has it as a background, in a relationship with, etc more than accounts for difference in opposition to more endless migration.
It's also like people are not mobile nowadays. I've worked and lived in Brussels and the like where I'm now a small minority.
It turns out if they have mind boggling unemployment and inactivity numbers (majroity non eu working age women are housewives), make up the majority of prisoners, cost a load of money and put pressure on certain groups of wages, alongside a host of other issues then what's the point?
I was once taking a trip from Canterbury to Glasgow. The train ride to Stansted airport cost more than twice the flight to Glasgow. Also, it's crazy just how cheap the flights are in Europe. How do the airline companies make any money?
People can indeed change their consumption patterns. You don’t hear about it with electricity as often, but with natural gas spike after the Ukraine war, it was all over the news that many couldn’t afford heating and were leaving their houses cold in the winter. But it’s not just poor people.
Low margin industries probably contribute a lot and are more likely to change electricity usage patterns (by moving to a different country or being outcompeted).
A lot of it could probably be brought back to consumption patterns or present day issues with war and outsourcing.. but.. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ is worth a (re-)read since I gather this is more of a more macro-structural outcome as opposed to a sudden thing.
I think you miss the point that power is a global market. In the UK we pay international prices because otherwise our state/corporations/establishment would sell it overseas. Yes, electricity is linked to natural gas, just because they can.
The UK population is generally docile, we don't really riot even when things are bad (unlike the French who barely need an excuse).
Our elites are pretty bad at running the country but actually quite crafty when it comes to managing dissent and channeling it into things that don't threaten their hold on power.
So the regime can get away with a lot, there is no organised violent resistance
I don't have an agenda, I just don't really believe in democracy.
There's very little evidence to support the idea that ordinary people vote for what they want and therefore control the direction of the state, in the UK or any other "democratic" country.
If that were the case then why are policies consistently implemented that go against the expressed desires of the majority of the population?
Every government in every state ever is more accurately described as a regime, for me it's a morally neutral term.
The only question is whether the regime is good or not
There is a lot of anger in the UK because their (our) environment and life conditions are measurably worse than in the past (even 10 years ago). This anger is masterfully directed (by political orgs but not the actual government) against immigrants, drug addicts, and other groups whose ousting is positioned as an "easy fix" to these problems. So there's not much meaningful action taken against the actual perpetrators.
There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.
Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.
>> There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.
It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up. Good luck proving your Brexit counterfactual.
>>Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.
When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true. Also, given that you can get a "skilled worker" visa for working in a kebab shop or a corner store [1], "skilled" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence [1].
> When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true
An immigrant cannot bring an extended family - only a spouse and children (younger 18). And they are not eligible for benefits so have no impact on the budget. Skilled visa is abused (to bring relatively low skilled workers) but that's not too common and they still pay taxes, just less than someone working at Google.
> It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up
1. I did check graphs and see low correlation - GDP pp dipped after GFC (2008 crisis) then again around Brexit referendum and started to recover 2021 - around the start of the Boris wave.
2. Even if we had a correlation it doesn't imply causation especially given multiple factors battered the economy around the same time - Brexit, COVID (which had delayed and lasting impact) and Russian-Ukrainian war.
Immigration is one of the primary factors in the decrease of life quality in the UK. The only mistake here is that being angry with the immigrants isn't going to change immigration policy.
>That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much.
With the massive extra "pro" of plausible deniability so all those who's interests are served by it can lie up down and sideways about how it's a good thing.
A lot of things are like this. It's really hard to overstate the cost of laying unpopular things bare.
Actually, I always found it so weird how often America is talked about on not only British social media, but on your state propaganda channels such as BBC and Channel 4 as well, who are taxpayer funded.
Almost every British person I've ever known has kept up with and has an opinion on American politics, but when I try to talk to Americans about British politics, they don't even know the names of the parties.
Which is to say, the UK is far more obsessed with America then America is with the UK. This has been true since WW2, where Britain was 'obsessed' with getting America to come save them from losing the war.
To be fair a lot of parties in the UK have appeared or changed names since around Brexit. I think "labour and tories" might have been simpler for American audiences than Reform vs Restore vs Rehab or whoever is up now
It is very strange to see how many nations gave up energy independence and basically exchanged a temporarily lower price of energy coupled with deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation. Money seems politically easy to spend raising defense expenditures by a few more percent of GDP but energy independence through decentralized renewables would be a much higher defense value imho.
>>deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation.
They are only deep geopolitical dependencies because our politicians are too stupid to actually let us drill for it in the North Sea or frack for it on the mainland.
Did you read the article? Gas prices are set by international markets that are willing to bid up prices and the small added contribution from the North sea is not going to swing prices significantly. The US is going through a similar delusion that they produce enough domestically to protect is Diesel prices - they don't and the oil companies are not going to forgo international markets
>> The article claims that gas prices are set by international markets that are willing to bid up prices and the small added contribution from the North sea is not going to swing prices significantly.
Argue what you like, but it's hard to think that increasing the supply of a commodity won't make the prices go down. Will it be major? Probably not compared to the massive amount of tax on fuel, but I'd still take it.
You've drawn the wrong premise from the data you've looked at. There is no rationing.
UK electricity prices operate in a broken market where the price is fixed to the most expensive on-stream generator in that moment, so in the auction of wholesale prices that happens dozens of times a day, if a single gas generator is online, everyone is setting the price around gas generation even if most of the supply is much cheaper wind.
Last week the PM announced that this broken market should get fixed in the next parliamentary session, because he - and his party - know that reducing energy prices has material impact on how people feel about the economy.
You should also understand that demand has changed shape considerably in the last 50 years.
There's been a pretty devastating deindustrialisation in the UK since the 1970s - there's only one steel forge left operating, and that required nationalisation this year, for example. As the UK moved to a knowledge economy, we found that most of the workforce moved to needing nothing more than a laptop to add to GDP.
But the home has also changed shape: you can't buy an old fashioned light bulb any more, so dreary wet winters are illuminated exclusively by LED lighting at ~10% the power consumption used in the 1970s. Heatpumps have replaced storage heaters, and while electric cars are popular even they do not use as much energy as the factories and ship yards used to.
There is literally just less demand. And the pricing is pegged to gas, unfairly. If that market breaks, I doubt consumption would go up, but maybe new industrial opportunities would open up - if we end up with cheap, abundant energy as a result, we might attract more energy-intensive industry to the UK, but I don't think it's fair to define current state as "rationing"
Well, there's a difference between "This is just marginal pricing" and "This very specific market with marginal pricing is the only one possible"
I would like to think that National Government is considering choices which would still be marginal pricing but change other elements to better suit our present reality. Two examples:
1. Regionalize. Today the price for 1MWh of electricity in Portsmouth is exactly the same as for 1MWh of electricity in Dundee but if the UK is making so much electricity in the far North on a windy January night that's not the real price to deliver the electricity, getting it to Dundee would be far cheaper. Prices can reflect that, and if they do that new energy-hungry factory makes more sense in Dundee than in Portsmouth even if it would be slightly more convenient to build it in Portsmouth.
2. Retail pricing can have a significant social policy element distinct from "What the market says this costs". Technically an old lady living alone who uses 50kWh per month and a wealthy family with two EVs and a swimming pool chewing almost 10MWh per month are both "connected to the grid" but maybe the 40p per day "standing charge" to cover that connectivity could be 10p per day for that old lady and 80p for the wealthy family. Again, the market says that's wrong because the connection doesn't cost more money if you use it - but it's a social policy decision.
Yep, line congestion is a pretty big problem - lots of wind generated in Scotland - industry down south have large demand so we end up curtailing wind and spinning up "peakers" to support regional demand. This is a bigger problem in Germany.
Regional pricing is something being looked into - comes with it's own problems - but more solve-able with modern data processing pipelines.
IMO stick a battery in every house, and you have a nation-wide buffer for smoothing out renewables is a good idea. Large battery bank projects are being rolled out which can help with this too.
In terms of social pricing - that would still need to be anchored to "something" - which currently is the price derived from the merit order.
There are also a lot of projects around improving transmission infrastructure. It's a very interesting time.
The UK doesn't have basically any "peakers" (Open Cycle Gas Turbines) and I'm surprised to hear they're a thing in Germany,
Combined Cycle costs more to build but is far more efficient. So OCGT is basically a bet that fuel is cheap forever, or at least for so long you've made your money. I know that bet doesn't work in the UK and I would not expect it to pay off in Germany either.
So, basically none. At that point there's over 30 GW of electricity production so OCGT was about 0.4% of the country's electricity. About a third of the electricity was gas, so almost 100x as much Combined Cycle as Open Cycle.
>>There's been a pretty devastating deindustrialisation in the UK since the 1970s - there's only one steel forge left operating, and that required nationalisation this year
Nationalised because high energy prices made it unsustainable commercially.
Increasing market prices aren't rationing. They should encourage more people and companies to consume less and produce more electricity. Of course if regulation is too complex that might not happen easily (I'm thinking of German solar power regulations right now).
The outrage is real, because production is less than half the story.
In the past 10 years.
The supply margin (declared capacity - demand) has reduced by half.
Electricity prices have increased 250%(edit: from 0.11 to 0.25).
And the 9-fold relative increase in imports (1% to 9%) definitely contributes to that increase.
Before you say it's all inflation, I believe inflation is not that high over the same period, and consider the role that electricity price hikes have played on inflation.
The main policy failure was the conservative government banning onshore wind for five years. There's less critical issues with pylons and planning that I would actually blame the public for rather than the government.
Other than that, not a lot of other options. People mentioning nuclear will be referred to the build time of Hinkley C.
Europe in general has failed to adjust to the then obvious risks of natural gas and fossil fuels in general that have now come to pass.
The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014. The geopolitical risks were crystal clear back then.
As far as nuclear goes there is a western failure to innovate on design presumably due to ossified regulatory requirements and I possible contractor malfeasance. In China new clear plants take 5 to 7 years.
> The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014
Hmm, I wonder what hugely expensive and distracting project the UK engaged in after that time instead? Ah yes, Brexit, which turns out to have been promoted in part by the Russians (with a lot of help from the UK press and local dodgily-funded actors).
Part of the higher per capita GDP than France is the anglosphere dividend. There is a great deal of preference in all the english speaking world to do business with english speaking countries for obvious reasons.
That's a strange comment. Electricity provision is a small part of GDP. So of course doing something great in one part of your government doesn't magically mean you have the best overall economy.
That said, its also wrong to measure benefits only by capita GDP.
It's estimated that embedded generation - behind-the-meter solar and batteries, CHP, and diesel generators used for backup or to avoid peak pricing - was about 23% of the UK's total capacity in 2024, and almost certainly a little higher now.
I would have expected that this can only be possible through economic downturn. Sure, the more efficient light bulbs can slightly flatten an ever rising graph, but we should not have any illusion that humanity will even use less energy than yesterday. That would only happen if a severe crisis of some form hits us.
And sure, if steelworks and chemistry is moved abroad, the country will use less energy on the whole. But then you have to calculate the indirect usage through imported products as well to have an honest "energy requirement" value for a region or country.
Not saying you can skip efficient light bulbs, but we need to stay realistic about future energy requirements.
It is a wonder isn't it? The absolute determination to debase ones own country. It does, however, make complete sense when you consider the incentives at play (and that is where British governance is genuinely on the back foot).
Industrial sites are almost always connected to the grid with backfeed. And even if they can't push out their entire wattage, in accounting terms, that power is priced the same as you get from the grid.
> [...] two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells [...] Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too.
And increasingly, batteries are also coming to such sites. Would be very interested in learning more about the study's analysis/impact regarding this trend.
It's interesting to look at the all time demand at the bottom of https://grid.iamkate.com and see that demand has one dropped from 36GW to 30GW since 2012
Let's get this straight: yes, there's been a reduction in demand and increases in efficiency, but electricity is objectively extremely expensive in the UK now. Energy is being heavily imported.
This has disastrous consequences for businesses and the economy. It is the number one biggest problem facing the UK economy after the huge government debt and crippling taxes... although there are a number of other problems I could mention.
Are clothes dryers common in the UK? After moving to Japan it took me a few weeks to get used to not using one, and now looking back I can't help but think of what an enormously stupid waste of energy they are.
They are a stupid waste of energy if you live alone and want to suffer for the sake of environment.
If you have a family of four, the clothes dryer is an ENORMOUS time-saver. I'll never voluntarily live in an apartment that doesn't have one. No way I'm sacrificing my quality of life.
I don't really mind hanging clothes, it doesn't take that long. You still have to fold and stash away clothes, and often they are crinkly out of the dryer, and don't last as long.
What it does save is space that you need to hang clothes.
During winter I also like that it provides some moisture so the air won't get too dry.
edit: so basically we only use our dryer if there's a ton of laundry to hang, plus sometimes for towels or bed sheets/blankets.
Whats so bizarre about non-americans is just how beaten down you are about these types of topics. You are post rationalizing why you shouldnt have access to modern technology. Youre so defeated you just cant understand how insane you sound.
> I don't really mind hanging clothes, it doesn't take that long.
I mean sure, but i still would rather not do it. I could wash my dishes by hand too, its not reallly that big of a deal, but i dont because we have technology. We have solutions to all these things, and your politicians have somehow convinced you that its fine that you cant use them. Bizzaro.
Fairly common in houses with the space for them, but they often come in washer/dryer combos if you don't have the space. These are about as effective as using a hairdryer to dry your clothes and take about 3hrs after the initial wash.
The tumble dryer I had in the US could do a full load dry in about 25-30 mins. Maybe it was significantly more wasteful in terms of energy.
Modern dryers are also far more efficient than the old ones; a heat pump dryer uses about a third the power of a conventional condenser, and even less than that of a vented.
Not sure how you can call it stupid. They perform a role which is valued by a lot of people, especially those living in apartments.
That's exactly why we convert things to money - so we don't use arbitrary measurements. An energy use is not "wasteful", it can only be expensive. Which is worth or not, depending on particular conditions.
I guess I'm just an oddball. Spending 5 minutes to hang my clothes seems like a tiny price to pay to save a ton of energy the way the rest of most of the world does. But I guess the HN crowd are mostly gated community techies who can't be bothered to walk three blocks to a supermarket, either. So I'm yelling at clouds here
I moved to the UK, and also got a dryer at that point.
The weather in the UK can be very humid, and if you don't have much of a garden, it can be impossible to dry your clothes at times. We've had times where our living room was full of clothes for more than a few days, and it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't really dry anyway.
So we've invested in dehumidifiers and a dryer, and it made our life a lot more comfortable.
The UK has huge problems with mould growth caused by damp. Drying clothes indoors is one of the causes. Energy is expensive so people don't heat their homes properly. Those two things combined cause mould which leads to severe health problems.
Dryers output heat, so it is possible to kill 2 birds with one stone here. I know several people who use dryers at strategic times to heat their house.
A dehumidifier solves both problems. Put your damp clothes in a room with a dehumidifier and they're dry by the morning. You can also use it when it's wet to keep the room humidity down to 50%.
Like others said, weather and conditions. During summers here clothes dry in an hour during the day, and they're half ironed to boot. In the winters however... I still remember bringing my jeans back inside as a slab of ice, and having foggy windows due to drying indoors.
They're not really. I only live with my partner and don't have kids, and even then we've got to have clothes airers around the house all the time. If we had kids then it'd become unfeasible to have that much washing blocking the house
The lower demand drives prices up because fixed costs are spread across less units.
A shift to EVs and heat pumps and possibly datacentres should increase demand and lower unit prices. Even more so to the degree that those can respond to price signals and shift demand away from peaks.
Peaks are expensive for the same reason, you need to build capacity that is rarely used and so can't spread the cost.
Separately, smart charging or water heating can use the cheapest available generation from renewables as they vary with time.
On the other hand, this generates a "doom loop" for methane gas as it also has network costs. Ensuring entire areas shift to electric heating at the same time helps with this e.g. banning new build areas from connecting to gas networks.
Not unsurprising, excluding grid efficiency and industrial demand, its also just households. More and more places are getting batteries wherever possible, plug in solar is also avaialble. The amount of demand I don't forsee increasing at all unless people start getting air source heatpumps.
The rise of gas central heating means that less electricity is used for supplemental heating — those lethal electric bar fires are a thing of the past, and the ones that remain have been replaced by efficient oil-filled radiators and at least somewhar more efficient storage heaters. Also many fewer houses rely on electric immersion heaters for water.
