Flood the sea with offshore wind farms. Build in redundancy so that even if only 20% are working they generate enough for the UK's needs. Switch them off when they are not needed.
Overprovisioning generation by a factor of 5 is also a long way from being cost-effective...
Offshore wind strike is around 40 quid per megawatt hour so doesn't it provide 20p per kwh long term power or so if quintuple overprovisioned ?
Having too much energy from renewables will be a very nice problem to have in the future, but we're a long (but not unimaginable) way from crossing that bridge. My pitch would be to use any excess to power some sort of reaction to react carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Well, would that not be the opportunity to connect wind and solar directly to storage schemes? When the grid is full, switch over.
I imagine that would be less economic than having your storage be part of the wider grid system and able to fill up at any point when electricity is cheap, not just when a single directly-attached wind or solar farm is not feeding the grid.
Large solar utility projects tend to come with some storage attached, to benefit from the higher margin load balancing bits of the energy market, or on a bigger scale to be able to sell units in the parts of the day when the sun isn’t shining.
"Society pays the price for our cheap goods Fast fashion, low airplane fares and our addiction to online deliveries have made us lose sight of what we should value Libby Purves" (£)
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
I don't think it's possible to track electrons like that. If you're running a wind farm or a solar farm, you generate electricity and sell it into the grid at whatever the going rate is (or whatever you managed to negotiate as a rate). Then you're done, and out of the picture: you got paid. If you're a storage system like a battery, you both buy electricity from the grid to store, and later sell electricity to the grid, again at the going or negotiated rate. You don't care whether the electricity you're storing was generated by wind farm, nuclear or gas -- you're just going to aim to buy low and sell high.
Thanks to you (and Sandy). That seems rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps that's why so many water pumping schemes are stalled without the investment they need. There is virtually no margin.
Except electricity prices fluctuate through the day due to the changes in generation and demand.
Battery owners can buy it cheap in the small hours, or on sunny/windy days and sell it back to the grid at a profit on cold, dark, still nights.
That's the theory anyway.
I understand the theory, but it seems strange to me that the generators of useless excess power should be entitled to feed the grid at full whack, and the companies that enable that power to be there when people actually need it have to scrape a profit here and there in the way you describe. It could explain the lack of storage in our system - what's the point?
I don't think there's ever been a time when combined solar plus wind has ever been 100% of UK electricity usage.
When Hinckley Point C comes on board then - given that also has guaranteed purchase price agreements - that may change.
Varying price of electricity != useless excess power.
Do commercial solar and wind farms have guaranteed prices for all they generate?
I guess we could export any excess.
Some do, some don't.
New commercial solar installations do not. Historic ones do.
Makes sense.
@Luckyguy1983 Isn't the problem with pumped water storage that it's very expensive to build?
I understood problem with pumped storage in the UK is geography - not enough suitable hills where you want them. One experimental approach being explored was pumped storage with liquid many times denser than water. Works well with smaller hills so more opportunities in UK.
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
I don't think it's possible to track electrons like that. If you're running a wind farm or a solar farm, you generate electricity and sell it into the grid at whatever the going rate is (or whatever you managed to negotiate as a rate). Then you're done, and out of the picture: you got paid. If you're a storage system like a battery, you both buy electricity from the grid to store, and later sell electricity to the grid, again at the going or negotiated rate. You don't care whether the electricity you're storing was generated by wind farm, nuclear or gas -- you're just going to aim to buy low and sell high.
Thanks to you (and Sandy). That seems rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps that's why so many water pumping schemes are stalled without the investment they need. There is virtually no margin.
Except electricity prices fluctuate through the day due to the changes in generation and demand.
Battery owners can buy it cheap in the small hours, or on sunny/windy days and sell it back to the grid at a profit on cold, dark, still nights.
That's the theory anyway.
I understand the theory, but it seems strange to me that the generators of useless excess power should be entitled to feed the grid at full whack, and the companies that enable that power to be there when people actually need it have to scrape a profit here and there in the way you describe. It could explain the lack of storage in our system - what's the point?
Well if it helps you feel better, any excess power we generate from our PV panels goes back to the grid at 5.99p.
I am not sure what happens for commercial generators, I assume they agree a contract price with the National Grid.
That's shockingly low. You would be better investing in a battery and storing it for use in the evening, and not paying 28p per kwh.
We've just been looking at that but I can't see the finances working.
We only use about 4 to 6 kWh overnight in the summer.
Assume 6kWh at a future 50p per unit, that's £3 per day for maybe 150 days of the year = £450 per year for batteries that cost £5k+ and last for 10 years. Not a good payback.
In the winter of course we use a lot more electricity overnight (air source heat pump heating) but I doubt we generate enough spare PV electricity during the day to charge the battery.
(If someone could invent a cheap 10,000 kWh battery I'd be interested.)
I have solar, battery (13kwh) and heat pump. In the summer months get about 30kwh of energy from solar cells. Which is good for powering the heat pump for hot water and charging electric cars.
In winter zero solar and heat pump needs 50kwh a day. Pre all the current energy crisis, overnight power was few p per kWh so could charge battery at say 4p and use to avoid peak rate prices of say 30, now perhaps 50p. But batteries are say £500 per kWh of capacity and I'd need another few, so difficult to justify.
Also interesting that electric car batteries are eg 75kwh or 90kwh for the EVs I have. So lots of scope for virtual storage solutions. Octopus does a Tesla tariff based on this idea - cheaper power if they can take it back sometime.
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
I don't think it's possible to track electrons like that. If you're running a wind farm or a solar farm, you generate electricity and sell it into the grid at whatever the going rate is (or whatever you managed to negotiate as a rate). Then you're done, and out of the picture: you got paid. If you're a storage system like a battery, you both buy electricity from the grid to store, and later sell electricity to the grid, again at the going or negotiated rate. You don't care whether the electricity you're storing was generated by wind farm, nuclear or gas -- you're just going to aim to buy low and sell high.
Thanks to you (and Sandy). That seems rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps that's why so many water pumping schemes are stalled without the investment they need. There is virtually no margin.
Except electricity prices fluctuate through the day due to the changes in generation and demand.
Battery owners can buy it cheap in the small hours, or on sunny/windy days and sell it back to the grid at a profit on cold, dark, still nights.
That's the theory anyway.
I understand the theory, but it seems strange to me that the generators of useless excess power should be entitled to feed the grid at full whack, and the companies that enable that power to be there when people actually need it have to scrape a profit here and there in the way you describe. It could explain the lack of storage in our system - what's the point?
Well if it helps you feel better, any excess power we generate from our PV panels goes back to the grid at 5.99p.
I am not sure what happens for commercial generators, I assume they agree a contract price with the National Grid.
That's shockingly low. You would be better investing in a battery and storing it for use in the evening, and not paying 28p per kwh.
We've just been looking at that but I can't see the finances working.
We only use about 4 to 6 kWh overnight in the summer.
Assume 6kWh at a future 50p per unit, that's £3 per day for maybe 150 days of the year = £450 per year for batteries that cost £5k+ and last for 10 years. Not a good payback.
In the winter of course we use a lot more electricity overnight (air source heat pump heating) but I doubt we generate enough spare PV electricity during the day to charge the battery.
(If someone could invent a cheap 10,000 kWh battery I'd be interested.)
Yeah the battery economics don't quite add up*. When electric cars are ubiquitous that could change with a two way cable.
* They might soon lol
Thought about that too... but atm if you're not careful your e-car becomes a VERY expensive battery... flat in the morning when you want to use it cos you've run your overnight household electricity from it.
Most drivers’ average daily mileage is pretty low, and new electric cars come with batteries of 50kWh and up. That gives quite a bit of headroom to use it as a domestic battery (though that also requires a charger and inverters which work in both directions, which is more expense).
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
I don't think it's possible to track electrons like that. If you're running a wind farm or a solar farm, you generate electricity and sell it into the grid at whatever the going rate is (or whatever you managed to negotiate as a rate). Then you're done, and out of the picture: you got paid. If you're a storage system like a battery, you both buy electricity from the grid to store, and later sell electricity to the grid, again at the going or negotiated rate. You don't care whether the electricity you're storing was generated by wind farm, nuclear or gas -- you're just going to aim to buy low and sell high.
Thanks to you (and Sandy). That seems rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps that's why so many water pumping schemes are stalled without the investment they need. There is virtually no margin.
Except electricity prices fluctuate through the day due to the changes in generation and demand.
Battery owners can buy it cheap in the small hours, or on sunny/windy days and sell it back to the grid at a profit on cold, dark, still nights.
That's the theory anyway.
