Best Of

https://x.com/alexwickham/status/2035280623808413826

Lots of interesting stuff in here.

— Policy proposals being examined include shifting the tax burden away from salaried work toward land and economic rent-seeking, merging employees’ NI with income tax, reforming council tax and creating new incentives for entrepreneurship and risk-taking. It also argues for a targeted deregulation push and an energy policy which refocuses the clean energy transition on driving down costs for households and industry, including moving levies off bills and a sprint for cheap electrification.

But if Labour did any of these I’d be happy.

If an energy transition can be done by driving down (lowering) costs and sprinting for (attaining) cheapness with no mention of any costs transferred to anyone else then it's hardly a political crisis. It is, like opening Hormuz, dead easy.

But I think, as so often, the account misses out the crucial second stage of the underpants gnomes.

It's the difference between one-off capital spends and ongoing revenue spends. The energy transition costs upfront (installing and connecting things) but pays back in the future. Borrowing in that situation is fine, even desirable.

One of the coalition's bigger mistakes was to miss that difference. Hence austerity felt fairly painless for many at the time, but now everything is rubbish. But we spent the preceding decades spending one-off windfalls as If they were recurring revenue, which is a similar thing with different signs on the numbers.

Morning all. Have been encouraging you all to book your holidays now. So if you are going to the EU and you haven't had your details collected for the new EES system then try this app.

Early travellers through the new EES system were queuing for up to an hour. Once scanned though, it will be minutes through so what the app does it to remove the need for scanning/queuing. App works like the Middle/Far East apps where you pre-register to come through immigration.


https://travel-europe.europa.eu/ees/Travel-to-Europe-mobile-app

According to the FAQ it only currently works in Sweden and Portugal?

And only does 1/3 of what’s required in Portugal.

Mrs Eek was in Lanzarote on Friday - on Thursday when the airport was in the news the queue was 90-120 minutes and Friday she was out of the airport in 10 minutes

It’s a combination of how many machines are working and how many UK flights have arrived just before yours

Hope for us all in the latest fashion trend: being smart.

"Being smart is sexy now. Not only the kind of sexy that makes people fancy you, but the kind of sexy that generates discourse. The kind of sexy that accrues value. The flipside of a dumbed-down world is that thought has scarcity value, and what is rare has always been hyped. Knowing stuff is to the 2020s what limited-edition trainers were to the 2000s."

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/mar/22/living-period-political-anti-intellectualism-pop-culture-clever-new-cool?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I was musing on this idea of knowledge scarcity in the context of (of course) the rise of AI and how the premium of actually knowing stuff might rise. On the one hand, supporters or AI would say that it will devalue knowledge because anyone can access 'phd-level expertise' in a given field.

I disagree, it's not like knowledge had been particularly scarce the past decade or two, for those who know where to look, the blockage has always been interpretation. With AI's unreliability problem being a 'feature' (and increasingly acknowledged as unsolvable) I think it means that people able to spot it's bullshit might become increasingly valued.

Difficult to articulate on a CV as a skill, but I was thinking that knowledge and field specific expertise might be making a comeback.

There are positives from this war, even if we do see energy prices go gaga.

We could be pretty self-sufficient as a nation. And have made huge strides forward in recent years. Reform fuckheads smashed the Milliband / Cameron / May / Boris / Sunak consensus on renewables. But "lets get rid of wind and solar and use more oil and gas" looks not just really stupid but practically traitorous.

Whilst I wholly agree with the voices saying lets drill more oil / gas, those same voices also lean towards "instead of renewables". It should be "in addition to renewables"

Not sure I have seen many people on here say Iintead of renewables.

Most of the commentary has been instead of importing oil and gas. Something with which I think you agree.

The fuckhead - to use your rather florid term - is Miliband who somehow thinks importing hydrocarbons is more climate friendly than using our own.

I didn't say on here. But out there in politics world Reform fuckheads - and they are fuckheads - have filled people's head with all kinds of guff about renewables.

Milliband is a dick, but he is less wrong than Tice et al who want us to turn our energy security over to Putin.

There is a lot of guff spoken about renewables - the biggest piece of guff about them being that they are cheaper than gas. This is a provable untruth, but it is still repeated with the same enthusiasm as a North Korean ovation for Kim Jong Un.

A 2025 Substack by David Turver has this useful table (you may have to blow it up if PB does a micropic):

https://davidturver.substack.com/p/renewables-are-more-expensive-than-gas

Now, granted, this was in May 2025.

The current gas price has shot through the roof - AI has it currently at £126 per megawatt hour. That makes it still cheaper than any renewable bar solar on CFD.

So, I'm a little confused by his analysis.

For natural gas he has the cost as #75 per MW/h, which is #61 fuel, and #15 carbon credits.

Which raises a little bit of a question: like how are you capturing operating and capital costs? #75 might be the marginal cost of production for an existing gas plant (i.e. the point at which the value of electricity exceeds the cost of fuel and carbon credits).

But it's not a fully loaded price. Nobody would build a CCGT if you only got the price of fuel plus the price of carbon credits. You need to get your capital and operational costs covered too.

So, it seems he's comparing the cost of energy from existing plants (excluding operating costs), agains the fully loaded cost of a KwH from other sources. He also doesn't seem to capture capacity payments in there, which is a little lazy.

As I understand it, capacity payments are paid to gas and other reliable generators to provide power where there is no generation from intermittent renewables. Since they would not be necessary without intermittent renewables, it would be misleading to add them to the price per megawatt hour of gas - they are in fact a hidden cost of renewable generation. If that is what you mean, it is dealt with at some length in the article.

I would assume that his costings for 'fuel' include plant running costs. If you doubt this and think he's made a mistake, what's your estiimated addition? £1? £5?

You seem to basically acknowledge the reasoning is sound.