Houses are better insulated. And it is a lot warmer (actually shockingly so — 1.5C more on the mean maximum daily temperature in winter) so there is much less supplemental electric heating needed.
Cooker hobs are not the horribly inefficient hot metal ring element things they used to be — halogen, induction and gas hobs have replaced them, more use of microwaves etc.
LED lighting.
Solar (assuming it is not included in the numbers).
Even things like electric kettle elements are modestly more efficient (more sealed-element kettles) and an energy efficiency drive in the 90s persuaded people to only boil the water they needed.
And talking of kettles, we drink only a third as much tea per person as we did in the 1970s, and while we drink much more coffee, it has not closed the gap.
Residential gas and efficiency are big components, but why ignore the elephant in the room - the seismic deindustrialization of the UK since the 70s? Industry was the largest consumer of electricity in the 70s, is more electrified now, yet still uses less electricity due to its dramatically smaller output.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm also not addressing it. I don't know that much about it. I do remember living in the 1970s; I just don't remember deindustrialisation well enough to speak of it (though I do remember I used to walk past a literal blacksmith and a stonemason to school).
I don't actually think the deindustrialisation of the UK is any sort of elephant in the room, as it goes. This is a small, tightly packed country and our physical quality of life has improved radically with the deindustrialisation of towns (and indeed, in this timeframe, the destruction of the last of the appalling housing that it forced on people).
Interesting point of view. The UK was considered the 'Workshop of the World' for generations though, and this was associated at the time with the wealth and relatively very high standard of living (and housing). This all fell apart in the 70s and most agree that housing and standard of living in the UK have not been improving as quickly since when compared to e.g. the new 'Workshop(s) of the World' as in Japan, Taiwan, Korean, now China.
Comparing rates of improvement is a bit silly, isn't it? They start from different places. I live very modestly but suspect my standard of living is still rather more comfortable than the average Chinese person.
The average standard of housing in the UK compared to the early 1970s is night and day different. People were still living in appalling slum conditions when I was young. That stuff has gone. It's just completely weird to suggest that we're stuck back there.
I don't know who the "most" who "agree" are. But if this is going to turn out to be another thing where people use air conditioning or car ownership or drying clothes outside or whatever… ehh.
To be honest you seem to want to read a lot more into what I'm saying than I (not an American) intend. I don't think the notion that China has improved in standard of living much more than the UK since the 70s requires citations, but it is fair to ask if comparing rates of improvement is meaningful - probably not really.
I'm genuinely surprised that you view the UK's industrial past so negatively - as the cause and not the solution to slums. It was the national pride and joy at the time and people celebrated it for raising their standard of living (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition). The terraced houses of the 1800's were actually built in part due to government initiative to improve housing for the working class beyond what was possible in comparable European cities. You even state that your own house from the UK's industrial heyday is up to modern standards! That's quite an achievement!
Would you apply this same logic (that industrialization degrades housing) to China - where the replacement of slums by modern apartments is usually seen to be a consequence of the vast industrial capacity?
Of course, the improved material standards of living from industrialization come at the cost of air quality and pollution - but these are likely solvable problems in the long-term.
Slums existed globally long before industrialisation (antiquity). The buildings which replaced the slums were built with the outputs of industry, and were bought by workers earning good wages from industrial jobs.
In Britain people were forced to move into cities due to enclosure - industrialisation saved them from the elite-imposed death sentence (which forced my ancestors to leave). It's an heroic story.
Again, would you say that Chinese industrialisation causes slums in China? Would you say that the demolition of slums in China, to be replaced by modern buildings, is assisted or inhibited by Chinese industrialisation? Would a similar country with less industry (e.g. India) have more or less slums? Would standards be better in Chinese or Indian slums?
Left wing thought is rooted in the idea that industrialisation allowed workers to create vast material wealth but did not give them their fair share. Now we have progressive Thatcherites apparently.
I am referring to the tenement slums that were built in the early industrial era. Vast, vast swathes of awful factory and mine worker housing, unsanitary, full of disease.
These persisted until the labour movements forced by then extremely wealthy industrialists to build something better; railway worker houses for example were usually built better.
But what was built from the late 1780s until the late 1880s was often of absolutely appalling quality.
The problem I have with HN is this belief that things were bad and then along came industrialisation and everyone had better lives — it is tosh. Dangerously misguided tosh that is being used to support the idea that protests against AI are misguided, that Luddites were only vandals, that the industrial era made everyone healthier and happier and freed them from farm labour.
It took a hundred years before their lives were on average better.
And there were industrial workers houses of appalling quality — the ones that didn't get bombed out in WWII — still in existence until I was eleven or twelve years old in the eighties.
I've asked twice about this causal relationship between industry and slums you propose. As I understand, the slums and crowded cities were created because the feudal overlords kicked the subsistence farmers off of their ancestral land and left them for dead. This preceded the industrial revolution.
Industry was the tool which allowed people to recover and build a vibrant, free, and enlightened country. A serviced-based free-market laissez faire Thatcherite economy will just leave them where they were originally. Deindustrialization is a change which people should be aware of and prepared to resist at a cost. Freedom and sovereignty demand it.
> It was in fact not ludicrous at all that the early years of the British industrial revolution..
If it had just been the early years (1700s) it would have still been ludicrous, given the size and history of the country. But that it was still the case by the 1870s is simply extraordinary. They were outcompeting larger and more autocratic countries.
> very much physically larger countries with more room for every kind of factory complex, poorer workers, poorer pollution controls, corrupt central-planning autocracies, and worse human rights
It was a political decision to move the technology there and to trade freely rather than strategically with these countries. It still is. Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Germany are of a similar size to the UK. Those are countries which accept a high price for their own industrial sovereignty. They reinvest their earnings and strategically use them to purchase industrial enterprises (like ARM) in other countries. They don't sell off their own high value industry. Political priorities are the only question here. The UK has embraced an ideology that prioritises the wealthy making as much money as possible, whereas these similar countries have resisted it. You endorse it but stating its consequences and inevitabilities.
> poorer workers
In 2026 the discretionary take home income for workers after food and rent is not that different between the UK and South Korea/Japan and Germans actually take home more. The bulk of worker pay actually goes to landlords and/or banks who reinvest it industrially in poor countries. Again, this is a political policy and not an inevitability. It does not happen in China.
I'm sorry but this is so much nonsense and myth-making. 'Workshop of the World' was in the late 1800s, not 1970. Britain was being outpaced on these things by 1900 by Germany and the US. France was doing a lot. And Japan was coming up.
The living standard was not actually high during this period. Unless you love dying early and breathing coal smoke.
And this didn't fall apart in the 70s, that just an rewrite of history. It had been falling apart for much, much longer. In the 70s they just had to reckon with it. In the Post-WW2 they had the advantage of much of the rest of the world being destroyed, but as Japan and Germany recovered, they out competed Britain in almost major industry.
But Britain could have done much to improve standard of living continuously even without the manufacturing dominance of 100 years earlier. Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands aren't major steel producers that are 'the workshop of the world' but the standard of living went up. Britain had the chance to do the same thing, but they didn't.
I'm aware of the timeline (and referenced it several times). Nevertheless, there has been a dramatic and obvious change since the 70s (re TFA), even though the trend began much earlier.
The important question is why manufacturing GDP per capita in the UK has fallen below comparable countries (not why it is below its historic peak - an unfair strawman), and whether or not this is for the best and/or inevitable - as you and others have suggested.
You've actually made the case that it is bad and evitable better than I did - all of the countries you mentioned produce more industrial GDP per capita than the UK in 2026, despite being physically smaller (well only if you exclude arctic tundra), and this a large source of their relatively high wealth and improved standard of living. All have different industrial policies to the UK (markedly, since the 90s). All previously produced less than the UK per a capita when they were relatively poorer, and produce more per capita now that they are relatively richer. You suggest there are other more important reasons than industry, but don't bother name them.
Sweden was famously one of the industrial greats (and still is, for its size) - if this surprises you then it's likely you know very little about modern industry, let alone history and policy. With most of the iron ore in Europe, it had an enormous primary steel making industry in the 70s, which also suffered and required state intervention / restructuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_crisis - Sweden now has double the manufacturing GDP per capita of the UK. That's one of its primary sources of wealth and high standard of living.
Switzerland is an outlier for many reasons but also produces far more manufacturing GPD per capita than the UK (maybe 4 or 5x) in 2026. As a late to industrialise region, it famously pulled itself up from a collection of agrarian cantons into a powerful industrialised federation. Again, modern Switzerland is famous for its industrial output.
Netherlands also makes about 2-3x the manufacturing GDP per capita as the UK, and benefits from some outlier effects, but is perhaps otherwise very similar to the UK.
Denmark makes about 3x the manufacturing GDP per capita. The government is highly active industry through all kinds of strategic public-private partnerships, and Danes have broadly rejected corporate control of their industrial economy through a swathe of legal mechanisms and alternate governance structures. The Danish are proud to invest in sovereign industry which improves their quality of life.
All of these countries (unlike the UK since the 90s) continue to maintain industrial policies which consist more or less of moderate protectionism beyond the EU, moderate state intervention in the key industries, state financing for key industries, state funding of research and development and education, tax subsidies, high taxation to support welfare and other labor market interventions which supported industry transitions, support for unions and labor relations, rejected deep privitisation and maintained state ownership of essential industrial infrastructure, safeguarded local ownership of key industries to some extent (through legal intervention, state spending, public-private partnerships, 'fonde', or at the very least laws requiring local governance).
The bottom line is that the UK continues to give it all away for pennies and the man on the street is convinced this is a good thing - even though the countries you reach to for comparison have all chosen a different path! It's striking that you take issue with me for recommending the very things which you celebrate in other countries.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Industry is poverty, slums, and pollution.
You are only looking at one metric and you are not even doing it in any systematic way. And you are viewing everything threw that one metric.
My point is, that the manufacturing difference is not the reason for the difference in standard of living by and enlarge. And even if it was, your implications aren't necessary correct.
First, the reason Copenhagen and most cities in the Netherlands or Switzerland are a nicer place to live then most cities in Britain, is because they have invested in infrastructure, both for cycling and trains and metros. Along with other local polices.
The same could be said for other things, Britain is doing things badly despite spending the same amount of money. Does Britain pay more for infrastructure because they sold the steel industry in the 70s? No clearly not as other countries without steel industries pay less. Same goes for health care and other things.
As we are talking about steel. British steel was in structural decline for 100 years already and totally uncompetitive and had been propped up by the government. Even then (conservative) government in the 70s did try to save it and did enact massive amounts of protectionism and it mostly was not successful and it remained problematic. Specially not at keeping massive amounts of the population employed.
Britain actually spent far more on propping up its steel industry then Sweden, even accounting for Britain being bigger. Sweden was just in a much better position already by 1970, so they had a much easier time reorganizing. So focusing the blame only on Post-1970 completely misses how they got to this structural crisis point. And its not clear how many more billions could have saved these 150k jobs in that industry, and its not even clear that with a few more billions these jobs would have been suitably saved. So the idea that if just Britain had retains its steel monopoly and invested another 10+ billion pound then everything would be amazing now is very questionable.
The same goes for manufacturing in general, yes Britain in 1970 had much higher manufacturing share, but so did everybody and by then British manufacturing issues were already apparent. In terms of actual manufacturing productivity, Britain was already bad in productivity terms, not comparable to Sweden or Switzerland. As Japan and others came up, it was in a hopeless position. That is actually the core of the issue. You are only looking at govenrment failing to protecting these industries, without realizing that you can't long term prop up industries with terrible productivity. Government can nationalize a failing car (truck) factory but running failing factories forever is not popular in any country. This is not at all like what happened in other countries. They did better in manufacturing in the long term because of higher labor productivity.
The Nordics, Switzerland and Netherlands also had neoliberalism. And they didn't maintain their industries primarily threw state intervention and protectionism. And when the did interventionism is was mostly reorganization and a few state loans (often less then Britain). France if anything is the most protectionist country in Europe and they have a low manufacturing just like Britain. Most of the countries that are doing the actual manufacturing and exporting in those countries are private companies and often ones that didn't have massive state involvement (not more then British companies for the most part).
And Britain spending is actually very close to countries like Netherlands and others. And while Sweden and Denmark spend more, that's mostly because of the social state, not propping up manufacturing.
So here are my points:
- Most issues with Britain in terms of Standard of Living have to do with bad govenrment polices, not the lack of manufacturing or the lack of spending. Britain spends nearly the same as Sweden on Healthcare, while getting worse outcomes. Same for infrastructure, same for many other things.
- British manufacturing went away because of a labor productivity that ...
You're not wrong, but you are mostly arguing against an exaggerated version of what I have said (focus steel production, ignoring qualifiers like 'moderate', 'since the 90s', 'public private' vs your 'state ownership' (which I only applied to infrastructure)).
Industrial policy should be measured by how industry delivers for the goals of the population - cleaner greener infrastructure, high-quality housing, and high wages. By that standard, Britain has had worse industrial policy than its comparable neighbours. Rather than pretending that this isn't the case, we should ask why. Britain led the neoliberal project since 1979 and applied its teachings deeply. What does it have to show for it?
> If an industry is uncompetitive, public ownership does not magically make it productive
Shrewd investments make productivity, and the public is generally incentivised to make these investments unlike owners - who can simply move the money to low-cost countries. Limited public ownership and the other structures I mentioned help to ensure that the profits are reinvested back into domestic industry. If you sell to the highest bidder, you can be certain that the profits will be taken overseas. Of course, the devil is in the detail, and this may be a sound decision (e.g. if you had other more critical industries in need of capital). But since these decisions are made by private owners, and not by the public, such cases are exceedingly rare.
> A competitive manufacturing sector is not primarily the result of protectionism. It depends on ..
You then list all the things I claimed the other states have intervened more heavily in, and which British neoliberal doctrine insists on leaving to the market.
Limited strategic protectionism for emerging industries has a long history in economics and left-wing political economy. It was practiced liberally in all ascendant industrial powers - China, US, Germany, and of course the UK. Only in the anglosphere and only since Thatcher and Reagan era propaganda have such policies come to be viewed with suspicion. Since the 70s, the Nordic countries have embraced it too. Norway protected its oil and gas industries, Sweden and Finland protected telecommunications (Nokia, Ericsson), Denmark protected its offshore wind. In these cases, state ownership (of the customers) was indeed the key mechanism. The list is long and many of those defining features of the modern sophisticated Nordic economies are the consequence of protectionism.
> But it does not establish that this is the primary reason for their higher living standards
If not from industry, then where does the Wealth of Nations come? If banking and finance service only foreign industry, and domestic real estate, what good are they for the development of the country? On these subjects, there has been much ink spilled.
I for one confidently believe that it is no coincidence that UK has experienced less growth and improvement of living standards, while its industrial base declined more rapidly. To find a counterexample you would have to go as far as Italy - a country with extreme political corruption during the period in question.
> or that their manufacturing success was primarily caused by the policies you advocate
No it doesn't, but I hope that at it least has led you to consider the possibility.
> Industrial policy should be measured by how industry delivers for the goals of the population
Yes, that's my position. None of those things are directly dependent on domestic manufacturing.
> Shrewd investments make productivity, and the public is generally incentivised to make these investments unlike owners
The history of British industry would point to the opposite. But there are counterexamples as well. In general, a government-owned industry faces much less pressure to make difficult choices because it can continue running losses for a long time. If, for example, an industry is not competitive, cutting wages might be the only way it survives to fight another day, but politically this is often impossible, creating a permanent structural deficit.
Meanwhile, many private owners do make smart decisions, and these often preserve at least some significant employment in the country of origin.
And making "shrewd investments" with the long term in mind doesn't really go well with a political system focused on election cycles, the media, and parties trying to undo each other's successes or failures.
British public industries demonstrated exactly these patterns. They were often structurally underdeveloped, leading to low labour productivity. That is not something you can fix with limited protectionism.
> who can simply move the money to low-cost countries
For many industries, there isn't a simple investment you can make to reduce labour costs sufficiently. If you want to preserve some of those industries, you will need to subsidise their higher labour costs through taxes, tariffs, or higher consumer prices. That hurts the competitiveness of your other industries.
If you have the right tax regime and a company headquartered in your country, moving some production abroad isn't necessarily a bad outcome. If that keeps the company internationally competitive while retaining valuable functions domestically, it can be a perfectly reasonable arrangement.
> Of course, the devil is in the detail, and this may be a sound decision (e.g. if you had other more critical industries in need of capital). But since these decisions are made by private owners, and not by the public, such cases are exceedingly rare.