I understand the theory, but it seems strange to me that the generators of useless excess power should be entitled to feed the grid at full whack, and the companies that enable that power to be there when people actually need it have to scrape a profit here and there in the way you describe. It could explain the lack of storage in our system - what's the point?
Well if it helps you feel better, any excess power we generate from our PV panels goes back to the grid at 5.99p.
I am not sure what happens for commercial generators, I assume they agree a contract price with the National Grid.
That's shockingly low. You would be better investing in a battery and storing it for use in the evening, and not paying 28p per kwh.
We've just been looking at that but I can't see the finances working.
We only use about 4 to 6 kWh overnight in the summer.
Assume 6kWh at a future 50p per unit, that's £3 per day for maybe 150 days of the year = £450 per year for batteries that cost £5k+ and last for 10 years. Not a good payback.
In the winter of course we use a lot more electricity overnight (air source heat pump heating) but I doubt we generate enough spare PV electricity during the day to charge the battery.
(If someone could invent a cheap 10,000 kWh battery I'd be interested.)
I have a Nissan Leaf which can, in theory, double as battery storage. In practice, though, nothing has been done to take advantage of this capability other than a few trials.
Once the economies of scale are out there, car and domestic charger manufacturers will likely start adding the capability as a relatively low cost option. That’s likely at least half a decade away, though.
Presumably the expired one is the US diplomatic passport issued to him when he was president, and one of the active ones is a regular US passport. What about the other active one?
Given his Latin American dictator shtick, you gotta wonder whether he mightn't have some time holed up in a foreign embassy in his future, à la Manuel Noriega. For more symbolism, he should allege the Feds stole his mother's bible. He could at least release some video footage of the raid. Is he losing his touch?
Strange how some of the media are using the phrase "three of his passports", implying he has more than three, whereas the words he actually wrote were "my three passports (one expired)", implying he has exactly three of which exactly two are active.
Presumably the expired one is the US diplomatic passport issued to him when he was president, and one of the active ones is a regular US passport. What about the other active one?
Given his Latin American dictator shtick, you gotta wonder whether he mightn't have some time holed up in a foreign embassy in his future, à la Manuel Noriega. For more symbolism, he should allege the Feds stole his mother's bible. He could at least release some video footage of the raid. Is he losing his touch?
Strange how some of the media are using the phrase "three of his passports", implying he has more than three, whereas the words he actually wrote were "my three passports (one expired)", implying he has exactly three of which exactly two are active.
Water companies are now being targetted by cyber-criminals.
"South Staffordshire Water says it was target of cyber attack as criminals bungle extortion attempt The parent company for Cambridge Water and South Staffs Water stresses it is still supplying safe water for customers."
Couldn't something or other be set up to suck up the extra power being generated that will inevitably arrive if we harness our natural wind resource fully - a national battery bank, electrolysis! or some sort of pushing water uphill scheme to create another source of potential energy for times of generation famine ?
Electricity storage at scale is notoriously tricky. So in principle, yes (and this is what Dinorwig et al do), but in practice doing it cost effectively and in a big enough way is AIUI not yet "just roll out this well understood tech" the way that, say, building a new wind farm now is.
Flood the sea with offshore wind farms. Build in redundancy so that even if only 20% are working they generate enough for the UK's needs. Switch them off when they are not needed.
(I haven't done the sums but there's a lot of sea out there.)
There is a lot of sea out there but not all of it is suitable for wind farms.
But that isn't the real problem. The problem is we are building wind farms as fast as it is physically possible to do. That involves, to start with, site surveys for finding suitable locations. These take a lot of time and you have to get them right. Get it wrong and at best you end up putting your turbines on the spawning grounds of some rare fish and wipe out a species. At worst your wind turbines fall over because the seabed conditions aren't suitable.
So you need side scan sonar, magnetometry (to make sure you don't stick them on one of the innumerable mines littering the seabed from two world wars), bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, 2DHR seismic, environmental monitoring and sampling with both baseline and habitat assessments and measurements of currents and local tide effects. Once you have done all of that you then need a geotechnical vessel to come in and take cores to make sure the ground conditions can support the turbine.
And of course in spite of new survey vessels being built there is a waiting list of many months or often years before one becomes available to do this work.
The you need the vessels to actually install the turbines - and again there are very long waiting lists for these in spite of more being built.
I love offshore wind. It is a great and obvious solution but you can no more just slap the things up any faster than we are doing than you can drill an oil or gas well on demand. It all takes time. Often lots of time.
And before anyone starts moaning that we should have been doing this years ago, we were. Since 2008 we have been the fastest growing generator of offshore wind farms in the world and we are home to the 3 largest individual offshore wind farms in the world.
Couldn't something or other be set up to suck up the extra power being generated that will inevitably arrive if we harness our natural wind resource fully - a national battery bank, electrolysis! or some sort of pushing water uphill scheme to create another source of potential energy for times of generation famine ?
Electricity storage at scale is notoriously tricky. So in principle, yes (and this is what Dinorwig et al do), but in practice doing it cost effectively and in a big enough way is AIUI not yet "just roll out this well understood tech" the way that, say, building a new wind farm now is.
Flood the sea with offshore wind farms. Build in redundancy so that even if only 20% are working they generate enough for the UK's needs. Switch them off when they are not needed.
(I haven't done the sums but there's a lot of sea out there.)
There is a lot of sea out there but not all of it is suitable for wind farms.
But that isn't the real problem. The problem is we are building wind farms as fast as it is physically possible to do. That involves, to start with, site surveys for finding suitable locations. These take a lot of time and you have to get them right. Get it wrong and at best you end up putting your turbines on the spawning grounds of some rare fish and wipe out a species. At worst your wind turbines fall over because the seabed conditions aren't suitable.
So you need side scan sonar, magnetometry (to make sure you don't stick them on one of the innumerable mines littering the seabed from two world wars), bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, 2DHR seismic, environmental monitoring and sampling with both baseline and habitat assessments and measurements of currents and local tide effects. Once you have done all of that you then need a geotechnical vessel to come in and take cores to make sure the ground conditions can support the turbine.
And of course in spite of new survey vessels being built there is a waiting list of many months or often years before one becomes available to do this work.
The you need the vessels to actually install the turbines - and again there are very long waiting lists for these in spite of more being built.
I love offshore wind. It is a great and obvious solution but you can no more just slap the things up any faster than we are doing than you can drill an oil or gas well on demand. It all takes time. Often lots of time.
And before anyone starts moaning that we should have been doing this years ago, we were. Since 2008 we have been the fastest growing generator of offshore wind farms in the world and we are home to the 3 largest individual offshore wind farms in the world.
And even then, we got quite lucky with lots of infrastructure left over from oil and gas. Even small ports like Leith are busy with it.
Couldn't something or other be set up to suck up the extra power being generated that will inevitably arrive if we harness our natural wind resource fully - a national battery bank, electrolysis! or some sort of pushing water uphill scheme to create another source of potential energy for times of generation famine ?
Electricity storage at scale is notoriously tricky. So in principle, yes (and this is what Dinorwig et al do), but in practice doing it cost effectively and in a big enough way is AIUI not yet "just roll out this well understood tech" the way that, say, building a new wind farm now is.
Flood the sea with offshore wind farms. Build in redundancy so that even if only 20% are working they generate enough for the UK's needs. Switch them off when they are not needed.
(I haven't done the sums but there's a lot of sea out there.)
There is a lot of sea out there but not all of it is suitable for wind farms.
But that isn't the real problem. The problem is we are building wind farms as fast as it is physically possible to do. That involves, to start with, site surveys for finding suitable locations. These take a lot of time and you have to get them right. Get it wrong and at best you end up putting your turbines on the spawning grounds of some rare fish and wipe out a species. At worst your wind turbines fall over because the seabed conditions aren't suitable.
So you need side scan sonar, magnetometry (to make sure you don't stick them on one of the innumerable mines littering the seabed from two world wars), bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, 2DHR seismic, environmental monitoring and sampling with both baseline and habitat assessments and measurements of currents and local tide effects. Once you have done all of that you then need a geotechnical vessel to come in and take cores to make sure the ground conditions can support the turbine.
And of course in spite of new survey vessels being built there is a waiting list of many months or often years before one becomes available to do this work.
The you need the vessels to actually install the turbines - and again there are very long waiting lists for these in spite of more being built.
I love offshore wind. It is a great and obvious solution but you can no more just slap the things up any faster than we are doing than you can drill an oil or gas well on demand. It all takes time. Often lots of time.
And before anyone starts moaning that we should have been doing this years ago, we were. Since 2008 we have been the fastest growing generator of offshore wind farms in the world and we are home to the 3 largest individual offshore wind farms in the world.
And even then, we got quite lucky with lots of infrastructure left over from oil and gas. Even small ports like Leith are busy with it.
Indeed. There is a huge amount of transferable skills there as well. I listed all that site survey stuff because that has been part of my job for many years for placing rigs so I am aware both of exactly what is needed and also what the wind farm companies are doing. We work alongside each other.
I should have added that the 4 largest offshore windfarms in the world currently under construction - all of a similar size to the current largest at Hornsea - are all being built in UK waters.
Couldn't something or other be set up to suck up the extra power being generated that will inevitably arrive if we harness our natural wind resource fully - a national battery bank, electrolysis! or some sort of pushing water uphill scheme to create another source of potential energy for times of generation famine ?
Electricity storage at scale is notoriously tricky. So in principle, yes (and this is what Dinorwig et al do), but in practice doing it cost effectively and in a big enough way is AIUI not yet "just roll out this well understood tech" the way that, say, building a new wind farm now is.
Flood the sea with offshore wind farms. Build in redundancy so that even if only 20% are working they generate enough for the UK's needs. Switch them off when they are not needed.
(I haven't done the sums but there's a lot of sea out there.)
There is a lot of sea out there but not all of it is suitable for wind farms.
But that isn't the real problem. The problem is we are building wind farms as fast as it is physically possible to do. That involves, to start with, site surveys for finding suitable locations. These take a lot of time and you have to get them right. Get it wrong and at best you end up putting your turbines on the spawning grounds of some rare fish and wipe out a species. At worst your wind turbines fall over because the seabed conditions aren't suitable.
So you need side scan sonar, magnetometry (to make sure you don't stick them on one of the innumerable mines littering the seabed from two world wars), bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, 2DHR seismic, environmental monitoring and sampling with both baseline and habitat assessments and measurements of currents and local tide effects. Once you have done all of that you then need a geotechnical vessel to come in and take cores to make sure the ground conditions can support the turbine.
And of course in spite of new survey vessels being built there is a waiting list of many months or often years before one becomes available to do this work.
The you need the vessels to actually install the turbines - and again there are
very long waiting lists for these in spite of more being built.
I love offshore wind. It is a great and obvious solution but you can no more just slap the things up any faster than we are doing than you can drill an oil or gas well on demand. It all takes time. Often lots of time.
And before anyone starts moaning that we should have been doing this years ago, we were. Since 2008 we have been the fastest growing generator of offshore wind farms in the world and we are home to the 3 largest individual offshore wind farms in the world.
A reason the ban on onshore wind is so daft tbh. Offshore wind takes more time
dixiedean - If you are warm and have a college degree, you may be able to get job teaching in the Seattle Eastside suburbs. (You would probably have to take education courses over the next two years, which, at best, would be annoying. But the schools are pretty good.)
The shortage of school bus drivers here is so acute that they have twice sent out postcards to everyone in my district (one of the larger ones in the state) advertising for help. As I recall, they were offering free training, benefits, and about 32 dollars an hour.
Blimey. Has the USA got a whole lot richer than the UK or something, thats an astonishing wage for bus driving.
Essentially, yes.
There was some convergence in the 90s and 2000s, but at some point the US kept delivering decent growth and the UK fell away.
Seattle is of course one of the wealthier bits, too.
Couldn't something or other be set up to suck up the extra power being generated that will inevitably arrive if we harness our natural wind resource fully - a national battery bank, electrolysis! or some sort of pushing water uphill scheme to create another source of potential energy for times of generation famine ?
Electricity storage at scale is notoriously tricky. So in principle, yes (and this is what Dinorwig et al do), but in practice doing it cost effectively and in a big enough way is AIUI not yet "just roll out this well understood tech" the way that, say, building a new wind farm now is.
Flood the sea with offshore wind farms. Build in redundancy so that even if only 20% are working they generate enough for the UK's needs. Switch them off when they are not needed.
(I haven't done the sums but there's a lot of sea out there.)
There is a lot of sea out there but not all of it is suitable for wind farms.
But that isn't the real problem. The problem is we are building wind farms as fast as it is physically possible to do. That involves, to start with, site surveys for finding suitable locations. These take a lot of time and you have to get them right. Get it wrong and at best you end up putting your turbines on the spawning grounds of some rare fish and wipe out a species. At worst your wind turbines fall over because the seabed conditions aren't suitable.
So you need side scan sonar, magnetometry (to make sure you don't stick them on one of the innumerable mines littering the seabed from two world wars), bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, 2DHR seismic, environmental monitoring and sampling with both baseline and habitat assessments and measurements of currents and local tide effects. Once you have done all of that you then need a geotechnical vessel to come in and take cores to make sure the ground conditions can support the turbine.
And of course in spite of new survey vessels being built there is a waiting list of many months or often years before one becomes available to do this work.
The you need the vessels to actually install the turbines - and again there are
very long waiting lists for these in spite of more being built.
I love offshore wind. It is a great and obvious solution but you can no more just slap the things up any faster than we are doing than you can drill an oil or gas well on demand. It all takes time. Often lots of time.
And before anyone starts moaning that we should have been doing this years ago, we were. Since 2008 we have been the fastest growing generator of offshore wind farms in the world and we are home to the 3 largest individual offshore wind farms in the world.
A reason the ban on onshore wind is so daft tbh. Offshore wind takes more time
Not really. The largest planned offshore wind farm at the moment - Berwick Bank - which is due to come online in 2027 will need nearly 600 windturbines. Not sure that is acceptable in our national parks.
dixiedean - If you are warm and have a college degree, you may be able to get job teaching in the Seattle Eastside suburbs. (You would probably have to take education courses over the next two years, which, at best, would be annoying. But the schools are pretty good.)
The shortage of school bus drivers here is so acute that they have twice sent out postcards to everyone in my district (one of the larger ones in the state) advertising for help. As I recall, they were offering free training, benefits, and about 32 dollars an hour.
Blimey. Has the USA got a whole lot richer than the UK or something, thats an astonishing wage for bus driving.
Is it? A good hourly rate but how many hours does a school bus driver do in a day? Oh, and yes, the United States is a whole lot richer than Britain.
dixiedean - If you are warm and have a college degree, you may be able to get job teaching in the Seattle Eastside suburbs. (You would probably have to take education courses over the next two years, which, at best, would be annoying. But the schools are pretty good.)
The shortage of school bus drivers here is so acute that they have twice sent out postcards to everyone in my district (one of the larger ones in the state) advertising for help. As I recall, they were offering free training, benefits, and about 32 dollars an hour.
Blimey. Has the USA got a whole lot richer than the UK or something, thats an astonishing wage for bus driving.
Essentially, yes.
There was some convergence in the 90s and 2000s, but at some point the US kept delivering decent growth and the UK fell away.
Seattle is of course one of the wealthier bits, too.
That point when Britain fell away being when George Osborne assumed control of the Treasury.
Perth hustings tonight. It will be interesting to see how candidates approach the Scottish question, as well as which parts of Labour's fuel plan (sorry LibDems) they will adopt while rejecting it.
Then it is onto Belfast Wednesday and Manchester Friday in a crucial week for Rishi Sunak if the polling is to be believed.
dixiedean - If you are warm and have a college degree, you may be able to get job teaching in the Seattle Eastside suburbs. (You would probably have to take education courses over the next two years, which, at best, would be annoying. But the schools are pretty good.)
The shortage of school bus drivers here is so acute that they have twice sent out postcards to everyone in my district (one of the larger ones in the state) advertising for help. As I recall, they were offering free training, benefits, and about 32 dollars an hour.
Blimey. Has the USA got a whole lot richer than the UK or something, thats an astonishing wage for bus driving.
Essentially, yes.
There was some convergence in the 90s and 2000s, but at some point the US kept delivering decent growth and the UK fell away.
Seattle is of course one of the wealthier bits, too.
Yet, so many Americans will say otherwise. In fact, the complaints on both sides of the Atlantic seem very similar. That median real wages have stagnated for a generation, that people on median incomes can't afford decent homes any longer, that public infrastructure is poor. Either they're wrong, or the statistics are wrong, or (what I suspect) the benefits of decent overall growth are somehow being captured by only a minority of the population.
dixiedean - If you are warm and have a college degree, you may be able to get job teaching in the Seattle Eastside suburbs. (You would probably have to take education courses over the next two years, which, at best, would be annoying. But the schools are pretty good.)
The shortage of school bus drivers here is so acute that they have twice sent out postcards to everyone in my district (one of the larger ones in the state) advertising for help. As I recall, they were offering free training, benefits, and about 32 dollars an hour.
Blimey. Has the USA got a whole lot richer than the UK or something, thats an astonishing wage for bus driving.
Essentially, yes.