"The public" doesn't make these decisions. Bureaucrats or politicians do. And those decisions are only indirectly influenced by elections every few years, with many layers of indirection.
It's almost impossible to express differentiated views. For example, I might want airlines to be private, the steel industry to be private, but telecommunications to remain public. It's unlikely that any political party will represent exactly those preferences.
I'm Swiss, so we get to vote on many more things than people do in the UK, especially individual policies. But even so, that's a tiny fraction of all the choices a government makes.
If you assume a much larger public sector, actual democratic control can become even weaker.
Politicians are often poorly informed about the details. The UK is a good example, where parliamentarians regularly get appointed to ministerial positions in fields in which they have little experience.
Politicians also prefer to argue over headline-grabbing industries and are more likely to advocate whatever is popular in the short term than to work out what's best for each individual manufacturing business.
Alternatively, decisions are made by bureaucrats, over whom the public often has very little direct influence because of the many layers of indirection. Singapore developed a powerful technocratic bureaucracy that performed extremely well in many areas. Its senior civil servants had considerable internal authority.
But such structures can also fail badly and become deeply undemocratic. It's a sword without a hilt in many ways.
> Limited strategic protectionism
You're picking out a few limited examples while ignoring the broader trends of economic liberalisation in these countri...
Deindustrialization is a bit of a meme. The UK still makes "stuff", quite a lot of stuff, and quite high value. It's just that it's less visible. Much of it is actually related to electrification, including power turbines. High value small run stuff like satellites or scientific instruments.
It looks less like men with hammers and more like mixed-gender teams in lab coats, and that makes it invisible for ~some reason~.
I realise now I'm arguing with people who actually know very little at all about Britain's industrial history. Britain held a comparable position to current China or the US (high tech and bulk volume) manufacturing for ~100 years despite being about 2% of the world's population (and competing with the US, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, etc).
That sounds ludicrous now - it was ludicrous then too. Yet it really happened, and it really is over.
> mixed-gender teams in lab coats
Women (working-class women) were actually an essential part of the industrial workforce during that time and dominated some of the industries like textile manufacturing. Only as the middle class grew with prosperity did this even begin to change at all. Laws were passed to limit their working hours to 60 a week and prevent them from working in underground mining. There were many lady engineers and inventors too, beginning the in the late 19th (peak) and accelerating with early 20th (WWI).
England was famous not for 'men with hammers' but for highly skilled craftsmen, inventors, and engineers who produced the bulk of the most sophisticated manufactured goods in the world - textiles, steam engines and turbines, ocean liners, scientific instruments, mechanical and then electronic calculators, chemicals and dyes, weaponry, steel and other metals, mining and heavy industrial equipment, electric motors and generators, radios and televisions, radar, photography and cameras, engines, cars, even tyres, plastics, cement. These are all industries with the British created and dominated.
They didn't just 'make stuff' -> they were the 'workshop of the world'. They made 20% of the world's goods while representing 2% of the population
> power turbines
Actually, they don't make their steam turbines, wind turbines or gas turbines anymore (except for jet engines). Steam and gas turbines were invented in the UK and produced there commercially.
> scientific instrument
The UK once dominated scientific instrument making. It is ridiculous now to contend that they are serious player in this field. Optical glass and various types of microscopes, (even flat glass), fibre optics, electron microscopes. All invented in the UK, commercially produced in the UK, and now gone (since the 70s).
Energy policy in Europe/UK is completely moronic. At some point in the past places like France and Germany had the most modern and technology advanced grids (nuclear) and were energy independent. Then the leftists/green came and destroyed it all, only to buy gas from Russia and the Middle East because renewables aren't enough during the winter and when demand is high. So now Germans pay the highest electricity prices in the world and still don't have AC (it's everywhere in China now). The left literally turned Germany into a third world country.
Financial services, film studios, and pharmaceuticals use a lot less energy than steel and shipbuilding. The UK economy is 80% services, and heavy industry has mostly disappeared, aside from cars and aerospace. The UK is far richer than it was in the 1970s, but it doesn't make many ships.
Your description might be right on paper that it’s richer today than it was in the 1970s but I believe dismantling the industry has been detrimental for the UK and Europe in general. I frequently visit the UK and it doesn’t strike me as a particularly prosperous country(although the rich seem to live well).
My favourite story is that it was someone’s job to watch for the end of Eastenders to trigger a dam release to generate surplus electricity for everyone to put their kettle on to make tea.
Yeah, it's a bit depressing in the UK these days. Growing up in the 90s we learnt we were one of the richest countries in the world. Now we are slowly accepting that's just not true any more. We probably won't be a "poor" country for a while, but we're all having to learn to live with less than our parents had, both relative to the rest of the world and in absolute terms (smaller houses, longer commutes, more traffic, more pollution, more noise, less nature, worse healthcare etc)
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 510 ms ] thread[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
Grew up in a house built in the 50s, university dorm was built in the late 1800s, student housing was Edwardian at the latest except two houses I lived in as a postgrad, then a place built in 1720 or something, current place is 220 years old on the ground floor plus an Edwardian bit, and I suspect the first and second were first built in the late 1800s; nobody actually knows and it looks like it might have been substantially rebuilt.
The ground floor of this place gets cold; the upper floors have conservation-area sash windows but also ultra-modern insulation under the tiles.
I am trying to avoid listed buildings for the next place, but I would be a bit surprised if I bought anywhere as new as the 1970s! Kind of want an old interwar bungalow next.
(The ground floor of my house, which is quite damp, was built 220 years ago; this is not all that remarkable and my neighbours' houses are fifty years older)
1970s houses are pretty energy-efficient by comparison.
But it's worth noting that a surviving 100 year old house in the UK is likely to be warmer than a surviving 100 year old house in the USA; it is not only brick-built but it is also likely to be in a terrace of several houses.
The "newer" town in my area is a railway town — it is actually a very old settlement but it became a big important town when the railway arrived in 1842. Much of the housing in that town dates back to the Edwardian era at the latest and is small houses in brick terraces of ten or fifteen houses in a row (usually in staggered terraces of four or five).
These houses are all supplied with natural gas now, and they have increasingly well-insulated roofs (and loft conversion rooms), so they have become pretty energy efficient.
But in the early 1970s, many of them still would not have been on the town gas supply, they would have been burning a lot more coal, and therefore almost all their supplemental heating (cooking, much of their hot water) would have been electric.
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.
Hopefully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Green_Links will get built and start having an effect before the next election.
If people are just going without, then that's generally bad.
I see a lot of comments here see "per capita" and think "residential consumption" - but the decrease is more indicating of general deindustrialization
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.
On the other hand I have lived in multiple places of varying sorts and regions of England (from London to a village in the North) so I think most places have reliable power, especially towns and cities. Other people's experience is mostly the same.
The OP is asking about the 1970s because that's what the headline is comparing to. My point was the 1970s had a lot of problems going on (labour disputes, oil crisis, extreme weather) so it's not an ideal comparison point.
I don't think I can agree with this. CfDs are (typically) a 15 year contract. For each CfD the price actually increases, as a result of inflation adjustment, each year. Dudgeon wind farm got £161.71 per MWh when it began but today gets £220.95 per MWh because of inflation.
Strike prices came down from where they began, but have since bounced around. Hornsea Project 2 is selling today for £80.08 per MWh but CfDs signed this year for similar Wind Farms would be (in today's money) more like £90 per MWh. Much cheaper than Dudgeon, but they are not in fact just steadily reducing in price.
The big boon for CfDs is the certainty for both parties. In 2022 and to a lesser extent again now, fossil fuel prices went crazy and so the less dependent you are on those prices the better for you. If you'd locked in CCGT prices at 2024 levels for 15 years you'd be doing great... except your providers would be bankrupt because methane just isn't available at those prices.
In 2020 22.0 TWh of electricity = £2.3B subsidy so about £104 per MWh
In 2021 21.6 TWh = £1B or about £46 per MWh
In 2022 20.5 TWh = -£235M subsidy - it paid us £17 per MWh
In 2023 20.6 TWh = £1.4B subsidy so about £68 per MWh
In 2024 31.1 TWh = £2.4B equivalent to £76 per MWh
In 2025 35.8 TWh = £2.6B or £74 per MWh
And this year, so far, 26.7 TWh for £1.7B or £62 per MWh
These numbers are pretty big, but even 35.8 TWh is maybe 12% of generation, most of Britain's renewable energy is not subsidised, it just made enough sense in the free market to build, one trick CfDs were used for, which doesn't end up with the government spending any money on a "subsidy" but which does result in more actual generation is that a potential generator would sign the CfD contract and then use a provision intended for practical obstacles - the sand bank you wanted to put turbines on turns out to be unstable for example, to instead sell the power wholesale at prevailing prices and not get a subsidy. That CfD contract made their project easier to finance, but then the market offered more money and they accepted the risk/ reward choice with their finances in place. Banks may or may not be happy they made loans on this basis, we'll find out when these firms go back for another loan and either get a champagne welcome or very different terms.
* All "subsidy" numbers are net additions to the price paid by the "Free market" clearing auction for electricity. Because metric system we can convert the market prices to the kWh units familiar to a household bill payer as "units" of electricity £100 per MWh = 10p per kWh but remember the wholesale electricity is just on some windswept Yorkshire hilltop or something at that price, you need it delivered to your home which costs extra to do.
> you need it delivered to your home which costs extra to do
If indeed that can be done at all!
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
I feel as though there are things in that auction data which are obvious to the generators and maybe the network operator but are utterly opaque to the general public and might help understand why things are as they are or aren't how they might be.
This is what I was meaning. The fact the contracts are auctioned via competitive bidding (usually) leads to price minimisation. Overall it seems to be a well designed procurement system.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-dif...
Anyway, thanks for the additional details, they were very informative.
So that lets me write code for "How much Power did we buy this way in year X and how much did we pay for it?" or "If we ignore Drax, can we see what subsidies cost us in each Summer?" and that sort of thing.
You could do much the same in Excel, or indeed if you had your own Power BI - but I can write software, I'm not great at Excel and I refuse to write Power BI reports without being paid for it because it's awful.
Currently paying 0.33 usd a unit.
Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1x0tds4/4hour_b...
These things are in progress. A vast amount of generation and storage capacity came online this year and much more still to come. This will gradually take effect, oil conflicts notwithstanding.
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.
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.
It might get you upvotes on social media but it's 180 degrees wrong.
You've only implied it's unique to the UK but many people will explicitly make that claim to help stoke everyone's anger at the wrong things. Actually it's the standard way to price things in many markets, even outside of electricity and the UK.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's nothing at all like having a fireplace going - unless they're on fire, in which case both of you have a problem.
The main energy saver is simply that the newer LED lights are dimmer!
- reflective housing is super inefficient (~70% losses on the bounced light off typical material, at the top end expensive stuff still ~23%), still better than just losing the light upwards but not as many lumens on the road as a lab test would show
- Today LEDs are more efficient than sodium
Some math: 100W HPS cobra head lamp prdouces 9.5k lumens, including ballast it draws ~133W from the wall. Lab test shows about 70% of the lamp's light leaves the fixture (with the rest being lost in the housing) leading to ~7k lumens exiting. Roughly 53 lm/W.
LED cobra head lamps get like ~125 lm/W on the low end + fade much more slowly than sodium
People don't like them mostly because they're orange.
That said, UK manufacturing decline also correlates with this as that’s very energy intensive.
I hope Europeans remember their colonial history because with how they are managing their economies they are going to have it revisited on them in a generation or two.
People from the global south like you forget how far north Europe is. Much of Europe never needed it. Now maybe it does for a week or two per year. Things will change.
Northern Europe's main problem, every year, is keeping people warm in the winter. Heat death in the summer is a novelty. Global warming will actually reduce excess mortality in Europe, because warming winters will save more people than hot summers kill.
On the other hand, people on the equator are FUCKED: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/change-heat-death-rate?ta...
Is this informed by studies, or are you just assuming "global warming = higher average temperature = less cold"? Because that's not how the climate works. It's very well possible that global warming increases the number of cold-related deaths in Europe.
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.
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.
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/
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?
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.)
Those minor conveniences are a drop in the bucket when it comes to total CO2 output.
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.
The rest of the world also has these things, just doesn't use them nearly as much.
50 years ago hot middle eastern countries had no AC. Not because they had some sort of symbiosis with nature and the summer heat. It was because the average AC costed the sum of 8-month of average income. As AC prices dropped, and the average income increased, having an AC became the norm.
Of course the richest people, richest economies get their first and to a non inquisitive or surface only thinking, it’s some how a unique was on discomfort or lust for luxury, when it’s just simple economics.
In absolute terms, yes. But per capita there are quite a few richer countries, like Switzerland, where people genuinely seem to brave the elements as part of their culture.
Sure, everyone adopts conveniences, but I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
> I've never seen anyone do it to the extent Americans do.
Sounds more like observational or cognitive bias tbh. For example, the Japanese market is notorious for building gizmos and machines for far less grand inconveniences that the weather or long-distance travel. They eat a lot of rice in Japan, so it makes sense they invented the rice cooker. To many Americans (today) who don't eat a lot of rice having an entire appliance for just cooking rice might seem like a crazy war on discomfort and too much of adopting convivences. What's next? a machine just for Turkish coffee?
Whenever I go shopping, it's insane how much they heat most places, while people are wearing heavy winter jackets.
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...
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)
(And re-arranged the furniture a bit + stopped using the radiator as storage...)
I guess it's cheaper to not have to install air ducting or indoor units if you can reuse existing pipes & radiators. But if you need to replace the radiators anyway, the cost might not be that much different? You'd get more precise temperature control, and cooling in the summer.
Mini-splits are noisy and have major problems getting heat distributed over a whole house.
In our case we couldn't install ducting downstairs (not enough gap between the floors), but it was simple and cheap to do so upstairs because there was attic / roof cavity space in which to run the ducting.
The mini-split also gives you precise temperature control in each room, where as our ducted system only has a single thermostat and on/off control in each room. This is problematic for the bedrooms, which tend to overheat at night in the winter when bedroom doors are closed, while it remains cooler in the hallway where the thermostat is. I'm currently looking into an upgraded control system ("Airtouch 5") which should solve this by putting wireless thermostats in each room.
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.
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..).
> Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..
I'm not saying _everybody_ must use less AC/clothes dryer/whatever. Grids are remarkably complex machines and are incredibly expensive to upgrade--which we should do! We should have done that ages ago, but the second best time to plant a tree is now. However, that's not an instantaneous process and requires quite a lot of political willpower to achieve, let alone the capex to bring new generation plants online.
In the meantime, as you've noted, people die without access to critical infra, i.e. AC in heatwaves. If the options facing grid operators are "rolling brownouts to keep from blowing up a transformer" or "educate people on time-of-day use re: peak load to reduce grid strain," the latter is often dismissed out of hand when it seems a perfectly sane approach to maximizing the utility of existing systems.
> deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc
Solar has a tremendous to "democratize" access to resources [0], we should absolutely incentivize its adoption as much as possible... but changing regulatory or tax environments is difficult. *We should still do that,* but altering behavior is (comparatively) free, so long as you can get past people being personally offended for being asked to not water their lawn every day in July.
[0]: https://mashable.com/article/solar-energy-rural-africa
Further, it is possible to run a heat pump at high temperatures: some use refrigerants specifically designed to do this relatively efficiently.
Several energy suppliers websites have pages dedicated to this very topic.
The current 2035 target originates in the 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
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
New builds are already much smaller than previous generations' housing, to increase margins for developers. Smaller than that, we'll basically be like rats.
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
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.
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.
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.
Rinse hold solves this. Even the cheapest machines have it.
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.
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.
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.
OP was making a fair point that not everybody has the same amount of time and energy (or money) to tolerate shifts in their routine, which in the context of a "personal vs collective responsibility" style argument is entirely reasonable.
By the same token, if only the _rich_ have the freedom to make such behavior changes for the sake of conservation it will only ever have a token impact, and in many cases the "correct" level to make an efficiency pitch at is the community: a decent light rail system will always outperform everyone driving their own vehicle to work/the store/downtown in terms of space and energy efficiency.
...but, to get people to buy into such "collectivist" systems, you often have to get them to contend with some perceived reduction in personal convenience: yes, a train doesn't need a parking lot and uses less gas per passenger-mile, but then you're beholden to the train schedule. It's exactly _that_ sentiment that I find frustrating in advocating for sustainable civic design.