There was some convergence in the 90s and 2000s, but at some point the US kept delivering decent growth and the UK fell away.
Seattle is of course one of the wealthier bits, too.
Yet, so many Americans will say otherwise. In fact, the complaints on both sides of the Atlantic seem very similar. That median real wages have stagnated for a generation, that people on median incomes can't afford decent homes any longer, that public infrastructure is poor. Either they're wrong, or the statistics are wrong, or (what I suspect) the benefits of decent overall growth are somehow being captured by only a minority of the population.
Median wages have stagnated everywhere in the developed world since 2009 except in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Germany. And the last of those is mostly just catch up in the East: incomes in the West have also stagnated.
Some of this is demographics. Some is the consequences of QE in driving inequality. Some is due to global rebalancing. And some is due to commodities having gotten a lot more expensive.
One cannot help but suspect these Johnny-come-lately Truss converts have one eye on the opinion polls and the other on their job prospects. It is hard to see any of Liz Truss's here today, gone tomorrow policy announcements attracting new disciples.
Couldn't something or other be set up to suck up the extra power being generated that will inevitably arrive if we harness our natural wind resource fully - a national battery bank, electrolysis! or some sort of pushing water uphill scheme to create another source of potential energy for times of generation famine ?
Electricity storage at scale is notoriously tricky. So in principle, yes (and this is what Dinorwig et al do), but in practice doing it cost effectively and in a big enough way is AIUI not yet "just roll out this well understood tech" the way that, say, building a new wind farm now is.
Flood the sea with offshore wind farms. Build in redundancy so that even if only 20% are working they generate enough for the UK's needs. Switch them off when they are not needed.
(I haven't done the sums but there's a lot of sea out there.)
There is a lot of sea out there but not all of it is suitable for wind farms.
But that isn't the real problem. The problem is we are building wind farms as fast as it is physically possible to do. That involves, to start with, site surveys for finding suitable locations. These take a lot of time and you have to get them right. Get it wrong and at best you end up putting your turbines on the spawning grounds of some rare fish and wipe out a species. At worst your wind turbines fall over because the seabed conditions aren't suitable.
So you need side scan sonar, magnetometry (to make sure you don't stick them on one of the innumerable mines littering the seabed from two world wars), bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, 2DHR seismic, environmental monitoring and sampling with both baseline and habitat assessments and measurements of currents and local tide effects. Once you have done all of that you then need a geotechnical vessel to come in and take cores to make sure the ground conditions can support the turbine.
And of course in spite of new survey vessels being built there is a waiting list of many months or often years before one becomes available to do this work.
The you need the vessels to actually install the turbines - and again there are
very long waiting lists for these in spite of more being built.
I love offshore wind. It is a great and obvious solution but you can no more just slap the things up any faster than we are doing than you can drill an oil or gas well on demand. It all takes time. Often lots of time.
And before anyone starts moaning that we should have been doing this years ago, we were. Since 2008 we have been the fastest growing generator of offshore wind farms in the world and we are home to the 3 largest individual offshore wind farms in the world.
A reason the ban on onshore wind is so daft tbh. Offshore wind takes more time
Not really. The largest planned offshore wind farm at the moment - Berwick Bank - which is due to come online in 2027 will need nearly 600 windturbines. Not sure that is acceptable in our national parks.
The bit next to the M18, M1 I head past daily with 6 or so wind turbines ain't national park. Also 600 is barely touching the sides of our requirements.
I see Trump has been spinning nonsense again. The passports weren’t deliberately seized - they were picked up by the FBI filter team which goes through all the documents to ensure agents investigating the case haven’t picked up stuff not covered by the warrant, and offered back to Trump’s lawyers straight away.
Starmer's plan for a windfall tax to pay for lower energy bills sounds like a good idea. The Conservative government may be forced to adopt it.
Gthe trouble is we can only squeeze BP and Shell for the windfall tax, not the Saudis and Qataris.
I’ll keep saying it if I have to. Bp and shell’s high headline profits have not been the result of high oil and gas prices in the North Sea or massive margins at their retail business. Of the total, +80% are trading profits from integrated global trading businesses. You’re talking about a financial companies super tax.
Trying to hypothecate a tax from bp/shell to subsidise energy bills is is childish politics by Sunak, Davey and Starmer. All that the “windfall” tax imposed so far has done is slash the equity value of junior North Sea producers and make it even more difficult for them to access finance for new investment.
dixiedean - If you are warm and have a college degree, you may be able to get job teaching in the Seattle Eastside suburbs. (You would probably have to take education courses over the next two years, which, at best, would be annoying. But the schools are pretty good.)
The shortage of school bus drivers here is so acute that they have twice sent out postcards to everyone in my district (one of the larger ones in the state) advertising for help. As I recall, they were offering free training, benefits, and about 32 dollars an hour.
Blimey. Has the USA got a whole lot richer than the UK or something, thats an astonishing wage for bus driving.
Essentially, yes.
There was some convergence in the 90s and 2000s, but at some point the US kept delivering decent growth and the UK fell away.
Seattle is of course one of the wealthier bits, too.
Yet, so many Americans will say otherwise. In fact, the complaints on both sides of the Atlantic seem very similar. That median real wages have stagnated for a generation, that people on median incomes can't afford decent homes any longer, that public infrastructure is poor. Either they're wrong, or the statistics are wrong, or (what I suspect) the benefits of decent overall growth are somehow being captured by only a minority of the population.
Almost like it is time for a wealth tax on the super elite. If only people bothered to look at what was actually happening and base tax policies around that rather than regurgitating textbook policies from when they grew up.
dixiedean - If you are warm and have a college degree, you may be able to get job teaching in the Seattle Eastside suburbs. (You would probably have to take education courses over the next two years, which, at best, would be annoying. But the schools are pretty good.)
The shortage of school bus drivers here is so acute that they have twice sent out postcards to everyone in my district (one of the larger ones in the state) advertising for help. As I recall, they were offering free training, benefits, and about 32 dollars an hour.
Blimey. Has the USA got a whole lot richer than the UK or something, thats an astonishing wage for bus driving.
Essentially, yes.
There was some convergence in the 90s and 2000s, but at some point the US kept delivering decent growth and the UK fell away.
Seattle is of course one of the wealthier bits, too.
Yet, so many Americans will say otherwise. In fact, the complaints on both sides of the Atlantic seem very similar. That median real wages have stagnated for a generation, that people on median incomes can't afford decent homes any longer, that public infrastructure is poor. Either they're wrong, or the statistics are wrong, or (what I suspect) the benefits of decent overall growth are somehow being captured by only a minority of the population.
Median wages have stagnated everywhere in the developed world since 2009 except in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Germany. And the last of those is mostly just catch up in the East: incomes in the West have also stagnated.
Some of this is demographics. Some is the consequences of QE in driving inequality. Some is due to global rebalancing. And some is due to commodities having gotten a lot more expensive.
Some is due to the wholly or largely private ownership of what once would have been public companies. Some to the explosion of C-suite salaries so that differentials from top to bottom tier are 100-fold instead of 10-fold. Some to tax laws favouring the rich.
Starmer's plan for a windfall tax to pay for lower energy bills sounds like a good idea. The Conservative government may be forced to adopt it.
Gthe trouble is we can only squeeze BP and Shell for the windfall tax, not the Saudis and Qataris.
I’ll keep saying it if I have to. Bp and shell’s high headline profits have not been the result of high oil and gas prices in the North Sea or massive margins at their retail business. Of the total, +80% are trading profits from integrated global trading businesses. You’re talking about a financial companies super tax.
Trying to hypothecate a tax from bp/shell to subsidise energy bills is is childish politics by Sunak, Davey and Starmer. All that the “windfall” tax imposed so far has done is slash the equity value of junior North Sea producers and make it even more difficult for them to access finance for new investment.
Couldn't something or other be set up to suck up the extra power being generated that will inevitably arrive if we harness our natural wind resource fully - a national battery bank, electrolysis! or some sort of pushing water uphill scheme to create another source of potential energy for times of generation famine ?
Electricity storage at scale is notoriously tricky. So in principle, yes (and this is what Dinorwig et al do), but in practice doing it cost effectively and in a big enough way is AIUI not yet "just roll out this well understood tech" the way that, say, building a new wind farm now is.
Flood the sea with offshore wind farms. Build in redundancy so that even if only 20% are working they generate enough for the UK's needs. Switch them off when they are not needed.
(I haven't done the sums but there's a lot of sea out there.)
There is a lot of sea out there but not all of it is suitable for wind farms.