To OP's point: whatever that "collectivist" option is necessarily has to contend that standards of accessibility and convenience are not constant across the population. That doesn't inherently mean "the poor should consume more," but that "hang dry your laundry" isn't an option for everyone in the current dominant socioeconomic structure.
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.
Expensive short term, life saving long term.
> requires a full redecoration after
Tell me that you are rich without telling me that you are.
Lime render with cork is the outside version
No, you're supposed to do the other way around.
If we're going to electrify everything, we need a clean, plentiful, reliable electrical supply. There is no technical obstacle to having this.
Saying "we can save $1000 per person in capital costs, they just need to deal with 5 extra minor inconveniences per day" is not how you run a developed country.
Having to install battery capacity in your own house is a step backwards.
If water was unavailable for 4 hours a day, you would suggest putting in your own rainwater filtration system.
But for example, cement production can be turned on and off quite easily, and is turned on and off on demand by the grid electric operators to help with grid stabilization (cement producers are paid for this grid stabilization service).
That's the way our system has developed for millennia.
It's not a "preferable" strategy, it's one that can (and should) be deployed in tandem with expanding our renewable generation and doing more "at scale" conservation of commercial resource use.
We're already building wind and solar at bananas rates [0], _and yet_ we're not even capitalizing on that gain as much as we could because people don't want to tolerate the behavior changes necessary to do so.
My beef isn't with expanding capacity, it's with that being the _only_ solution that's considered to match supply to demand instead of doing anything to manage demand.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67367
no we arent. China added the entire capacity of the US grid in solar in the last 4 years and they are accelerating. That is bananas. We've barely increased total grid capacity in the last 20 years. It should be a national embarrassment. Energy abundance is possible, and one of the greatest ways to improve peoples lives. There are no energy poor countries that are rich.
Half the state of Nevada should be a solar farm at this point if anyone actually cared about climate change, and that would do 10x to imrpve peoples lives than telling them not to use the dryer.
again, the degrowth mindset relies on a fundamental paucity of imagination and will to actually solve the problem.
That few in government are readying for that and are rearranging deck chairs instead is not particularly reassuring.
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.
That is the power of modern construction techniques.
Unfortunately this is out of reach of poorer people and it would takes a hundred years before all the old housing stock is replaced. But it's nice progress for the happy few.
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.
Your parents never taught you how to balance a checkbook? That's just basic arithmetic, are you sure you were "formed to work in an office" when you can't even manage your own finances? Sounds like you weren't formed for anything, not even basic self-care.
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.
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.
Well, fracking kind of is, we stopped after we tried it and it caused ground tremors.
Part of the problem with fracking on mainland UK is not just the tremors but that there’s also not much proven gas either
And its in no way going to solve any of the actual long term energy issues in the UK.
For example, if you assume limited government resources, massive investment in North Sea fossil is just inherently stupid.
Allowing some private exploration and production would be tiny and barley relevant to solve any problem. The right wing people who advocate this as some kind of 'solution' are more delusional then any 'leftist'.
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.
- 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?
Here's an example of how to bullshit. The original report is here: https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastroph...
And it's missing the word "monitored". And then you read the methodology:
> The LPI measures changes in the sizes of 35,803 populations of 5,790 vertebrate species (amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles) that have been monitored over time. The latest LPI shows a decline of 73% (73.2%). This means that the size of these populations fell by, on average, 73% between 1970 and 2022.
> This doesn’t mean that there are 73% fewer wild animals in total today than in 1970. The LPI measures changes in relative abundance, not the total number of animals. Changes in small populations with few individuals are averaged with changes in large populations of thousands of animals. Nor does it mean that 73% of species or populations are declining. In fact, around half of the studied populations are stable or increasing – but these gains are outweighed by the greater magnitude of losses elsewhere when calculating a global average.
So basically, it's a made-up number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
Mammoths disappeared without human intervention, for example.
I just don't think that the only natural state for the Earth is change. And human-caused changes are neither bad nor good from that standpoint.
But yes I do agree about the impossibility of communication.
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
For some on the left, they view humans as parasites. It starts as self-hate internally and expands outwards to encompass humanity more generally ('I love animals, I hate people'). Humans have to modify their environment to exist (shelter, farming, hunting, et al.), so the people that hold that ideology, you will find, they comprehensively hate any modification of the environment by humans, ie they want humans to cease to exist, rooted first in their own desire to not exist (they hate their own existence first and foremost).
The world is at all times overflowing with people that hate existing. They're miserable sad sacks and they desperately want everyone to drown in it with them. Sometimes that gets formalized into projected ideology used as a weapon against the rest of humanity.
Everything must grow all the time because all we care about is compounding interest, and that can only exist with continuous growth.
Finite resources and time be dammed.
I would like us to find a way to live without killing our host.
Which is a fair gamble to be frank, I don't blame them.
Human production and consumption (in a broad sense) is generating/leading to ecological catastrophes. Some people believe technology will solve the problem, some people believe the easier solution is to stop producing as much.
Unfortunately, that means letting go of some privileges and not everybody will agree on what to let go.
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.
People in my area HATE it. They hate giving up control (even though you can still manually lower your thermostat if you get too warm), and feel like the power company is doing some sort of scam even though it's a win/win/win (you make money, electric company saves money, homes are precooled with solar instead of burning fossil fuels).
Yep, it's probably not terribly hard to leave either, most of the one's I've seen aren't.
I dunno how you can make it more palletable, when they're already paying you monthly, it already does pre-cooling (or pre-heating), and you can also override it. And you might not even be home.
Personally I’m happy to. Charge my car at night when it’s 1/3 the price and use the h used capacity rather than pay higher bills to build more nuclear plants.
This is nothing new in the U.K., “economy seven” was a thing 50 years ago.
I've only heard similar claims repeated by Reform.
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
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-...
No they have even less money than Europe. They'll do the smart thing, which is using electricity when it's cheap.
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...
Coal is no longer used, and the remaining mothballed coal power stations were demolished a couple of years ago. North Sea gas is now in decline, and is rapidly being replaced by renewables for electricity generation but we'll still rely on (expensive!) LNG imports to make up the difference until the end of the decade.
Even on sunny days we are pretty much burning gas now for electricity 24/7 (last I looked sometime in September).
2025 it was 49.5TWh
2010 it was over 66.4TWh
Coal use went down significantly.
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
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 argument, 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 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.
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.
More ironically, air conditioning is tolerated if powered by oil (like in cars), but not by electricity (like in buildings). At least Europe is better at EV adoption, but still far behind many parts of Asia.
They're going to invest 30 billion euros in direct government _subsidies_ in adding 11GW of natural gas generation.
For comparison, this amount of money would buy 5GW of nuclear power generation. But nuclear power is basically free after the initial capital expenses, and natural gas generation will still require fuel (gas or maybe hydrogen).
It's crazy that you guys do.
The evidence for man-made climate change is quite compelling, and taking personal responsibility for your own impact on it isn't hard. I don't really see doing my washing at 6am as 'social and technological regression'. Quite the opposite actually - my washing machine has bluetooth and an app. I can tell it when to start.
The fact there isn't global pressure on corporations to be similarly responsible means my act of selflessness is ultimately a futile waste of time, but that's your kids and grandkids problem. I've chosen not to have kids, so I don't really care. I would suggest that choosing to have a family but not choosing to protect the environment as much as you can is an act of incredible selfishness towards your own children. They're the ones who'll have to live in a world with problems like water and food shortages. There is every chance that your grandchildren will die in a war over resources, and your view that tech is awesome will be little comfort to them.
Sure
Where is the the evidence for me using the washing machine at the wrong time causing climate change?
As I said, I don't mind people claiming that washing clothes itself is bad for the environment (it contributes a little bit), but the idea that it's bad specifically because I wash it at a bad time? That's insane.
Degrowrh is a mathematical and physical inevitability, the only choice you have is to prepare for it or not
Degrowth will need to happen at some point. I believe people "with a growth mindset" are just hoping that by submitting to growth it won't happen in their lifetime.
They installed the entire grid capacity of the US in 4 years and they are accelerating. THere is a path to infinite free energy, but youd rather worry about doing your laundry at night.
Why do you find it more reasonable to build factories on the moon, rather than accept to live more austerely?
In fact, I've only ever met people who wanted more things and a higher quality of life. While many green/degrowth political policies are based around convincing people to consume less, I've met consumers and found that's not what they want. It's why most environmental policies fail, consumers want more things at a lower cost, and are willing to import goods from overseas if the environmental regulations at home prevent them from being created there.
For the future, it means degrowth policies will fail. The only solution to climate change is to develop and grow our way out of it. It will be easier to live on the moon than it will be to convince consumers to accept less than they have now.
How exactly? This is sci fi... how much more technology do you need? it's obviously not going in the right direction so far, we're just piling up reneweable sources on top of fossil ones. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy-by-...
What's your plan? "Hey claude scrub the entire atmosphere to remove co2 from the past 200 years, make no mistake and use no energy"? "Hey codex send all our industries with razor thin margin to the moon, make no mistake and keep them as profitable as on earth"?
Look at atmospheric co2 scrubbers, the hot new thing, we can just keep polluting and clean it up am I right? Well, let's run the numbers:
We need 1 to 3 MWh of energy to remove 1t of co2
We produced 38.1 billion tonnes of it in 2025
Global electricity production in 2025: 30 TWh
We'd need to dedicate ~100% to 300% of our electricity production to simply offset our co2 production, even if we get it 10x better, and we won't because co2 is very stable and very dilute in the atmosphere (and also because it literally is below the minimum thermodynamic work to separate CO2 from air in ideal lab conditions), it's still completely retarded.
Every single technical solution to climate change completely falls apart when you run the numbers, the only argument left is "in the future we'll invent a magical tech that will save us so we have to accelerate"... might as well pray Jesus for help at that point
Meanwhile you're lying about us wiping out 70% of wildlife population in 50 years.
I already replied in the other thread why.
- 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
No, e-waste is not a serious issue on the scale of climate change. It would be nice to fix it, but either way its impact is fairly minor.
And I don't doubt that most industries will be sustainable within the next 30-50 years.
If that's your definition of "sustainability" lmao... nothing is a problem if your horizon is 50 years
His growth would go to him and then he would graceful give some 'alms' to the 'deserving poor' meaning only 'good white christens who do not advocate for anything he doesn't like'.
Peter Thiel is literally human scum of the worst kind. He literally has his hand in all destruction of modern western society, and is trying to go back to 11th century emperor aligned with a compliant pope, but extend this over the whole world.
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.
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.
Once silicon is in control (which is where responding grid requests to delay consumption is more or less necessarily heading) you could even achieve better (worst-case) safety margins at reduced (total) power consumption. Because the machinery no longer needs to be designed around two "dumb" thermo switches and do a little extra in case layers of varying temperature manifest after two or more spaced periods of consumption. With continuous monitoring in software, you can integrate the worst-case bacterial growth based on time elapsed outside the "practically safe" temperature ranges. Then the tank always knows what is needed, and can both operate on tighter margins and reliably know when reducing or delaying power draw is ok.
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
Nearly 20 years ago I had such a wonderful debugging experience when the power grid where I lived sent a "switch to backup" message and then milliseconds later a cancellation. The colo's power system got jammed between generator and mains electricity and everything rapidly ran out of UPS backup power and died. I found so many dependency loops between servers that day, took me hours to get things back up and running.
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.
> 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 network operators or the system operator? Hard to do any form of sane long term planning when the regulator changes their mind every 5 years.
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.
France, mostly.
In nearly every case, this is actually "we'll take 35% of your bill if you agree to let us sometimes turn off your A/C and clothes dryer between 5pm-8pm". It doesn't require everyone to take the deal, just enough people who want to save money. You can take the discount and use your own battery if you want, or you can pay full price so the power company can. And some will live with the mild inconvenience in exchange for money (which most of us are forced to do in so many different ways).
This is just charging people the costs of their decisions. That's capitalism at its best.
The UK introduced cheaper nighttime electricity (and storage heaters that could use it) - economy7 at the end of the 70’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
One of the key challenges is electricity distribution, with a number of key transmission bottlenecks: a notable one is Scotland/England, where Scotland renewables generate more power than necessary, but not all of it can be exported to England as their isn't enough capacity across that transmission section.
Transmission capacity growth is now the key priority for the grid, with policies and plans optimised to address the bottlenecks in distribution.
Demand on the national grid probably should; as home solar (yes, even in stereotypically dark and cloudy UK), wind etc becomes more and more viable I think a mix of on-site and grid electricity will be increasingly common.
The grid operators are definitely not saying that in France, in fact they are spending hundreds of billion (€100B each for both RTE and Enedis) to accommodate for a growth in electricity consumption due to electrification, and are lamenting that the policies don't encourage electrification fast enough.
Curious what was actually said. I can imagine some smarter pricing incentives being put in place to move demand around. If so, you should know that versions of that have been happening for decades.
> Chernobyl failed when operators attempted to raise the generator from 4 kw/h per capita to 5.7 kw/h per capita
How silly
It also seems to be blessed with few natural disasters such as major earthquakes, volcanoes, larger tornadoes 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.
We used to be the workshop of the world. Compared to blast furnaces people don't use much energy at all personally, even when illuminated by incandescent light bulbs.
The fact is, the UK has undergone a nearly complete deindustrialization in that period. e.g 'cars made per capita' is about 1/3 what it was. Domestic white goods are gone. Commercial shipbuilding is gone. Consumer electronics is gone. Domestic textiles are gone. Steel smelting (and nearly recycling) and machine tools are gone. For centuries(decades) these things were quintessentially British.
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 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 in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?
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.
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...
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/651422e03d371...
All of think links here, the person you are responding to, mine (above) and your own directly point towards reduction in industrial use.
Two things were happening at the same time: deindustrialization and electrification. Industries and the economy used to depend more on machines and oil. That was getting replaced by reliance on electricity. If electricity generation was cheap enough, we might have seen the total energy usage get transformed one for one into electricity usage. But that didn’t happen and energy usage overall went down. That’s deindustrialization.
Of course it could have other reasons like labour costs and so on.
This government data is must more substantial than that link, and it puts the ratio at 70% reduction in electricity due to deindustrialization.
Moreover - the OP's comment was a blatant lie - by ignoring deindustrialization - plus a bit of a thrown slander aka the 'Telegaph' nonsense.
You people are turning HN into Twitter.
This is not even controversial.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6aba96e8997a4...
The linked numbers are not per-capita, they are absolute.
We’re discussing electricity consumption, not total energy inputs into all industrial processes.
To take the stupidest version of the argument (not going to sugarcoat it, I think it was embarrassingly stupid) there was Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto where he called for a 1000x increase in energy production from nuclear fission and fusion. I quote directly:
"We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well."
The point of using energy is not to use energy. What matters is the services that energy delivers, be it a hot shower, a drive to the grocery store, a new house, a squillion tokens of AI computation. If we can get the services we want more cheaply by energy more efficiently, this is a good thing, not a disaster for humanity.
For completeness, I acknowledge that there are people for whom energy usage is inherently bad, which is equally silly. What matters are the downside impacts of the energy use, not the energy use itself.
In all the places I’ve lived there are generally large incentive programs to convert air conditioners and old heaters to heat pumps, and other efficient appliance replacements, install better insulation, etc. because that rebate dollar stretches a lot further than building new power plants, transmission lines, etc.
That's roughly ten times the warming effect of doubling CO2.
Now, I don't have a climate model handy to simulate this in detail but I would suggest "render the Earth uninhabitable" is a close enough approximation to the actual effects to suggest it's a terrible idea and anyone seriously proposing it should be laughed out of the room until they've done their homework.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
Most of that is lost in waste heat.
Total energy arriving on earth from the sun is about 1,500,000,000 TWh
https://smartstep.blog/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth-per-...
7500 times higher
The US has a lot of wiggle room wrt energy consumption because it has ceded the role of being the world's factory to China. At the same time, the US is the world's data center and software development hub, and the world's finance hub, and the world's bank. What does the UK have in comparison?
The US has a lot of wiggle room because it uses almost 2x electricity per capita than e.g. Germany. People don't need electricity, they need light and cooling. If you do the math, that is hundreds of GW of free "new" capacity just by getting the same value for less energy. Obviously you can't do 1/1 comparisons, a lot of people in the US use AC whereas they don't in Europe. But overall the US could get more efficient in energy use. People buy new appliances all the time, make them be more energy efficient. Or don't and let the market sort it out. "The solution to high prices are high prices".
Yest it is. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.1855
"a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades" Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Same with AI. It is becoming much more efficient and cheaper. This will result in a much, much higher demand. Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.
That the energy demand is sinking is based on the fact that most industries got outsourced to China.
Blech. I don't have wishes I want netflix to fulfill. I want to see the dreams of another human before me and be entranced/enchanted.
When your logic collides with hard numbers I would stick to the numbers and reconsider the logic. Here is an idea: will I run my dishwasher 3x more often just because it is now 3x more efficient? Will I run my fridge more often because it is more efficient? Difficult, it already runs 24/7. Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?
So as you see although there is obviously some validity in the OBSERVATION that is Jevons Paradox, it is not a hard rule. There comes a point where it stops being true.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/the-ap...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/10/18/the-approaching-us-ene...
"Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?" Nope. But now you have a computer, maybe two, a cell phone, an ebook reader, a tablet, take international flights and use Bitcoin and AI.
Article link: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling?ref=ufuksno...
Your anegdotal evidence falls on its face as well: I have two TVs now instead of one, and my electricity consumption went down. This includes moving mid year from an office to work from home. So one laptop charging every day, and one monitor. I even bought a printer which I did not have previously. That's because the two TVs combined, made 2023 and 2025, use less electricity than the one I had before, made 2011. The addition of a laptop, monitor and printer were negligent compared to the savings I made with my new fridge.
I also stated previously that we have the data even on a large scale. Electricity use in the EU went down in the last 20 years and this even with millions of EVs now compared to then. Even Norway which now for years sells almost exclusively EVs has had just a mild bump in electricity use compared to a decade before. This implies that The efficiency savings made elsewhere held. My hypothesis would be it's because at a certain point it's impossible to use something more than you already are (see fridge, dishwasher, induction stove, computers, TVs etc) and thus efficiency gains there will hold. The same pattern is observed with American gasoline use -- as the gas guzzlers of the 70s died off during the oil crisis, per capita gas use fell and practically never recovered. This despite the fact that this use case is quite comparable to coal and you could easily argue that with better mileage people will drive more. And they probably do, but still the gasoline use fell.
So obviously, Jevons Paradox did not hold in these substantial cases and should not be viewed as law of nature. It's an interesting observation that makes sense, but obviously has its limits.
* https://rac.co.uk/drive/news/electric-vehicles-news/1-in-3-n...
EVs are almost at the supply issues point. I've had one on order since June, which I suppose is my fault for choosing Stellantis.
Air conditioning is a weird one, because it’s only been necessary in residential properties for a couple of years, and really still only necessary for a couple of days a year, so a fixed installation isn’t cost effective. Portable units are becoming more popular.
AC has been a requirement in most commercial premises for years. Decades, perhaps.
From a pedantic point of view, it is quite literally the exact same as an AC. Air conditioners are literally heat pumps.
Common installations reuse the wet systems we have and are air to water, which was until recently the only thing the grants covered (and now it’s still lower for a2a).
Most importantly it's not the same in the way of me not feeling the chill. It's stupid, as I know the house is cooler than the outsides, but the actual split system delivers the cold air right to where I feel it and this thing just makes the ambient temperature down to 25c without me even noticing.
I don't want to know what it costs to install (I got it with the house), but split system costed lol nothing in eastern european dollars and took some guys less than half a day and zero permits to install too. For better or worse the heat pump doesn't live in the same locale I had that.
This is more like what they're talking about, but they do come in a lot of shapes and sizes and can be more or less integrated into central systems.
https://senville.com/mini-split-heat-pumps/
Like, sure, but the word has a specific and a general meaning, conventional use is only the specific meaning.
With an AC the advantage is that the condensate is forming inside the AC when cooling the air.
Although you could pipe cool water through the radiators, it's an ineffective form of cooling compared to blown-air systems, and retro-fitting a blown-air system is much more costly than a heating-only heat pump.
Once room and floor temperature match, condensation doesn't occur anymore as long as you keep it running.
However it will not cool like an A/C unit, only something like 5°C reduction. This can be enough to get a decent night's sleep during a summer heatwave.
While our house is relatibvely small and we kept the units (which also do heating as well) confined to the main living space, it wasn't especially burdensome. The bulk of the work was installing the behemoth of a hot water tank!
I'm currently investigating options for kitchen sinks and such. It feels quite silly to have a long length of pipe leading from a central source for a small amount of warm water to wash my hands.
There's a limit: you can fill a medium saucepan with boiling water, but large/industrial-kitchen pans will exhaust the boiling water and you'll need to wait for the next batch.
It's fine for general household use.
Daikin (and presumably others, but they're the ones we went with) do have integrated tanks/heatpump internal units. It might be worth having a think about your actual needs and it may be that there is a solution.
My experience with electric hot water taps is that they've been universally awful and only a last resort, but equally the state of the art may have moved on since I last looked!
This is only the beginning. Soon people will realize that a mini-split install isn't that much more expensive than a portable AC, but is a lot more convenient.
The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.
> decarbonizing heating
What does this mean? More renewables? If efficiency reduces energy demands then it directly results in less carbon.
> electric vehicles
Aren't people already adopting electric vehicles? Do you think that the government should introduce a scheme to persuade people to buy electric vehicles? Does the availability of charging for electric vehicles need improving?
> Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first
Efficiency means saving money. In what circumstance could efficiency be bad? The grid responds to demand, unused electricity means higher prices for consumers. One of biggest issues right now in the UK is cost of living crisis, so raising electricity prices would be universally hated. How does making the grid less efficient increase growth?
I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid. Buildings are engineered to trap heat, so the heat doesn't dissipate at night and every day the indoor temperature rises, and rises...
At least they removed the need for planning permission recently. The problem is that the places that need AC the most (flats) will probably not be able to get it until the leasehold system has been abolished.
> > decarbonizing heating
> What does this mean?
Presumably it means heating using electric heat pumps rather than gas boilers. This also solves the AC problem. I don't think this is viable for most people. Heating was never the problem anyway, at least in the south winters are mild.
well, i live in lincolnshire and used to live in london. i usually have a fan on for a few weeks over summer, but that's it. where in the UK did you live that the summers were so unbearable?
Not to be that guy, in the last 20 years, 27 was considered a heatwave.
> Buildings are engineered to trap heat,
I mean Victorian buildings were engineered to let in light, and have good ventilation. Hence why each room has a huge sash window, an airbrick and a fireplace.
This makes insulation sound like a bad thing. The more insulation you have the less the indoor temperature is affected by the outside temperature.
Insulation isn't magic, over many days of hot weather eventually the building will reach equilibrium with the average outside temperature. This means it will be cooler indoors than outdoors during the day, and hotter indoors than outdoors at night.
However, the nights are specifically when you want a residential building to be cooler, assuming the inhabitants are not at home during the day. So the insulation actually makes the building hotter from the perspective of the inhabitants.
Nobody "needs" air conditioning, but even a modest window unit provides a huge improvement in quality of life whenever it's 80+ outside.
It can be considered a medical necessity for people with certain conditions like anhidrosis, asthma, COPD, kidneys disease, or cardiovascular issues. It's also a huge medical benefit for people with terrible allergies who wouldn't be able to open a window even when that'd normally help cool the house.
We are? It’s becoming more common and we had a few bad summers and earlier this year too. The heat wave a few years back killed my dad.
Given there’s a push to swap heating systems for more efficient ones, air con units are being looked at a lot more.
We had 6 heat waves this summer. Parents were booking hotels just to keep their kids cool
We also had heatwaves in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018. 2024 wasn't bad but was still the 4th hottest year on record.
You can absolutely bet the better-off middle classes are installing aircon. I know many. If more people could afford it they would get it
It's the humidity too not just the heat. And how after 3 or 4 days of high temps, our houses just do not cool down at night because they act like radiators. Humid 25c+ nights suck for us
I’m thinking about it, but there’s a lot of other things I could spend the capital on.
The UK is definitely doing all three of these things. Though arguably not fast enough, for some of them.
BEV is 28% of new car sales HEV is 13%
https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/
- CRTs got replaced by LCDs, and LCDs even 25 years ago were maybe around half the wattage
- CFLs and then LED Light bulbs replacing older filament bulbs.
- The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.
With the smaller thought of:
- Set-top appliances like rice cookers and air-fryers that tend to be better for smaller everyday cooking than a full-on oven or stovetop.
And it's fun to think about, e.x. I remember when I had to move back in 15-ish years ago my parents (very politely!) complained about the power bill increase until I went ahead and did the one-time cost of switching all the bulbs I could to LED. That change alone managed to cover the PC, monitors, and TV I had at the time.
Realistically, your average citizen is using less power than they were even 40 years ago, even with all the additional technology they have.
That also goes for people watching things on their smartphones instead of a 65" television.
Even people who have laptops, the shift to smartphones and tablets for much (maybe most? IDK I'm still a laptop person at minimum when I write this so it's hard to say) of their computing/communication is another order of magnitude change for sure.
As another side note/anecdata, I still remember the amazement where the aftermath of a nasty (mostly wind) storm in 2017 caused major outages in my region. I had just moved into an apartment and due to the lagging maintenance around makeready/treetrim it took the better part of a week to get power back. Thankfully however, I had a fully charged, fancy-ish APS Backup unit [0] that was able to keep my Surface Pro 3 and 4G Hotspot charged enough to at least not feel totally in the dark. It was crazy to see how even with both charging the 'time remaining' indicator said I could have used both way more than I even needed to.
[0] - Some variant of an APS 1500VA
Haven't burnt out a single bulb yet.
I understand that this has caused some challenges for the Philips Hue division. They had extremely satisfied customers but not many repeat buys.
It costs 6 euro. I'm _fairly_ sure that incandescent 100Ws didn't cost six cents. I bought a few of these (actually a cheaper non-dimmable model which is no longer on Ikea's confusing website, from a cursory search) in 2016, when I moved. They're still working fine.
Whereas incandescents failed _all the time_.
Throughout the house, I need to replace a regular screw-in LED bulb probably every other month or so. I don't know what brand they are, they are light bulbs I picked off the shelf at Target or Walmart. Life is too short to worry about light bulb brands. Until now.
Well, yeah, because they were trying to get rid of them.
> Life is too short to worry about light bulb brands
Just get the Ikea ones, they're fine.
The total electricity consumption for computers is much higher then in the past. You just don't see it, because the consumption moved to data centers.
To me the difference is that we moved to more efficient ways to generate heat, more specifically from electric resistive heating to heat pumps. Both in home heating but also appliances (e.g. cloth driers).
And of course there is climate change, not only we generate heat more efficiently (an heat pump uses at least 1/3 to the power to generate the same amount of heat) but also the climate is less cold, thus less heat required. That is the big difference, not bulbs or computers.
Of course for nations that are more hot in the summer (e.g. my, Italy) the reverse applies, that is more power used because of air conditioning, that 30 years ago nobody had and now it's required since last summer was 25/38C outside for 2 months straight.
Germany saw a massive drop too. The only big European country that keeps growing their electricity production is France.
If I search for "retail electricity price trends uk" I'm starting to see reports coming out of the UK like "UK electricity prices are now among the highest in the developed world." and "Household electricity prices have risen by almost 150% since 2010, and business electricity prices by nearly 175%" [0]. And now we see things like they've dropped below their 1970s per capita consumption.
That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much. It doesn't sound like an efficiency gain. Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff. It looks like they don't have enough energy and people are getting squeezed. I'd expect to see political instability in such an environment but the last time I checked only one of the major parties seemed to be in the process of collapsing (down from 2 in April) so they are doing better than expected on that front; I would expect riots in the streets with these sort of trends.
[0] https://ifs.org.uk/publications/electricity-prices
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
Most appliances don't see much increased use from efficiency. And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency; other factors drive use changes there.
Very appropriate nickname!
Where I live, in Europe, when I was a child there was a great abundance of insects of many different kinds. If I did a walk around my home I could see insects from perhaps at least 10 different orders.
Nowadays, the only insects that are still abundant are the true bugs (Hemiptera) why all others have mostly disappeared (a few, like mosquitoes, may still be seen from time to time). I do not know the reason, but I assume that the true bugs might be more resistant to insecticides.
Unfortunately, so do cockroaches.
I think the number of lights is about the same at least where I live in the UK, the big change is the light is now bright white not the yellow of the older sodium vapour lights.
I kinda miss that but mostly because it wasn't as bright and is what I grew up with, you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.
IN fact white light is MUCH MUCH less effective. Red light doesn't affect your night vision, and yellow isn't much behind. White light means you can see very well where the light it, but you can't see beyond that radius and so more light is needed. I don't need to see colors at night (where white it good), I just need to see the dangers in time to avoid them, and so white is much worse for the goal.
Just to make it worse, it takes nearly an hour for your eyes to fully adjust to dark after leaving white light. So if the lights go off or you have to leave the place where they are shining you can't see as well.
White light is only good when you have enough of it that everything you want to see for the next hour is fully illuminated. If there is any exception to that, then you shouldn't have white lite.
We got an increase in lighting whether we like it or not but for lower overall consumption.
> not to mention headlights
40 years ago the highest powered headlight halogen bulbs consumed 80-100W per bulb. so you were looking at 150-200W for low/high beams. A pair of modern laser headlights now gives you 5 times more light for a fifth of the electricity. The limit is safety in traffic.
> People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.
They consume so little that even wasting is still cheaper lower consumption than in the days of incandescent lights.
Dylan16807: Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
We're saying the same thing, but my spider senses are detecting we aren't on the same wavelength. Maybe if I point at the key words, that will help?
And while I'm thinking about it, let me recommend those heating bathroom lights. They are divine.
You concluded rationing before having evidence of real demand in the sense of need or even desire from the people. The less data you have, the more potential answers fit in the gaps.
Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it? Or do they already get more but with less electricity? I get twice the light I had 20+ years ago with a third of the electricity consumption. I get way more computing power with less electricity too. Same with my TV, my fridge, etc. Excluding the switch from gas powered kitchen appliances which drove my electricity consumption up, everything else went down in consumption while giving me more.
Do I mathematically want or need more? Am limited by the price of electricity, or by the price of the bigger/better product? Maybe I'd want a walk in fridge or a 3m tall TV but the electricity isn't the limiting factor. I need an extra room and taller ceilings first. Do I want more light? No. Do I need any of the things I mentioned? Also no.
The increase in price could equally be the providers extracting the maximum value from the consumers. Current consumption could be exactly as much as the consumers want or need to consume, and the providers sell for as high as they can before that demand drops. We need more data to answer this and we don't have it now. SO your answer is your bias put in words, not the certainty you want to make it sound like.
Because the comment triggering this branch suggested improvements in efficiency must imply wanting to consume more. Light is one of those things. It's not the only thing I mentioned, you just chose to skip the others to make your job of arguing easier.
> Heating, cooking and appliances use the most
Even there you get more for less. Induction stove are way more efficient than the old heating elements. Heat pumps are way more efficient than a boiler. But most heating isn't electric. Natural gas, oil, or wood were always far more common. In the UK today almost 75% of heating is gas. Electricity is less than 10% so it contributes little to the topic of the article. [0]
Now let's get to the confounding factors which go down the pit of ignorance. Natural gas was always subsidized everywhere in the world whether you know it or not. District heating is almost the same story. Where I live there are still "heating electricity" plans so people get a better price if they happen to use electrical heating because the provider knows that small number of people will suffer if that costs too much.
Another confounding factor, the push for extreme efficiency. Heat pumps have some big limitations that nobody wants but choose to live with for the sake of efficiency and self sufficiency. Because people also install solar panels on their roof and power their appliances without anyone ever reporting how much more heating or cooking was provided with 0 load on the grid.
> Seems like you don't live in the UK.
I do not, I just chose to know what I'm talking about and not rely on being in a specific place to know the real situation. No offence.
[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
I see things stated (and assumed as a norm) by people in this thread that are just miles off.
If you're working off data and not assumptions though, fair enough.
It used to not be!
It is historic, electric lighting was the first major application for electricity in households.
" Electric lighting is highly desirable. The light is much brighter than oil or gas lamps, and there is no soot. Although early electricity was very expensive compared to the 21st century, it was far cheaper and more convenient than oil or gas lighting. Electric lighting was so much safer than oil or gas that some companies were able to pay for the electricity with the insurance savings. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrification#Benefits_of_el...
Well, yes? That seems somewhat uncontroversial? There are a lot of people out there who need more electricity and can't afford it. Electricity is one of the most fungible forms of energy, with infinite electricity we could all live like kings. It'd be very comfortable.
That is also the explanation for a lot of the issues your post goes to. If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead. And the way the math shakes out is it'd normally be economically optimum to increase their access to a good standard of living by giving them more energy than you gave up. These effects are over the entire economy.