But that isn't the real problem. The problem is we are building wind farms as fast as it is physically possible to do. That involves, to start with, site surveys for finding suitable locations. These take a lot of time and you have to get them right. Get it wrong and at best you end up putting your turbines on the spawning grounds of some rare fish and wipe out a species. At worst your wind turbines fall over because the seabed conditions aren't suitable.
So you need side scan sonar, magnetometry (to make sure you don't stick them on one of the innumerable mines littering the seabed from two world wars), bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, 2DHR seismic, environmental monitoring and sampling with both baseline and habitat assessments and measurements of currents and local tide effects. Once you have done all of that you then need a geotechnical vessel to come in and take cores to make sure the ground conditions can support the turbine.
And of course in spite of new survey vessels being built there is a waiting list of many months or often years before one becomes available to do this work.
The you need the vessels to actually install the turbines - and again there are
very long waiting lists for these in spite of more being built.
I love offshore wind. It is a great and obvious solution but you can no more just slap the things up any faster than we are doing than you can drill an oil or gas well on demand. It all takes time. Often lots of time.
And before anyone starts moaning that we should have been doing this years ago, we were. Since 2008 we have been the fastest growing generator of offshore wind farms in the world and we are home to the 3 largest individual offshore wind farms in the world.
A reason the ban on onshore wind is so daft tbh. Offshore wind takes more time
Not really. The largest planned offshore wind farm at the moment - Berwick Bank - which is due to come online in 2027 will need nearly 600 windturbines. Not sure that is acceptable in our national parks.
They won't be in the national parks but outside of them is fine which is why there is a lot west of the Lake District.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
Stockholm Syndrome describes people who support their kidnapper / abuser. I think the UK political equivalent for Tory voters could be called Mansfield Syndrome.
Water companies are now being targetted by cyber-criminals.
"South Staffordshire Water says it was target of cyber attack as criminals bungle extortion attempt The parent company for Cambridge Water and South Staffs Water stresses it is still supplying safe water for customers."
Every company is a target for cyber-criminals partly because they don't target companies, they look for exploits and then identify where the exploit can be used...
Does Britain have anything like the US SNAP program, which subsidizes food purchases for poor families? "In the United States, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),[1] formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, is a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income people. It is a federal aid program, administered by the United States Department of Agriculture under the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), though benefits are distributed by specific departments of U.S. states (e.g. Division of Social Services, Department of Health and Human Services, etc.).
SNAP benefits supplied roughly 40 million Americans in 2018, at an expenditure of $57.1 billion.[2][3] Approximately 9.2% of American households obtained SNAP benefits at some point during 2017, with approximately 16.7% of all children living in households with SNAP benefits.[2] Beneficiaries and costs increased sharply with the Great Recession, peaked in 2013 and have declined through 2017 as the economy recovered.[2] It is the largest nutrition program of the 15 administered by FNS and is a key component of the social safety net for low-income Americans." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assistance_Program
Although it won't, unless amended, help poorer families with food inflation, it will continue to reduce the amount they spend on food.
Perhaps something similar might help with your soaring energy costs?
(I occasionally see scandals in the program; typically a recipient will trade benefits to a small grocery store for about 50 per cent of their cash value..
The Right, distrustful of the poor, insisted they be given food stamps rather than money. It is a stupid system. Just give people £.
If you recall, Conservative MPs lined up to say that recipients of said £ would spend it on drugs and alcohol rather than food for their kids...
More things blowing up at military sites in Crimea, where the Russian defense ministry admits “a fire took place” and “munitions detonated” near the village of Maiske – without explaining how.
Meanwhile, the next PM is being comprehensively outplayed by Keir Starmer!! Not sure that bodes well.
He was uncharacteristically relaxed and impressive yesterday. Maybe all he needed was a holiday. We've got every reason to be optimistic. With all the baggage she's carrying we can expect him to give Ms Truss a pretty torrid time. It'll be interesting to see who she appoints as Home secretary. Patel again would be a gift
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
Perth hustings tonight. It will be interesting to see how candidates approach the Scottish question, as well as which parts of Labour's fuel plan (sorry LibDems) they will adopt while rejecting it.
Then it is onto Belfast Wednesday and Manchester Friday in a crucial week for Rishi Sunak if the polling is to be believed.
When you say crucial, are you suggesting that Rishi could win? Whilst I have read various reports interviewing Tory members which look favourable to him, all the polls suggest we are getting our first dominatrix PM. What will be the bigger shock - her losing, or her installing manacle point over the top of the Johnson's £billion a roll wallpaper?
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
It's like the dying days of the Major regime would have been if Teresa Gorman and Co had taken over the party.
Meanwhile, the next PM is being comprehensively outplayed by Keir Starmer!! Not sure that bodes well.
He was uncharacteristically relaxed and impressive yesterday. Maybe all he needed was a holiday. We've got every reason to be optimistic. With all the baggage she's carrying we can expect him to give Ms Truss a pretty torrid time. It'll be interesting to see who she appoints as Home secretary. Patel again would be a gift
Meanwhile, the next PM is being comprehensively outplayed by Keir Starmer!! Not sure that bodes well.
He was uncharacteristically relaxed and impressive yesterday. Maybe all he needed was a holiday. We've got every reason to be optimistic. With all the baggage she's carrying we can expect him to give Ms Truss a pretty torrid time. It'll be interesting to see who she appoints as Home secretary. Patel again would be a gift
More things blowing up at military sites in Crimea, where the Russian defense ministry admits “a fire took place” and “munitions detonated” near the village of Maiske – without explaining how.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
I hope that Starmer can follow his centre-ground leanings and propose "what works" solutions. Ideology is what got us into this mess, it won't get us out.
But the Mansfield Syndrome still bites hard amongst some voters. It doesn't matter that they can see the basics falling apart around them as you describe. They were persuaded that it was all someone else's fault and only the Tories & Brexit could fix things. Despite things getting clearly worse not better, its a persuasive mental delusion that "it will be better tomorrow".
That ToryTV focus group in Bury North was interesting. 9 Tory 2019 voters and 7 already likely to vote Labour. Of the two holdouts, the bloke my age displayed all signs of Mansfield Syndrome. So the challenge for Labour is to offer something at which at least explains why things are this bad and the first practical steps on the journey to fix them, and they could walk it.
And in the upside down, the LibDems need to do the same to southern Tories who seem to be increasingly disillusioned with Leonite Tory rhetoric and increasingly stupid policies. A LibDem platform of similar policies to Labour but less threatening can do the Tories serious damage. And as Labour keep stealing LD policies that feels doable.
Perth hustings tonight. It will be interesting to see how candidates approach the Scottish question, as well as which parts of Labour's fuel plan (sorry LibDems) they will adopt while rejecting it.
Then it is onto Belfast Wednesday and Manchester Friday in a crucial week for Rishi Sunak if the polling is to be believed.
When you say crucial, are you suggesting that Rishi could win? Whilst I have read various reports interviewing Tory members which look favourable to him, all the polls suggest we are getting our first dominatrix PM. What will be the bigger shock - her losing, or her installing manacle point over the top of the Johnson's £billion a roll wallpaper?
I'm not sure how much faith we can place in one item of jewellery. It is unlikely Sunak can turn it round from here, even if polls have been wrong before; as you say, there does seem to be a difference between Sunak being rated the winner of hustings or debates, and Truss being overwhelming leader in membership polls.
Workers suffer sharpest fall in pay in at least 20 years
Millions of people are being hit by the sharpest fall in real wages for at least 20 years, official figures revealed on Tuesday
Regular pay, which excludes bonuses, plummeted by an eyewatering 4.1 per cent in the three months to June, compared to a year earlier, once inflation is taken into account, according to the Office for National Statistics.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
It's like the dying days of the Major regime would have been if Teresa Gorman and Co had taken over the party.
To win a majority of 1, is a hell of a mountain to climb for Starmer, and if by miracle he does it, he then receives the worst hospital pass of all time, with the country falling apart
Have had interesting conversations with my Spanish FIL these last few weeks out here. Spain isn't on the hook to Russia for energy - their gas comes from north Africa apparently. Spain supposedly told the EU where to stick its energy reduction targets and is unhappy with paying Ukraine-affected market prices for gas when its gas isn't affected.
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
dixiedean - If you are warm and have a college degree, you may be able to get job teaching in the Seattle Eastside suburbs. (You would probably have to take education courses over the next two years, which, at best, would be annoying. But the schools are pretty good.)
The shortage of school bus drivers here is so acute that they have twice sent out postcards to everyone in my district (one of the larger ones in the state) advertising for help. As I recall, they were offering free training, benefits, and about 32 dollars an hour.
Blimey. Has the USA got a whole lot richer than the UK or something, thats an astonishing wage for bus driving.
Essentially, yes.
There was some convergence in the 90s and 2000s, but at some point the US kept delivering decent growth and the UK fell away.
Seattle is of course one of the wealthier bits, too.
Yet, so many Americans will say otherwise. In fact, the complaints on both sides of the Atlantic seem very similar. That median real wages have stagnated for a generation, that people on median incomes can't afford decent homes any longer, that public infrastructure is poor. Either they're wrong, or the statistics are wrong, or (what I suspect) the benefits of decent overall growth are somehow being captured by only a minority of the population.
Median wages have stagnated everywhere in the developed world since 2009 except in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Germany. And the last of those is mostly just catch up in the East: incomes in the West have also stagnated.
Some of this is demographics. Some is the consequences of QE in driving inequality. Some is due to global rebalancing. And some is due to commodities having gotten a lot more expensive.
Some is due to the wholly or largely private ownership of what once would have been public companies. Some to the explosion of C-suite salaries so that differentials from top to bottom tier are 100-fold instead of 10-fold. Some to tax laws favouring the rich.
The median worker's income has little to do with the income of the ceo. Ceo incomes are higher than before due to a blend of massive modern transnationals that oversee a ton of capital, plus the offer of huge winner pay to get more competition and effort out of the top 2-3 rungs of management. It doesn't matter whether the workers they oversee are shelf stickers or Bay Area coders. And it is certainly not due to the generosity of their owners.
More things blowing up at military sites in Crimea, where the Russian defense ministry admits “a fire took place” and “munitions detonated” near the village of Maiske – without explaining how.
Another day, another Russian weapons dump making a fireworks display. Crimea again, that’s a long way from the front line and well out of range of the usual HIMARS rockets.
That’s nearly as funny as hearing that the enemy’s senior officers are rumoured to have abandoned 20,000 troops in Kherson region, surrounded by defenders and with almost no weapons.
Rishi Sunak has committed to cutting Civil Service jobs as part of a “shake up” of the “bloated post-Covid state” that would also require senior civil servants to spend a year working outside of Whitehall if they want promotion.
The Sunak campaign said the plans include cutting the “back office” headcount, changing pay rewards from being based on longevity to performance, bringing back a version of the suspended fast-stream graduate recruitment programme, and championing the use of apprenticeships.
Have had interesting conversations with my Spanish FIL these last few weeks out here. Spain isn't on the hook to Russia for energy - their gas comes from north Africa apparently. Spain supposedly told the EU where to stick its energy reduction targets and is unhappy with paying Ukraine-affected market prices for gas when its gas isn't affected.
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
There is a solution. If England doesn't want clean Scottish energy, lets stop transmitting it. Then the distance sent is much less, the cost falls, and life gets cheaper in Scotland. See, I have just written my first practical reason why Scotland should become independent.
Stockholm Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards your kidnapper Mansfield Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards the party who made your shitty town more shitty Buchan Syndrome: realising that however bonkers Sindy appears on the surface, there are genuine practical issues behind it that unionists have no answers to
Perth hustings tonight. It will be interesting to see how candidates approach the Scottish question, as well as which parts of Labour's fuel plan (sorry LibDems) they will adopt while rejecting it.
Then it is onto Belfast Wednesday and Manchester Friday in a crucial week for Rishi Sunak if the polling is to be believed.
When you say crucial, are you suggesting that Rishi could win? Whilst I have read various reports interviewing Tory members which look favourable to him, all the polls suggest we are getting our first dominatrix PM. What will be the bigger shock - her losing, or her installing manacle point over the top of the Johnson's £billion a roll wallpaper?
I'm not sure how much faith we can place in one item of jewellery. It is unlikely Sunak can turn it round from here, even if polls have been wrong before; as you say, there does seem to be a difference between Sunak being rated the winner of hustings or debates, and Truss being overwhelming leader in membership polls.
Two items of jewellery. Both seem remarkably on theme if its "whoops I had no idea"
Rishi Sunak has committed to cutting Civil Service jobs as part of a “shake up” of the “bloated post-Covid state” that would also require senior civil servants to spend a year working outside of Whitehall if they want promotion.
The Sunak campaign said the plans include cutting the “back office” headcount, changing pay rewards from being based on longevity to performance, bringing back a version of the suspended fast-stream graduate recruitment programme, and championing the use of apprenticeships.
Pretty desperate stuff from Rishi who seems to be flailing around in search of headlines, even if you might agree with him on certain points.
It works in big business though. Blue Chips do this on a regular cycle. Cut a % of jobs, make the survivors feel like they are lucky to still have a job where they get to do 120% of their previous job for a 1.071% pay rise.
Rishi Sunak has committed to cutting Civil Service jobs as part of a “shake up” of the “bloated post-Covid state” that would also require senior civil servants to spend a year working outside of Whitehall if they want promotion.
The Sunak campaign said the plans include cutting the “back office” headcount, changing pay rewards from being based on longevity to performance, bringing back a version of the suspended fast-stream graduate recruitment programme, and championing the use of apprenticeships.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
It's like the dying days of the Major regime would have been if Teresa Gorman and Co had taken over the party.
To win a majority of 1, is a hell of a mountain to climb for Starmer, and if by miracle he does it, he then receives the worst hospital pass of all time, with the country falling apart
The starter for 10 for suffers of Mansfield Syndrome is to realise their shitty town is even more shitty under the Tories / Brexit. That is not insulting shitty towns, it is almost verbatim how voters in places like Mansfield saw them under decades of Labour councils. Tory was going to provide their moon on a stick. Instead they have been given more shit.
Labour's problem is that the issues facing England are macro, not micro. Whilst starting to wipe excrement from the walls is going to be required, until they get to the root of why more poo is raining down they will make little difference.
This is Starmer's challenge. He guffs all the right platitudes. Without being able to tackle the root causes. Whether that is because of realpolitik or lack of comprehension we don't know.
Water companies are now being targetted by cyber-criminals.
"South Staffordshire Water says it was target of cyber attack as criminals bungle extortion attempt The parent company for Cambridge Water and South Staffs Water stresses it is still supplying safe water for customers."
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
I hope that Starmer can follow his centre-ground leanings and propose "what works" solutions. Ideology is what got us into this mess, it won't get us out.
But the Mansfield Syndrome still bites hard amongst some voters. It doesn't matter that they can see the basics falling apart around them as you describe. They were persuaded that it was all someone else's fault and only the Tories & Brexit could fix things. Despite things getting clearly worse not better, its a persuasive mental delusion that "it will be better tomorrow".
That ToryTV focus group in Bury North was interesting. 9 Tory 2019 voters and 7 already likely to vote Labour. Of the two holdouts, the bloke my age displayed all signs of Mansfield Syndrome. So the challenge for Labour is to offer something at which at least explains why things are this bad and the first practical steps on the journey to fix them, and they could walk it.
And in the upside down, the LibDems need to do the same to southern Tories who seem to be increasingly disillusioned with Leonite Tory rhetoric and increasingly stupid policies. A LibDem platform of similar policies to Labour but less threatening can do the Tories serious damage. And as Labour keep stealing LD policies that feels doable.
One catch, maybe a Catch-22.
On one hand it is really obvious what practical step would do most to put a bit more sparkle in the economy and give the government bandwidth to begin to manage all the other problems.
On the other hand, mentioning that step is still guaranteed to drive Mansfield Man back into the arms of Momma Liz.
For all the flaws of the current government, it's worth noting the biggest problems faced (excepting energy for which all governing parties are culpable) are external. COVID-19, the lockdown cost, the rampant inflation caused by the Ukraine-Russia war, all of it had external causes.
I do think inflation/energy should be more directly linked by politicians to the war in Ukraine.
I think I have done a poor job of explaining how the purchase price agreements for renewables, the renewable levy and the electricity markets work together.
Let us imagine that you have a 1MW solar plant that was guaranteed £100/MWh for any energy it produces.
What happens is that the power is sold to electricity retailers at whatever the prevailing price of electricity is. So, it might be £10/MWh if there are massive amounts of renewables being generated and demand is low, or it might be £250/MWh if demand is high, and gas is the marginal generating plant.
To ensure that the generator gets £100 irrespective of the underlying energy price, the government enters into contract-for-difference transactions. I.e., it agrees to pay the different between the market price and the contracted rate.
This means that pumped storage firms are paying £10/MWh for power (if that is the prevailing price) irrespective of the purchase price guarantees from the government.
The reason why electricity bills contain the renewable levy is to compensate the government for the losses on the contracts-for-difference they have taken out. However, right now, they are mostly making money because (due to the very high prices of coal and natural gas) the intraday floor has been above the guaranteed prices in most occasions. It could therefore - and probably should therefore - be suspended.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
Surely DBS should be instant in today's digital age ?