And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd. If I were relying on HN comment threads I'd believe households in the UK were composed of nothing but light-bulbs and consumed nothing but the same given how much of a focus they are of the energy policy.
Thinking about what happens when prices approach zero makes it hard to make realistic predictions. Yeah infinite power would change everything, but for realistic price shifts there are very different price elasticities for different use cases.
Also roenxi I mentioned things other than lights, but lights happen to be a super clear example of Jevon's paradox not happening over a very significant amount of power usage so of course they'll get brought up.
Cost of electricity is a significant part in aluminum production. Cheap electricity, cheap aluminum, more cars made from aluminum instead of currently cheap steel.
Cheap reliable electricity would enable cheap hydrogen production, which could replace many uses of fossil fuels. Cheap hydrogen, cheap ammonia production, cheaper nitrogen fertilizers.
Speak for yourself. The price of electricity immediately & directly effects the setup/operation of small business. I know home businesses that (juicing plants) that became non-viable on the basis of electricity alone.
> And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd
Easy, light used to consume a lot. Actually by some statistics [0] it was close to 15% of household consumption just a few decades ago. Is 15% so insignificant that mentioning it is ridiculous?
Personal anecdata, I can use more but I realistically (not in "infinite energy" world) want and need exactly as much as I use.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/81562463/Energy_consumption_in_UK_h...
Supply/demand and prices are rationing. Prices represent the limit on how much of a resource someone can use before there is reason to believe they should stop. It's happens to be best form of rationing we have, the other methods tend to lead to disincentives to improve the situation (consider, for example, how the market rations out limited supplies of RAM right now - prices go up and people who pay get the RAM and all the money going to RAM producers gives them resources and incentive to build new capacity to produce more RAM). There isn't a limit on demand for electricity other than the price, it does literally everything. At the extreme case, if it were somehow cheap enough, we'd be able to use it to fabricate new matter. But every step of the way there are population-level opportunities to use more energy to get more comfortable if there is enough of it.
But when prices go up 100-200%, that suggests the market is rationing pretty hard.
All the things I see that would allow me to use more electric are not worth it - I'd rather spend my money on something else. My life would be better for an electric animated sculpture in my front year - but not by nearly enough that it would be worth building and so I don't have it.
It's more what it enables in terms of industrial production, and transportation and the knock-on effects from that.
And that doesn't happen at all with light bulbs. The cheapness caused a mild increase in lighting, but people are using way less electricity on lights now.
Seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox has a pretty good explanation. This isn't a new effect, it's been an established consideration related to energy efficiency since the 1850s.
Jevon's paradox is when a specific use case gets more efficient, so you do more of that use case, so much so that the extra use overwhelms the efficiency. It happens in many situations but definitely not all. You have a curve between how much you use and how much value you get, and the steepness of that curve decides Jevon's. For lighting in the past few decades, there's no Jevon's. The changes in light bulbs have caused a big reduction in electricity use. If we were stuck on incandescents we'd be using a lot more electricity total.
The UK doesn't look like it is experiencing an efficiency utopia; it looks like it has a relatively poor population among the developed countries and they're suffering from an advanced energy shortage. They costs appear to be going crazy, they're deindustrialising. That isn't efficiency.
That's still the Jevons paradox.
> There isn't any reason to use less energy; if there are efficiency improvements then all else equal it makes the most sense to produce the same amount of energy and trade the excess into higher real living standards. Economies are good at sniffing that equilibrium out.
Massively wrong. Using more energy gives you sub-linear returns in value; you already got the lowest hanging fruit. For many uses you ramp up and use more power than before, but many uses you let your power bill drop.
-
To put it differently, read your own article. Right at the top it says "if demand is sufficiently price elastic".
Demand is often not sufficiently price elastic.
There is no way that the dropping per capita energy efficiency in the UK is being driven by efficiency gains, there is no theoretical reason to expect the two to pair up in the first place and it is clearly an energy squeeze when you look at the situation in context of the political and other real economic indicators. If the UK could drop 33% of its electricity use while maintaining a healthy economy that'd be a miracle on par if not exceeding what China managed in the last 50 years. That is simply not the situation, nobody seems to be talking about the vast improvements to QoL being driven by their vast surplus that has theoretically developed in the efficiency scenario [0]. As I learned in this comments section the UKians are literally rioting in the streets which is, sadly, not a surprise given their energy statistics and the head-in-sand strategy that seems to go hand in hand.
[0] I also feel great temptation to allege that people in the UK have been forced into straits so dire that they subsist on a diet of lightbulbs, but my will is strong.
> There is no way that the dropping per capita energy efficiency in the UK is being driven by efficiency gains
I don't want to get too far into that analysis. I just really dislike how you came in here talking about Jevons like it's a guarantee in every situation. And dressing it up as "mathematically speaking". That math only applies for specific shapes of demand curve. Whether or not the UK is seeing a squeeze, your original argument and a lot of the followups were deeply flawed.
If there is evidence that the country has freed up a third of its electricity for other uses and just run out of things to do with it then that is going to, without doubt, be one for the history books and would be a level of success that would be well worth talking about. The signalling out of the UK isn't "we're swimming in electricity, what do we do with all this power now that more efficiencies have been found? Lets go bitcoins and aluminium to find a use for these power plants!", it'd a pretty clear "we can't produce as much electricity as we once did, we don't have the resources, usage has to drop, heavy industry please leave".
But let's say the cost of Y (in electricity or money) drops 25%. If that makes people consume 60% more Y, then spending rises. But if it only makes people consume 15% more Y, then spending drops. Both results are plausible.
There's no mathematical reason to assume the demand increase is bigger than the price drop.
If I could suddenly make each gallon of household water use go 10x as far, I'd do somewhere between 1-2x as much stuff with water as before. This would mean I'm only consuming 10-20% as much water as before. Would you be different?
As for gas or oil boilers - oil is uncommon except in rural areas - gas is far more common but not as ubiquitous in the past as you’d think - many folks heated their homes with resistive electric radiators or IR heaters - so a heat pump is a huge efficiency win.
1950: Lighting was 30% of total electrical demand [1] 1993-1997: 112 TWh, 9% of demand [2] 2020: 81 TWh, 6% of demand [3]
Couldn't find total used in 1950 but the point remains: Lighting used to be a major source of consumption and now it's pretty minor, and at least the trends in the last 30 years have been driven by efficiency gains, particularly following the energy crisis in the 70s.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222531686_Exergy_po...
[2] https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl-40...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=99&t=3
I mean not really.
Old aircon was off/on which mean that at temperatures near the target efficiency drops. (as in turning on for a few minutes, it takes a while to move the settle heat around)
Moving from fixed speed ac motors to "inverter driven" (brushless motors) means that AC can be run at a speed other than 100% or 0%. Yes, CoP hasn't increased 6x, but newer aircons have higher CoP over a wider range of temperatures.
moving from Plasma TVs to LED/oled is about a 2-3x improvement in efficiency.
Laptops are anywhere between 2 and 10x less power than desktop (caveats apply)
then double glazing has a large effect on heat rejection/storage. Non-coated glass lets in something like 1kw/m2 of heat, coated glass can reject anywhere up to 70% of that.
But they do just leave their lights on more[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
An old 100 W incandescent bulb produced about 1500 lumens, and now a LED bulb of 12 or 13 W can produce slightly more than that.
In the now distant past, I used only 100 W incandescent bulbs, all of which had been replaced more than a decade ago with 13 W LED bulbs, so I have benefited from this 8x reduction in energy consumption.
The other significant reduction in electrical energy consumption happened when I replaced a many-decades-old refrigerator with a modern high-efficiency refrigerator.
Compared with a half century ago when I was a child, now I consume additional electrical energy with some computers, one or two of which are almost always on, and with a microwave oven used for cooking, but the additional energy consumption is normally less than what is saved by modern lighting and refrigeration technologies.
40 years of technological progress and prices went up :(
Now in 2026 the main generators are EDF (French state owned), RWE (German), and Scottish Power (Spanish owned). These companies tend not to publish executive pay, but back in 2012 the CEO of EDF in the UK was being paid £1.2 million a year.
I would submit that all this has some bearing on why the prices have gone up.
This is why distributed solar is actually cheaper than utility scale solar all-in: you need less of that very very expensive grid, even if you pay 3x on the initial install costs.
However, I think that often you should not need to be overly reliant on electric power. If you have enough windows then you should not need electric light in the day time, if the incandescent light in the winter time also provides heat, if you have candles when needed, moon light (depending on the phase of the moon), etc, and I can write by hand and many things can be done without a computer (including, walk to where you need to go; I do not have a car so I walk if it is close enough or car pooling with someone else if far away), etc.
I want more than 6x as much light as I had in the incandescent bulb era. Indoor lighting is usually very dim compared to outdoor lighting, and that makes it harder to see things. As I get older and my eyes degrade I expect I'll want even more light. People running offices understand this and provide more lighting than typical for homes. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux
Yes, that means we can use the energy we would have used on light for other things.
Consumption of final products, and exports are what make more sense to look at to see if lives are better today than the 1970's, which the article implies it isn't.
https://alvancebritishaluminium.com/
Which has it's own hydroelectric scheme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochaber_hydroelectric_scheme
Cost of electricity is a very significant part of production costs of aluminum, around 30% on average.
https://www.aluminium.fr/en/energie
There are still electric arc furnaces in the UK and more are being built
We import very little Al from China; it turns out mostly to come from the UAE, which will have absolutely terrible CO2 emissions, as well as greener countries like Iceland and Norway.
It looks like we need to invest in local recycling (which, yes, needs cheap energy, but not as much as primary Al) in order to make more of a circular economy rather than just exporting vast volumes of scrap.
Climate change and oil use have generated predominantly non-violent protests.
Palestinian rights have generated direct action protests but not riots.
Energy hasn't really been on the radar (except in the context of climate-change protests).
It's just an immense right wing noise machine which makes it impossible to actually focus on finding solutions. We're back to people who want to improve electricity per capita by decapitating people.
People hate electricity prices, but they hate electricity infrastructure as well. They hate pylons, they hate renewables, they hate nuclear. People hate pollution and hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity). Every solution will encounter angry blockers, often angry about things that aren't even real (anti-5G lunatics). And they want to blame everything on foreigners. Absolutely childish behavior of our """elite""", the dead hand of which sits on our media and most of our parties.
I think everything that needs to be said in this thread probably already has been by someone. Re-litigating the same issues.
Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.
And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.
Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.
Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.
Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!
Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Despite anti-ULEZ folk claiming it's hugely unpopular Kahn convincing won the next mayoral election including some boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ zone expansion
I think you overstate this. While there are wingnuts on Twitter who hate Khan for who he is, massively more people hate him - any politician, not just him - for dipping into their pocket and taking their money. "For the greater good".
Even the most beloved politican on the planet will become the most hated as soon as the propose increasing taxes, or increasing household costs. Which is why they're always looking for the sneakiest way to do it.
> Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic
Alternatively, the central authority with all the money (Johnson's government) tells the devolved authority (Mayor of London) it doesn't like handing out free money, so what if our lockdown has decimated your cashbox income... so in exchange for money now to keep the lights on during this pandemic, I demand you make more of your own money in future, by fining people and by driving up public transport usage in your area. Also, I know how unpopular it is, which is why I delayed it when I was Mayor of London, so good luck at the polls ha ha!
> some
"some" indeed.
Well he flipped one of them from Conservative and didn’t lose any of the ones that had previously voted for him and his vote was up overall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Uxbridge_and_South_Ruisli...
> Both Labour's leader, Keir Starmer, and deputy leader, Angela Rayner, blamed opposition to ULEZ, with Starmer suggesting the Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan should rethink the policy. Khan defended the policy and Starmer soon sought to heal the rift. The defeated Labour candidate, Beales, also criticised the ULEZ policy.
So someone paid the electoral price for Khan's policy, it just wasn't him.
Yes, in 2023 ULEZ was a campaign issue but so was it when Khan was reelected mayor and Labour won a general election
ULEZ is fundamentally a good thing whether you like it or not
In general, diesel vehicles are more likely to exceed the emission threshold.
So a lot of people moved to diesel cars/vans from 2001 onward.
Then in 2019, the Ultra Low Emission Zone was set around central London, which issued daily fines to:
- petrol cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 4 standards (most vehicles pre-2006)
- diesel cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 6 standards (most vehicles pre-2015)
This didn't bother that many people, because central London already has a daily congestion charge, so anyone taking a vehicle in there already had business to justify it. Most people get around central London by train/tube/bus/taxi, it's the best served city in the UK for public transport. There was also a scrappage scheme offering up to £9500 for replacing the vehicle.
What bothered a LOT of people, though, is the widening of the ULEZ area, first to the inner London orbital in 2021 and then to the whole of Greater London (9 million people) in 2023, regardless of whether they went to central London or not. The outer boroughs, aren't as well served by public transport as central London is, and car/van ownership and use is much higher than central London. And of course, the scrappage scheme was cut down to a maximum of £2000, which is not a lot.
You can perhaps see why there was so much opprobrium.
Kahn won the next election including outer boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ expansion
https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/04/map-reveals-london-mayor-elec...
What the election map on your article shows is a bunch of outer boroughs ("some"?) choosing the Tory candidate over the Labour one, there just weren't enough of them overall. Elections aren't usually single-issue, and there's probably enough value in reelecting Kahn (or his opponents are odious enough), that forcing a large number of people to set their money on fire didn't entirely wreck his chances.
But you'll note that lessons have been learned. Back in 2019, the IEA were demanding the complete ban of gas boilers by 2026. The government never adopted such a policy, it's only too well aware at how much needless cost and effort it'd put the entire country through by making 80% of households throw out their heating system and buy another one, for the sake of the planet. So that's why the closest the government got to that was proposing in 2020/2021 maybe banning them by 2035. And now? The government is reassuring people that it won't ban gas boilers; not in 2026, not in 2035, not in 2050, not ever. It saw what banning cars in London kicked off. It doesn't want that for itself.
We've known diesel emissions are bad for health for a long time and ULEZ schemes improve people's health, particularly children https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1l1r1zne1ro
But some selfish people still think it's their right to drive highly polluting vehicles and let everyone else bear the cost
ULEZ / LEZ zones are a good thing
It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.
> fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves
I think we can agree on this. It's not that the UK is in any way a poor country in total, but it is an unequal one. And open to the negative effects of inequality from the outside - see the involvement of UAE oligarchs in Man City fraud, for example.
It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.
If they are "fairly obviously traceable" then surely you can name some and provide reasonable evidence?
The establishment view is that riots and racism are right wing agitators and foreign power influenced. The people look to rival immigrants and conspiracies, united by anxiety and fear.
They are both looking for scapegoats. This has unfortunately lead to so many atrocities in history.
This explanation seems to ignore much more obvious motivations. Most of the recent violent protests were triggered by concerns about immigrants committing violent crime and sexual offenses or harassment, often following concrete incidents.
Public safety seems like the clear primary motivation here.
One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.
However, I think that glossing over the primary concern to claim that the outrage is essentially engineered, will not convince the public. At least that's my opinion.
Which elites, possibly? The anti-immigrant views are represented by fringe parties (albeit ones that are getting more votes than many would be comfortable with) and all sorts of mainstream political leaders are constantly condemning them. Social media is the only reason the stories spread, practically speaking; international news barely even cares about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ceuta_migrant_crisis (where the number of people involved approximately matched the population of Ceuta itself).
At any rate, I can't say I particularly hear these protesters, or their representatives, talking about economic factors all that much. Certainly it comes up, but only with explicit reference to biased government policy and not as just some natural pie-sharing effect.
Or that politicians are not trying to solve immigration issues in order to stay in power.
Really I've heard all kinds of theories used to discount the actual issues or the motivations of those who make politics about immigration.
Most of them are likely nonsense with maybe a kernel of truth here and there, but that's just how politics are, right?
If migration is responsible for 5% of an issue, and other causes are responsible for 95%, it's far too easy to make the population imagine the numbers are swapped.
Though it still won't help your argument, because 1) correlation != causation, and 2) there are literally thousands of comparable correlations, so why is it immigrants, and not any of the others?
Rounding things off to "migration" is ignoring the state's role in all of this, deliberately, in order to present complainants as racist.
If you feel attacked by the word "migration", take it up with modo_mario.
Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.
Lol. Ask people in Crowborough and Piddington if that's true.
Individual examples are results of specific circumstances and not indication of a universal trend.