We recruited someone from London recently, and the Met took 6 months to do the DBS.
I've applied for a job in school (non teaching), since retirement, to help with new energy bills. Been waiting for a Dbs for a month now. I don’t think it will be resolved for September. Both me and the school are now stuck.
Have you tried Disclosure Scotland. They provide same criminal records check service as DBS for anyone in the UK but historically are much faster. They used to take a week, I don't know how it takes now. They look at the same national systems as DBS so just as valid.
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
I don't think it's possible to track electrons like that. If you're running a wind farm or a solar farm, you generate electricity and sell it into the grid at whatever the going rate is (or whatever you managed to negotiate as a rate). Then you're done, and out of the picture: you got paid. If you're a storage system like a battery, you both buy electricity from the grid to store, and later sell electricity to the grid, again at the going or negotiated rate. You don't care whether the electricity you're storing was generated by wind farm, nuclear or gas -- you're just going to aim to buy low and sell high.
Thanks to you (and Sandy). That seems rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps that's why so many water pumping schemes are stalled without the investment they need. There is virtually no margin.
Except electricity prices fluctuate through the day due to the changes in generation and demand.
Battery owners can buy it cheap in the small hours, or on sunny/windy days and sell it back to the grid at a profit on cold, dark, still nights.
That's the theory anyway.
I understand the theory, but it seems strange to me that the generators of useless excess power should be entitled to feed the grid at full whack, and the companies that enable that power to be there when people actually need it have to scrape a profit here and there in the way you describe. It could explain the lack of storage in our system - what's the point?
I don't think there's ever been a time when combined solar plus wind has ever been 100% of UK electricity usage.
When Hinckley Point C comes on board then - given that also has guaranteed purchase price agreements - that may change.
Varying price of electricity != useless excess power.
Do commercial solar and wind farms have guaranteed prices for all they generate?
I guess we could export any excess.
Some do, some don't.
New commercial solar installations do not. Historic ones do.
Makes sense.
@Luckyguy1983 Isn't the problem with pumped water storage that it's very expensive to build?
I understood problem with pumped storage in the UK is geography - not enough suitable hills where you want them. One experimental approach being explored was pumped storage with liquid many times denser than water. Works well with smaller hills so more opportunities in UK.
Rivers of Mercury xD
And lifting/lowering heavy weights up and down old mine shafts.
Meanwhile, the next PM is being comprehensively outplayed by Keir Starmer!! Not sure that bodes well.
He was uncharacteristically relaxed and impressive yesterday. Maybe all he needed was a holiday. We've got every reason to be optimistic. With all the baggage she's carrying we can expect him to give Ms Truss a pretty torrid time. It'll be interesting to see who she appoints as Home secretary. Patel again would be a gift
Braverman most likely
The problem with moving Braverman is that you have to find another lawyer willing to totally debase his/her legal reputation and trash the rule of law to replace her. It wouldn’t be easy. Johnson knew exactly what he was doing when he appointed her.
Have had interesting conversations with my Spanish FIL these last few weeks out here. Spain isn't on the hook to Russia for energy - their gas comes from north Africa apparently. Spain supposedly told the EU where to stick its energy reduction targets and is unhappy with paying Ukraine-affected market prices for gas when its gas isn't affected.
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
The “National Grid” is robbing Scots blind. No normal country would put up with it.
For all the flaws of the current government, it's worth noting the biggest problems faced (excepting energy for which all governing parties are culpable) are external. COVID-19, the lockdown cost, the rampant inflation caused by the Ukraine-Russia war, all of it had external causes.
I do think inflation/energy should be more directly linked by politicians to the war in Ukraine.
Few governments are looking like they will get back in right now.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
Surely DBS should be instant in today's digital age ?
We recruited someone from London recently, and the Met took 6 months to do the DBS.
I've applied for a job in school (non teaching), since retirement, to help with new energy bills. Been waiting for a Dbs for a month now. I don’t think it will be resolved for September. Both me and the school are now stuck.
Have you tried Disclosure Scotland. They provide same criminal records check service as DBS for anyone in the UK but historically are much faster. They used to take a week, I don't know how it takes now. They look at the same national systems as DBS so just as valid.
Shhhh!
SNPbad!
Never deviate from PB’s favourite memes.
How is that an SNP story? You’ll be saying Rangers and Celtic being shit at football are due to the SNP next.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
It's like the dying days of the Major regime would have been if Teresa Gorman and Co had taken over the party.
To win a majority of 1, is a hell of a mountain to climb for Starmer, and if by miracle he does it, he then receives the worst hospital pass of all time, with the country falling apart
The starter for 10 for suffers of Mansfield Syndrome is to realise their shitty town is even more shitty under the Tories / Brexit. That is not insulting shitty towns, it is almost verbatim how voters in places like Mansfield saw them under decades of Labour councils. Tory was going to provide their moon on a stick. Instead they have been given more shit.
Labour's problem is that the issues facing England are macro, not micro. Whilst starting to wipe excrement from the walls is going to be required, until they get to the root of why more poo is raining down they will make little difference.
This is Starmer's challenge. He guffs all the right platitudes. Without being able to tackle the root causes. Whether that is because of realpolitik or lack of comprehension we don't know.
There is a lot that even a minority Labour government can do to ensure it will be much harder for any future government to walk away from Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law in the way this one has. There are also a few quick wins available for a government not obsessed with absolute sovereignty. But, as you say, the big ticket stuff is macro, not micro, and will take years to resolve. Maybe that’s where the quick wins come in.
Real wages are falling at a record rate as inflation soars above the average increase. The government, and the BoE want this because they are concerned that this commodity driven wave of inflaion will become imbedded if wages rise to meet it but it is only sustainable for a relatively short period of time and even then puts pressure in the system to "catch up" in subsequent years.
We have had pretty low inflation for quite a long time now and it has reset wage expectations. Most employees think, when being offered 6% or so that this is better than they have had for years but inflationary expectations will adjust rapidly as people find that "generous" increase is not matching the increase of food and fuel.
Have had interesting conversations with my Spanish FIL these last few weeks out here. Spain isn't on the hook to Russia for energy - their gas comes from north Africa apparently. Spain supposedly told the EU where to stick its energy reduction targets and is unhappy with paying Ukraine-affected market prices for gas when its gas isn't affected.
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
There is a solution. If England doesn't want clean Scottish energy, lets stop transmitting it. Then the distance sent is much less, the cost falls, and life gets cheaper in Scotland. See, I have just written my first practical reason why Scotland should become independent.
Stockholm Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards your kidnapper Mansfield Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards the party who made your shitty town more shitty Buchan Syndrome: realising that however bonkers Sindy appears on the surface, there are genuine practical issues behind it that unionists have no answers to
Post of the week, so far.
The more you delve into the topic, the more practical issues you will find. Self-government is simply common sense, and independence is normal.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
I hope that Starmer can follow his centre-ground leanings and propose "what works" solutions. Ideology is what got us into this mess, it won't get us out.
But the Mansfield Syndrome still bites hard amongst some voters. It doesn't matter that they can see the basics falling apart around them as you describe. They were persuaded that it was all someone else's fault and only the Tories & Brexit could fix things. Despite things getting clearly worse not better, its a persuasive mental delusion that "it will be better tomorrow".
That ToryTV focus group in Bury North was interesting. 9 Tory 2019 voters and 7 already likely to vote Labour. Of the two holdouts, the bloke my age displayed all signs of Mansfield Syndrome. So the challenge for Labour is to offer something at which at least explains why things are this bad and the first practical steps on the journey to fix them, and they could walk it.
And in the upside down, the LibDems need to do the same to southern Tories who seem to be increasingly disillusioned with Leonite Tory rhetoric and increasingly stupid policies. A LibDem platform of similar policies to Labour but less threatening can do the Tories serious damage. And as Labour keep stealing LD policies that feels doable.
One catch, maybe a Catch-22.
On one hand it is really obvious what practical step would do most to put a bit more sparkle in the economy and give the government bandwidth to begin to manage all the other problems.
On the other hand, mentioning that step is still guaranteed to drive Mansfield Man back into the arms of Momma Liz.
How would that achieve this miraculous effect? The problems right now are energy (not due to Brexit) and recovering from Covid (not due to Brexit). We are able to offer visas to people who fit the bill and want to work here.
What would reversing Brexit achieve? And how would it be achieved? Why would they have us back?
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
I don't think it's possible to track electrons like that. If you're running a wind farm or a solar farm, you generate electricity and sell it into the grid at whatever the going rate is (or whatever you managed to negotiate as a rate). Then you're done, and out of the picture: you got paid. If you're a storage system like a battery, you both buy electricity from the grid to store, and later sell electricity to the grid, again at the going or negotiated rate. You don't care whether the electricity you're storing was generated by wind farm, nuclear or gas -- you're just going to aim to buy low and sell high.