Because to me, it sure looks like you're only here to spread your agenda, and not to have any meaningful conversations.
I'm not sure why you think I'm jumping around between ideas.
> Lol. Ask people in Crowborough and Piddington
Awww, you guys have stopped citing Luton then?
‘I feel perfectly safe’: white Lutonians on the town’s supposed no-go zones - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/oct/08/luton-white-...
that's the way, just move onto another UK backwater and claim that as the new hotbed of brown people plotting against the King.
I have a rape gang enquiry report you should read.
>>Awww, you guys have stopped citing Luton then?
Not sure what "guys" you are referring to. I'm referring to the fact that dropping 1,250 male asylum seekers from countries with a completely different culture (such that need to be given brochures saying women need to consent to sex) next to a village with a population of 350 is one of the most appalling ideas ever.
Hence you have places like Fox news run coverage about cities all the time, telling you how they are lawless places full of crime. Scaring rural people about what all these immigrants will do once they final start to move to bum-fuck nowhere.
You seem the same pattern in most democracies.
There is no correlation between contact with immigrants and anti-immigrant voting.
There is anti-immigration voting, not anti-immigrant voting. But if an area is predominantly immigrant-populated, where are you expecting the right wing votes in that area to come from?
You don't think since the Boris Wave there has been a surge in politicians taking anti-immigration positions?
> You don't think since the Boris Wave there has been a surge in politicians taking anti-immigration positions?
That's not what we are arguing about. No question that the avg. level of opposition to immigration has gone up.
But interestingly again this is not actually correlated with how many immigrants are arriving, and the popularity of these politicians isn't actually correlated with how good they actually did on immigration.
Boris himself being in power while there was a lot of immigration but he remained popular with the base.
Because most people don't have any actual understanding of immigration issues or look at any kind of data.
He actively caused a large part of that migration of the boris wave with policies which were recommended against by at least 2 reports which they had requested and fellow front line politician such as suella. This after running on a partially anti migration mandate. He gets plenty of shit for it and lost popularity with anyone that cares about the matter.
>Because most people don't have any actual understanding of immigration issues or look at any kind of data.
By which metrics that they should all care about has it been doing well for people of the existing nations in europe?
Maybe among well-informed people who closely follow immigration policy, but not necessarily among the broader Conservative base.
This illustrates my point: much of the political debate about immigration is driven by perceptions rather than actual policy outcomes. Johnson talked about restricting immigration, which was popular with his base, but many voters had little understanding of what his government was actually doing. Literally just anti-immigration vibes.
And the political scandals that ultimately brought him down were largely unrelated to immigration. And he would have been the best for the Tories to have a chance in the election.
> By which metrics that they should all care about has it been doing well for people of the existing nations in europe?
Nice attempt at shifting the goalposts while not so subtly implying that immigration is responsible for all these other issues.
That wasn't the argument. The argument was about whether anti-immigration sentiment and political support for anti-immigration politicians actually correlate with immigration levels and policy outcomes.
> I listed some examples of ones that aren't so great in an earlier comment in this comment tree.
You mean the racist rants based on completely made up stuff or serious misinterpretation of a few data-points while completely ignoring the much more important much more actual relevant issues?
It turns out if they have mind boggling unemployment and inactivity numbers (majroity non eu working age women are housewives), make up the majority of prisoners, cost a load of money and put pressure on certain groups of wages, alongside a host of other issues then what's the point?
Water, too, because our water infrastructure is dire. I imagine we have some of the most expensive water in the world too
> How do the airline companies make any money?
Addons and cargo I believe (and cutting every single cost you can imagine, then more).
A lot of people have the perception nobody buys addons but the airlines make a tonne of money from them
Low margin industries probably contribute a lot and are more likely to change electricity usage patterns (by moving to a different country or being outcompeted).
Our elites are pretty bad at running the country but actually quite crafty when it comes to managing dissent and channeling it into things that don't threaten their hold on power.
So the regime can get away with a lot, there is no organised violent resistance
> the regime
The 'regime'. Also known as the democratically elected government.
There's very little evidence to support the idea that ordinary people vote for what they want and therefore control the direction of the state, in the UK or any other "democratic" country.
If that were the case then why are policies consistently implemented that go against the expressed desires of the majority of the population?
Every government in every state ever is more accurately described as a regime, for me it's a morally neutral term.
The only question is whether the regime is good or not
The Boris Wave has been the biggest adverse event to the UK since OPEC Oil crisis.
Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.
It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up. Good luck proving your Brexit counterfactual.
>>Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.
When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true. Also, given that you can get a "skilled worker" visa for working in a kebab shop or a corner store [1], "skilled" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence [1].
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjdg4nvz5mro
An immigrant cannot bring an extended family - only a spouse and children (younger 18). And they are not eligible for benefits so have no impact on the budget. Skilled visa is abused (to bring relatively low skilled workers) but that's not too common and they still pay taxes, just less than someone working at Google.
I recommend to listed to this podcast (or read transcript) it's not trying to defend immigration at all but di-spells lots of myths about economical impact of immigration: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/how-does-immigration-affect-publ...
The major point, though, is that countries are not economic units, and are closer to families than they are companies.
1. I did check graphs and see low correlation - GDP pp dipped after GFC (2008 crisis) then again around Brexit referendum and started to recover 2021 - around the start of the Boris wave. 2. Even if we had a correlation it doesn't imply causation especially given multiple factors battered the economy around the same time - Brexit, COVID (which had delayed and lasting impact) and Russian-Ukrainian war.
With the massive extra "pro" of plausible deniability so all those who's interests are served by it can lie up down and sideways about how it's a good thing.
A lot of things are like this. It's really hard to overstate the cost of laying unpopular things bare.
Almost every British person I've ever known has kept up with and has an opinion on American politics, but when I try to talk to Americans about British politics, they don't even know the names of the parties.
Which is to say, the UK is far more obsessed with America then America is with the UK. This has been true since WW2, where Britain was 'obsessed' with getting America to come save them from losing the war.
What a way to characterize supply and demand variation.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of...
https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/65515/decoupling-...
It is very strange to see how many nations gave up energy independence and basically exchanged a temporarily lower price of energy coupled with deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation. Money seems politically easy to spend raising defense expenditures by a few more percent of GDP but energy independence through decentralized renewables would be a much higher defense value imho.
They are only deep geopolitical dependencies because our politicians are too stupid to actually let us drill for it in the North Sea or frack for it on the mainland.
Argue what you like, but it's hard to think that increasing the supply of a commodity won't make the prices go down. Will it be major? Probably not compared to the massive amount of tax on fuel, but I'd still take it.
You've drawn the wrong premise from the data you've looked at. There is no rationing.
UK electricity prices operate in a broken market where the price is fixed to the most expensive on-stream generator in that moment, so in the auction of wholesale prices that happens dozens of times a day, if a single gas generator is online, everyone is setting the price around gas generation even if most of the supply is much cheaper wind.
Last week the PM announced that this broken market should get fixed in the next parliamentary session, because he - and his party - know that reducing energy prices has material impact on how people feel about the economy.
You should also understand that demand has changed shape considerably in the last 50 years.
There's been a pretty devastating deindustrialisation in the UK since the 1970s - there's only one steel forge left operating, and that required nationalisation this year, for example. As the UK moved to a knowledge economy, we found that most of the workforce moved to needing nothing more than a laptop to add to GDP.
But the home has also changed shape: you can't buy an old fashioned light bulb any more, so dreary wet winters are illuminated exclusively by LED lighting at ~10% the power consumption used in the 1970s. Heatpumps have replaced storage heaters, and while electric cars are popular even they do not use as much energy as the factories and ship yards used to.
There is literally just less demand. And the pricing is pegged to gas, unfairly. If that market breaks, I doubt consumption would go up, but maybe new industrial opportunities would open up - if we end up with cheap, abundant energy as a result, we might attract more energy-intensive industry to the UK, but I don't think it's fair to define current state as "rationing"
I would like to think that National Government is considering choices which would still be marginal pricing but change other elements to better suit our present reality. Two examples:
1. Regionalize. Today the price for 1MWh of electricity in Portsmouth is exactly the same as for 1MWh of electricity in Dundee but if the UK is making so much electricity in the far North on a windy January night that's not the real price to deliver the electricity, getting it to Dundee would be far cheaper. Prices can reflect that, and if they do that new energy-hungry factory makes more sense in Dundee than in Portsmouth even if it would be slightly more convenient to build it in Portsmouth.
2. Retail pricing can have a significant social policy element distinct from "What the market says this costs". Technically an old lady living alone who uses 50kWh per month and a wealthy family with two EVs and a swimming pool chewing almost 10MWh per month are both "connected to the grid" but maybe the 40p per day "standing charge" to cover that connectivity could be 10p per day for that old lady and 80p for the wealthy family. Again, the market says that's wrong because the connection doesn't cost more money if you use it - but it's a social policy decision.
Regional pricing is something being looked into - comes with it's own problems - but more solve-able with modern data processing pipelines.
IMO stick a battery in every house, and you have a nation-wide buffer for smoothing out renewables is a good idea. Large battery bank projects are being rolled out which can help with this too.
In terms of social pricing - that would still need to be anchored to "something" - which currently is the price derived from the merit order.
There are also a lot of projects around improving transmission infrastructure. It's a very interesting time.
Combined Cycle costs more to build but is far more efficient. So OCGT is basically a bet that fuel is cheap forever, or at least for so long you've made your money. I know that bet doesn't work in the UK and I would not expect it to pay off in Germany either.
So, basically none. At that point there's over 30 GW of electricity production so OCGT was about 0.4% of the country's electricity. About a third of the electricity was gas, so almost 100x as much Combined Cycle as Open Cycle.
Nationalised because high energy prices made it unsustainable commercially.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/13/lawyers-to-...
ROTFL.
Yes, true, many economies like US, UK, Germany are becoming more "energy efficient". By outsourcing energy hungry industries and steps to China.
"Electricity oh that's the thing the runs the telly and kettle"
There is something very concerning about this complacent attitude towards the stagnant QoL of citizens.
In the past 10 years.
The supply margin (declared capacity - demand) has reduced by half.
Electricity prices have increased 250%(edit: from 0.11 to 0.25).
And the 9-fold relative increase in imports (1% to 9%) definitely contributes to that increase.
Before you say it's all inflation, I believe inflation is not that high over the same period, and consider the role that electricity price hikes have played on inflation.
Which, in turn, is due to the war.
The main policy failure was the conservative government banning onshore wind for five years. There's less critical issues with pylons and planning that I would actually blame the public for rather than the government.
Other than that, not a lot of other options. People mentioning nuclear will be referred to the build time of Hinkley C.
The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014. The geopolitical risks were crystal clear back then.
As far as nuclear goes there is a western failure to innovate on design presumably due to ossified regulatory requirements and I possible contractor malfeasance. In China new clear plants take 5 to 7 years.
Hmm, I wonder what hugely expensive and distracting project the UK engaged in after that time instead? Ah yes, Brexit, which turns out to have been promoted in part by the Russians (with a lot of help from the UK press and local dodgily-funded actors).
And nuclear had no chance what so ever in the post market liberalization world. Those sudo-market are not design for that kind of thing.
Nuclear made most sense in the area of centralized utilities, but most nations didn't use it well for various reasons.
We don't really need new technology in nuclear, I mean it would be nice but its not really needed.
France has made an absolutely amazing deal by investing in nuclear. If you calculated all the benefits is actually insane how beneficial it was.
This is all true, and yet somehow, at the end of the day, the UK has a higher per capita GDP than France.
That said, its also wrong to measure benefits only by capita GDP.
The conservatives also appear to have intentionally sabotaged one of the auction rounds for offshore wind.
Probably _mostly_ as reduced demand, though if you net feed back into the grid then that may be counted as generation.
https://www.neso.energy/energy-101/electricity-explained/how...
And sure, if steelworks and chemistry is moved abroad, the country will use less energy on the whole. But then you have to calculate the indirect usage through imported products as well to have an honest "energy requirement" value for a region or country.
Not saying you can skip efficient light bulbs, but we need to stay realistic about future energy requirements.
So I'm almost certain they are being counted
And increasingly, batteries are also coming to such sites. Would be very interested in learning more about the study's analysis/impact regarding this trend.
The price of electricity is driving deindustrialisation.
This is so hilariously Daily Mirror.
Don't be so sure.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/10/great-brita...
https://spectator.org/germanys-electricity-rationing-is-no-l...
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/german-electricity-to-...
And you don't even have to do it through law, with high enough prices you get the subjects to do them themselves:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/oct/01/britons-prepar...
This has disastrous consequences for businesses and the economy. It is the number one biggest problem facing the UK economy after the huge government debt and crippling taxes... although there are a number of other problems I could mention.
We do have electric tumble dryers, condenser dryers, washer dryers.
(Indeed, the progressive switch to condensers may be part of power consumption dropping.)
AFAIK The UK's climate is about equivalent to New York State.
If you have a family of four, the clothes dryer is an ENORMOUS time-saver. I'll never voluntarily live in an apartment that doesn't have one. No way I'm sacrificing my quality of life.
What it does save is space that you need to hang clothes.
During winter I also like that it provides some moisture so the air won't get too dry.
edit: so basically we only use our dryer if there's a ton of laundry to hang, plus sometimes for towels or bed sheets/blankets.
> I don't really mind hanging clothes, it doesn't take that long.
I mean sure, but i still would rather not do it. I could wash my dishes by hand too, its not reallly that big of a deal, but i dont because we have technology. We have solutions to all these things, and your politicians have somehow convinced you that its fine that you cant use them. Bizzaro.
The tumble dryer I had in the US could do a full load dry in about 25-30 mins. Maybe it was significantly more wasteful in terms of energy.
That's exactly why we convert things to money - so we don't use arbitrary measurements. An energy use is not "wasteful", it can only be expensive. Which is worth or not, depending on particular conditions.
The weather in the UK can be very humid, and if you don't have much of a garden, it can be impossible to dry your clothes at times. We've had times where our living room was full of clothes for more than a few days, and it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't really dry anyway.
So we've invested in dehumidifiers and a dryer, and it made our life a lot more comfortable.
A shift to EVs and heat pumps and possibly datacentres should increase demand and lower unit prices. Even more so to the degree that those can respond to price signals and shift demand away from peaks.
Peaks are expensive for the same reason, you need to build capacity that is rarely used and so can't spread the cost.
Separately, smart charging or water heating can use the cheapest available generation from renewables as they vary with time.
On the other hand, this generates a "doom loop" for methane gas as it also has network costs. Ensuring entire areas shift to electric heating at the same time helps with this e.g. banning new build areas from connecting to gas networks.
The rise of gas central heating means that less electricity is used for supplemental heating — those lethal electric bar fires are a thing of the past, and the ones that remain have been replaced by efficient oil-filled radiators and at least somewhar more efficient storage heaters. Also many fewer houses rely on electric immersion heaters for water.
Houses are better insulated. And it is a lot warmer (actually shockingly so — 1.5C more on the mean maximum daily temperature in winter) so there is much less supplemental electric heating needed.
Cooker hobs are not the horribly inefficient hot metal ring element things they used to be — halogen, induction and gas hobs have replaced them, more use of microwaves etc.
LED lighting.
Solar (assuming it is not included in the numbers).
Even things like electric kettle elements are modestly more efficient (more sealed-element kettles) and an energy efficiency drive in the 90s persuaded people to only boil the water they needed.
And talking of kettles, we drink only a third as much tea per person as we did in the 1970s, and while we drink much more coffee, it has not closed the gap.
I don't actually think the deindustrialisation of the UK is any sort of elephant in the room, as it goes. This is a small, tightly packed country and our physical quality of life has improved radically with the deindustrialisation of towns (and indeed, in this timeframe, the destruction of the last of the appalling housing that it forced on people).
The average standard of housing in the UK compared to the early 1970s is night and day different. People were still living in appalling slum conditions when I was young. That stuff has gone. It's just completely weird to suggest that we're stuck back there.
I don't know who the "most" who "agree" are. But if this is going to turn out to be another thing where people use air conditioning or car ownership or drying clothes outside or whatever… ehh.
I'm genuinely surprised that you view the UK's industrial past so negatively - as the cause and not the solution to slums. It was the national pride and joy at the time and people celebrated it for raising their standard of living (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition). The terraced houses of the 1800's were actually built in part due to government initiative to improve housing for the working class beyond what was possible in comparable European cities. You even state that your own house from the UK's industrial heyday is up to modern standards! That's quite an achievement!
Would you apply this same logic (that industrialization degrades housing) to China - where the replacement of slums by modern apartments is usually seen to be a consequence of the vast industrial capacity?
Of course, the improved material standards of living from industrialization come at the cost of air quality and pollution - but these are likely solvable problems in the long-term.
Slums existed globally long before industrialisation (antiquity). The buildings which replaced the slums were built with the outputs of industry, and were bought by workers earning good wages from industrial jobs.
In Britain people were forced to move into cities due to enclosure - industrialisation saved them from the elite-imposed death sentence (which forced my ancestors to leave). It's an heroic story.
Again, would you say that Chinese industrialisation causes slums in China? Would you say that the demolition of slums in China, to be replaced by modern buildings, is assisted or inhibited by Chinese industrialisation? Would a similar country with less industry (e.g. India) have more or less slums? Would standards be better in Chinese or Indian slums?
Left wing thought is rooted in the idea that industrialisation allowed workers to create vast material wealth but did not give them their fair share. Now we have progressive Thatcherites apparently.
These persisted until the labour movements forced by then extremely wealthy industrialists to build something better; railway worker houses for example were usually built better.
But what was built from the late 1780s until the late 1880s was often of absolutely appalling quality.
The problem I have with HN is this belief that things were bad and then along came industrialisation and everyone had better lives — it is tosh. Dangerously misguided tosh that is being used to support the idea that protests against AI are misguided, that Luddites were only vandals, that the industrial era made everyone healthier and happier and freed them from farm labour.
It took a hundred years before their lives were on average better.
And there were industrial workers houses of appalling quality — the ones that didn't get bombed out in WWII — still in existence until I was eleven or twelve years old in the eighties.
I've asked twice about this causal relationship between industry and slums you propose. As I understand, the slums and crowded cities were created because the feudal overlords kicked the subsistence farmers off of their ancestral land and left them for dead. This preceded the industrial revolution.
Industry was the tool which allowed people to recover and build a vibrant, free, and enlightened country. A serviced-based free-market laissez faire Thatcherite economy will just leave them where they were originally. Deindustrialization is a change which people should be aware of and prepared to resist at a cost. Freedom and sovereignty demand it.
> It was in fact not ludicrous at all that the early years of the British industrial revolution..
If it had just been the early years (1700s) it would have still been ludicrous, given the size and history of the country. But that it was still the case by the 1870s is simply extraordinary. They were outcompeting larger and more autocratic countries.
> very much physically larger countries with more room for every kind of factory complex, poorer workers, poorer pollution controls, corrupt central-planning autocracies, and worse human rights
It was a political decision to move the technology there and to trade freely rather than strategically with these countries. It still is. Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Germany are of a similar size to the UK. Those are countries which accept a high price for their own industrial sovereignty. They reinvest their earnings and strategically use them to purchase industrial enterprises (like ARM) in other countries. They don't sell off their own high value industry. Political priorities are the only question here. The UK has embraced an ideology that prioritises the wealthy making as much money as possible, whereas these similar countries have resisted it. You endorse it but stating its consequences and inevitabilities.
> poorer workers
In 2026 the discretionary take home income for workers after food and rent is not that different between the UK and South Korea/Japan and Germans actually take home more. The bulk of worker pay actually goes to landlords and/or banks who reinvest it industrially in poor countries. Again, this is a political policy and not an inevitability. It does not happen in China.
The living standard was not actually high during this period. Unless you love dying early and breathing coal smoke.
And this didn't fall apart in the 70s, that just an rewrite of history. It had been falling apart for much, much longer. In the 70s they just had to reckon with it. In the Post-WW2 they had the advantage of much of the rest of the world being destroyed, but as Japan and Germany recovered, they out competed Britain in almost major industry.
But Britain could have done much to improve standard of living continuously even without the manufacturing dominance of 100 years earlier. Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands aren't major steel producers that are 'the workshop of the world' but the standard of living went up. Britain had the chance to do the same thing, but they didn't.
The important question is why manufacturing GDP per capita in the UK has fallen below comparable countries (not why it is below its historic peak - an unfair strawman), and whether or not this is for the best and/or inevitable - as you and others have suggested.
You've actually made the case that it is bad and evitable better than I did - all of the countries you mentioned produce more industrial GDP per capita than the UK in 2026, despite being physically smaller (well only if you exclude arctic tundra), and this a large source of their relatively high wealth and improved standard of living. All have different industrial policies to the UK (markedly, since the 90s). All previously produced less than the UK per a capita when they were relatively poorer, and produce more per capita now that they are relatively richer. You suggest there are other more important reasons than industry, but don't bother name them.
Sweden was famously one of the industrial greats (and still is, for its size) - if this surprises you then it's likely you know very little about modern industry, let alone history and policy. With most of the iron ore in Europe, it had an enormous primary steel making industry in the 70s, which also suffered and required state intervention / restructuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_crisis - Sweden now has double the manufacturing GDP per capita of the UK. That's one of its primary sources of wealth and high standard of living.
Switzerland is an outlier for many reasons but also produces far more manufacturing GPD per capita than the UK (maybe 4 or 5x) in 2026. As a late to industrialise region, it famously pulled itself up from a collection of agrarian cantons into a powerful industrialised federation. Again, modern Switzerland is famous for its industrial output.
Netherlands also makes about 2-3x the manufacturing GDP per capita as the UK, and benefits from some outlier effects, but is perhaps otherwise very similar to the UK.
Denmark makes about 3x the manufacturing GDP per capita. The government is highly active industry through all kinds of strategic public-private partnerships, and Danes have broadly rejected corporate control of their industrial economy through a swathe of legal mechanisms and alternate governance structures. The Danish are proud to invest in sovereign industry which improves their quality of life.
All of these countries (unlike the UK since the 90s) continue to maintain industrial policies which consist more or less of moderate protectionism beyond the EU, moderate state intervention in the key industries, state financing for key industries, state funding of research and development and education, tax subsidies, high taxation to support welfare and other labor market interventions which supported industry transitions, support for unions and labor relations, rejected deep privitisation and maintained state ownership of essential industrial infrastructure, safeguarded local ownership of key industries to some extent (through legal intervention, state spending, public-private partnerships, 'fonde', or at the very least laws requiring local governance).
The bottom line is that the UK continues to give it all away for pennies and the man on the street is convinced this is a good thing - even though the countries you reach to for comparison have all chosen a different path! It's striking that you take issue with me for recommending the very things which you celebrate in other countries.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Industry is poverty, slums, and pollution.
My point is, that the manufacturing difference is not the reason for the difference in standard of living by and enlarge. And even if it was, your implications aren't necessary correct.
First, the reason Copenhagen and most cities in the Netherlands or Switzerland are a nicer place to live then most cities in Britain, is because they have invested in infrastructure, both for cycling and trains and metros. Along with other local polices.
The same could be said for other things, Britain is doing things badly despite spending the same amount of money. Does Britain pay more for infrastructure because they sold the steel industry in the 70s? No clearly not as other countries without steel industries pay less. Same goes for health care and other things.
As we are talking about steel. British steel was in structural decline for 100 years already and totally uncompetitive and had been propped up by the government. Even then (conservative) government in the 70s did try to save it and did enact massive amounts of protectionism and it mostly was not successful and it remained problematic. Specially not at keeping massive amounts of the population employed.
Britain actually spent far more on propping up its steel industry then Sweden, even accounting for Britain being bigger. Sweden was just in a much better position already by 1970, so they had a much easier time reorganizing. So focusing the blame only on Post-1970 completely misses how they got to this structural crisis point. And its not clear how many more billions could have saved these 150k jobs in that industry, and its not even clear that with a few more billions these jobs would have been suitably saved. So the idea that if just Britain had retains its steel monopoly and invested another 10+ billion pound then everything would be amazing now is very questionable.
The same goes for manufacturing in general, yes Britain in 1970 had much higher manufacturing share, but so did everybody and by then British manufacturing issues were already apparent. In terms of actual manufacturing productivity, Britain was already bad in productivity terms, not comparable to Sweden or Switzerland. As Japan and others came up, it was in a hopeless position. That is actually the core of the issue. You are only looking at govenrment failing to protecting these industries, without realizing that you can't long term prop up industries with terrible productivity. Government can nationalize a failing car (truck) factory but running failing factories forever is not popular in any country. This is not at all like what happened in other countries. They did better in manufacturing in the long term because of higher labor productivity.
The Nordics, Switzerland and Netherlands also had neoliberalism. And they didn't maintain their industries primarily threw state intervention and protectionism. And when the did interventionism is was mostly reorganization and a few state loans (often less then Britain). France if anything is the most protectionist country in Europe and they have a low manufacturing just like Britain. Most of the countries that are doing the actual manufacturing and exporting in those countries are private companies and often ones that didn't have massive state involvement (not more then British companies for the most part).
And Britain spending is actually very close to countries like Netherlands and others. And while Sweden and Denmark spend more, that's mostly because of the social state, not propping up manufacturing.
So here are my points:
- Most issues with Britain in terms of Standard of Living have to do with bad govenrment polices, not the lack of manufacturing or the lack of spending. Britain spends nearly the same as Sweden on Healthcare, while getting worse outcomes. Same for infrastructure, same for many other things.
- British manufacturing went away because of a labor productivity that ...
Industrial policy should be measured by how industry delivers for the goals of the population - cleaner greener infrastructure, high-quality housing, and high wages. By that standard, Britain has had worse industrial policy than its comparable neighbours. Rather than pretending that this isn't the case, we should ask why. Britain led the neoliberal project since 1979 and applied its teachings deeply. What does it have to show for it?
> If an industry is uncompetitive, public ownership does not magically make it productive
Shrewd investments make productivity, and the public is generally incentivised to make these investments unlike owners - who can simply move the money to low-cost countries. Limited public ownership and the other structures I mentioned help to ensure that the profits are reinvested back into domestic industry. If you sell to the highest bidder, you can be certain that the profits will be taken overseas. Of course, the devil is in the detail, and this may be a sound decision (e.g. if you had other more critical industries in need of capital). But since these decisions are made by private owners, and not by the public, such cases are exceedingly rare.
> A competitive manufacturing sector is not primarily the result of protectionism. It depends on ..
You then list all the things I claimed the other states have intervened more heavily in, and which British neoliberal doctrine insists on leaving to the market.
Limited strategic protectionism for emerging industries has a long history in economics and left-wing political economy. It was practiced liberally in all ascendant industrial powers - China, US, Germany, and of course the UK. Only in the anglosphere and only since Thatcher and Reagan era propaganda have such policies come to be viewed with suspicion. Since the 70s, the Nordic countries have embraced it too. Norway protected its oil and gas industries, Sweden and Finland protected telecommunications (Nokia, Ericsson), Denmark protected its offshore wind. In these cases, state ownership (of the customers) was indeed the key mechanism. The list is long and many of those defining features of the modern sophisticated Nordic economies are the consequence of protectionism.
> But it does not establish that this is the primary reason for their higher living standards
If not from industry, then where does the Wealth of Nations come? If banking and finance service only foreign industry, and domestic real estate, what good are they for the development of the country? On these subjects, there has been much ink spilled.
I for one confidently believe that it is no coincidence that UK has experienced less growth and improvement of living standards, while its industrial base declined more rapidly. To find a counterexample you would have to go as far as Italy - a country with extreme political corruption during the period in question.
> or that their manufacturing success was primarily caused by the policies you advocate
No it doesn't, but I hope that at it least has led you to consider the possibility.
Yes, that's my position. None of those things are directly dependent on domestic manufacturing.
> Shrewd investments make productivity, and the public is generally incentivised to make these investments unlike owners
The history of British industry would point to the opposite. But there are counterexamples as well. In general, a government-owned industry faces much less pressure to make difficult choices because it can continue running losses for a long time. If, for example, an industry is not competitive, cutting wages might be the only way it survives to fight another day, but politically this is often impossible, creating a permanent structural deficit.
Meanwhile, many private owners do make smart decisions, and these often preserve at least some significant employment in the country of origin.
And making "shrewd investments" with the long term in mind doesn't really go well with a political system focused on election cycles, the media, and parties trying to undo each other's successes or failures.
British public industries demonstrated exactly these patterns. They were often structurally underdeveloped, leading to low labour productivity. That is not something you can fix with limited protectionism.
> who can simply move the money to low-cost countries
For many industries, there isn't a simple investment you can make to reduce labour costs sufficiently. If you want to preserve some of those industries, you will need to subsidise their higher labour costs through taxes, tariffs, or higher consumer prices. That hurts the competitiveness of your other industries.
If you have the right tax regime and a company headquartered in your country, moving some production abroad isn't necessarily a bad outcome. If that keeps the company internationally competitive while retaining valuable functions domestically, it can be a perfectly reasonable arrangement.
> Of course, the devil is in the detail, and this may be a sound decision (e.g. if you had other more critical industries in need of capital). But since these decisions are made by private owners, and not by the public, such cases are exceedingly rare.
"The public" doesn't make these decisions. Bureaucrats or politicians do. And those decisions are only indirectly influenced by elections every few years, with many layers of indirection.
It's almost impossible to express differentiated views. For example, I might want airlines to be private, the steel industry to be private, but telecommunications to remain public. It's unlikely that any political party will represent exactly those preferences.
I'm Swiss, so we get to vote on many more things than people do in the UK, especially individual policies. But even so, that's a tiny fraction of all the choices a government makes.
If you assume a much larger public sector, actual democratic control can become even weaker.
Politicians are often poorly informed about the details. The UK is a good example, where parliamentarians regularly get appointed to ministerial positions in fields in which they have little experience.
Politicians also prefer to argue over headline-grabbing industries and are more likely to advocate whatever is popular in the short term than to work out what's best for each individual manufacturing business.
Alternatively, decisions are made by bureaucrats, over whom the public often has very little direct influence because of the many layers of indirection. Singapore developed a powerful technocratic bureaucracy that performed extremely well in many areas. Its senior civil servants had considerable internal authority.
But such structures can also fail badly and become deeply undemocratic. It's a sword without a hilt in many ways.
> Limited strategic protectionism
You're picking out a few limited examples while ignoring the broader trends of economic liberalisation in these countri...
It looks less like men with hammers and more like mixed-gender teams in lab coats, and that makes it invisible for ~some reason~.
I realise now I'm arguing with people who actually know very little at all about Britain's industrial history. Britain held a comparable position to current China or the US (high tech and bulk volume) manufacturing for ~100 years despite being about 2% of the world's population (and competing with the US, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, etc).
That sounds ludicrous now - it was ludicrous then too. Yet it really happened, and it really is over.
> mixed-gender teams in lab coats
Women (working-class women) were actually an essential part of the industrial workforce during that time and dominated some of the industries like textile manufacturing. Only as the middle class grew with prosperity did this even begin to change at all. Laws were passed to limit their working hours to 60 a week and prevent them from working in underground mining. There were many lady engineers and inventors too, beginning the in the late 19th (peak) and accelerating with early 20th (WWI).
England was famous not for 'men with hammers' but for highly skilled craftsmen, inventors, and engineers who produced the bulk of the most sophisticated manufactured goods in the world - textiles, steam engines and turbines, ocean liners, scientific instruments, mechanical and then electronic calculators, chemicals and dyes, weaponry, steel and other metals, mining and heavy industrial equipment, electric motors and generators, radios and televisions, radar, photography and cameras, engines, cars, even tyres, plastics, cement. These are all industries with the British created and dominated.
They didn't just 'make stuff' -> they were the 'workshop of the world'. They made 20% of the world's goods while representing 2% of the population
> power turbines
Actually, they don't make their steam turbines, wind turbines or gas turbines anymore (except for jet engines). Steam and gas turbines were invented in the UK and produced there commercially.
> scientific instrument
The UK once dominated scientific instrument making. It is ridiculous now to contend that they are serious player in this field. Optical glass and various types of microscopes, (even flat glass), fibre optics, electron microscopes. All invented in the UK, commercially produced in the UK, and now gone (since the 70s).
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.1855
The wealth of a nation is directly related to how much energy is available to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
https://x.com/a16z/status/2108950777440165999?
There are no low electricity, rich countries.
I sincerely hope the UK is able to muddle its way through its current host of challenges.
Now, where is all the wealth going? Perhaps a more pertinent question.
> more traffic, more pollution
More traffic, less pollution (see ULEZ controversy)
> worse healthcare
better healthcare, despite the terrible waiting list problems and the NHS dentistry issue, life expectancy continues to creep upwards.