Thanks to you (and Sandy). That seems rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps that's why so many water pumping schemes are stalled without the investment they need. There is virtually no margin.
Except electricity prices fluctuate through the day due to the changes in generation and demand.
Battery owners can buy it cheap in the small hours, or on sunny/windy days and sell it back to the grid at a profit on cold, dark, still nights.
That's the theory anyway.
I understand the theory, but it seems strange to me that the generators of useless excess power should be entitled to feed the grid at full whack, and the companies that enable that power to be there when people actually need it have to scrape a profit here and there in the way you describe. It could explain the lack of storage in our system - what's the point?
I don't think there's ever been a time when combined solar plus wind has ever been 100% of UK electricity usage.
When Hinckley Point C comes on board then - given that also has guaranteed purchase price agreements - that may change.
Varying price of electricity != useless excess power.
Do commercial solar and wind farms have guaranteed prices for all they generate?
I guess we could export any excess.
Some do, some don't.
New commercial solar installations do not. Historic ones do.
Makes sense.
@Luckyguy1983 Isn't the problem with pumped water storage that it's very expensive to build?
I understood problem with pumped storage in the UK is geography - not enough suitable hills where you want them. One experimental approach being explored was pumped storage with liquid many times denser than water. Works well with smaller hills so more opportunities in UK.
Rivers of Mercury xD
And lifting/lowering heavy weights up and down old mine shafts.
I don't think there's an issue with lack of hills for pumped storage schemes. The BBC article I posted upthread suggests that there are a whole load of schemes that have been greenlit but are stalled due to lack of funding.
If the Government is paying wind farms and solar farms for every bit of power they produce, and even paying them to switch off when the grid is full, that's a costly situation (though obviously not at the moment) that will need to be addressed as wind power continues to expand. These pumped storage schemes need to be built fast. That or something similar, though personally I'd rather be pushing water around than putting massive batteries everywhere (though it might be clean, I don't know anything about it).
Rishi Sunak has committed to cutting Civil Service jobs as part of a “shake up” of the “bloated post-Covid state” that would also require senior civil servants to spend a year working outside of Whitehall if they want promotion.
The Sunak campaign said the plans include cutting the “back office” headcount, changing pay rewards from being based on longevity to performance, bringing back a version of the suspended fast-stream graduate recruitment programme, and championing the use of apprenticeships.
Pretty desperate stuff from Rishi who seems to be flailing around in search of headlines, even if you might agree with him on certain points.
It works in big business though. Blue Chips do this on a regular cycle. Cut a % of jobs, make the survivors feel like they are lucky to still have a job where they get to do 120% of their previous job for a 1.071% pay rise.
In what sense does it work? My experience of the private sector is that it encourages a high turnover of staff - the best staff will tend not to stay anywhere for too long because they can find a better job elsewhere. This means that the institution has a big problem holding onto institutional knowledge - the number of meetings that become a question of, "who is left who still knows what x is?"
This also means there's a constant struggle to recruit people with the necessary skills, little incentive to train anyone (because they'll leave and the training expense will be wasted), which creates a large overhead, and then you have to deal with a proportion of absolute duffers who get brought in because there's no-one else available.
I'm not saying the staffing approach in the public sector is without its problems, but I'd be hard-pressed to say it was better in the private sector (though I've done very well out of it salary-wise).
Have had interesting conversations with my Spanish FIL these last few weeks out here. Spain isn't on the hook to Russia for energy - their gas comes from north Africa apparently. Spain supposedly told the EU where to stick its energy reduction targets and is unhappy with paying Ukraine-affected market prices for gas when its gas isn't affected.
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
There is a solution. If England doesn't want clean Scottish energy, lets stop transmitting it. Then the distance sent is much less, the cost falls, and life gets cheaper in Scotland. See, I have just written my first practical reason why Scotland should become independent.
Stockholm Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards your kidnapper Mansfield Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards the party who made your shitty town more shitty Buchan Syndrome: realising that however bonkers Sindy appears on the surface, there are genuine practical issues behind it that unionists have no answers to
Post of the week, so far.
The more you delve into the topic, the more practical issues you will find. Self-government is simply common sense, and independence is normal.
Personally I would be happy for Scots and Scotland if they vote for independence and make a success of it. It will lance the boil. But do you never have pause to think of how Brexit has gone so far? Why will Scotland breaking up from rUK be better?
Have had interesting conversations with my Spanish FIL these last few weeks out here. Spain isn't on the hook to Russia for energy - their gas comes from north Africa apparently. Spain supposedly told the EU where to stick its energy reduction targets and is unhappy with paying Ukraine-affected market prices for gas when its gas isn't affected.
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
Hang on, what are you arguing for here? Placing renewables far away from major population centres, and taking on high transmission costs that get passed on to consumers?
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
Surely DBS should be instant in today's digital age ?
We recruited someone from London recently, and the Met took 6 months to do the DBS.
I've applied for a job in school (non teaching), since retirement, to help with new energy bills. Been waiting for a Dbs for a month now. I don’t think it will be resolved for September. Both me and the school are now stuck.
Have you tried Disclosure Scotland. They provide same criminal records check service as DBS for anyone in the UK but historically are much faster. They used to take a week, I don't know how it takes now. They look at the same national systems as DBS so just as valid.
Shhhh!
SNPbad!
Never deviate from PB’s favourite memes.
How is that an SNP story? You’ll be saying Rangers and Celtic being shit at football are due to the SNP next.
Disclosure Scotland is an executive agency of the Scottish Government. It works well. The English agency doesn’t.
Classic lie from the BBC just now. “Average pay is falling by 3%”. I immediately took notice. That’s not right, I thought. I was right. That’s the adjusted for inflation figure.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
The scale of it will overwhelm them all. Whatever 'solution' is applied i suspect its a finger in the dyke Everything is creaking
A true sense of a state falling apart and failing to provide the basics. And yet some people still say "what is Starmer's solution" whilst indicating they will still vote Conservative.
To win, Starmer needs to set out his stall and have some convincing policies as well as appealing sales patter. It is not enough to be solid, competent and honest though each of those is a step up from flaky, incompetent and mendacious.
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
I hope that Starmer can follow his centre-ground leanings and propose "what works" solutions. Ideology is what got us into this mess, it won't get us out.
But the Mansfield Syndrome still bites hard amongst some voters. It doesn't matter that they can see the basics falling apart around them as you describe. They were persuaded that it was all someone else's fault and only the Tories & Brexit could fix things. Despite things getting clearly worse not better, its a persuasive mental delusion that "it will be better tomorrow".
That ToryTV focus group in Bury North was interesting. 9 Tory 2019 voters and 7 already likely to vote Labour. Of the two holdouts, the bloke my age displayed all signs of Mansfield Syndrome. So the challenge for Labour is to offer something at which at least explains why things are this bad and the first practical steps on the journey to fix them, and they could walk it.
And in the upside down, the LibDems need to do the same to southern Tories who seem to be increasingly disillusioned with Leonite Tory rhetoric and increasingly stupid policies. A LibDem platform of similar policies to Labour but less threatening can do the Tories serious damage. And as Labour keep stealing LD policies that feels doable.
One catch, maybe a Catch-22.
On one hand it is really obvious what practical step would do most to put a bit more sparkle in the economy and give the government bandwidth to begin to manage all the other problems.
On the other hand, mentioning that step is still guaranteed to drive Mansfield Man back into the arms of Momma Liz.
How would that achieve this miraculous effect? The problems right now are energy (not due to Brexit) and recovering from Covid (not due to Brexit). We are able to offer visas to people who fit the bill and want to work here.
What would reversing Brexit achieve? And how would it be achieved? Why would they have us back?
Brexit but not being a dick about it all the time.
There's an awful lot of friction that could be removed from the relationship by acknowledging that there's little harm and a lot of good in shadowing EU standards for things like food and chemicals. And that friction is costing a chunk of GDP that we could never really afford to toss away, and certainly can't now.
But for some voters and politicians, that would be to betray Brexit, which is why it can't be done.
FPT. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
Surely DBS should be instant in today's digital age ?
We recruited someone from London recently, and the Met took 6 months to do the DBS.
I've applied for a job in school (non teaching), since retirement, to help with new energy bills. Been waiting for a Dbs for a month now. I don’t think it will be resolved for September. Both me and the school are now stuck.
Have you tried Disclosure Scotland. They provide same criminal records check service as DBS for anyone in the UK but historically are much faster. They used to take a week, I don't know how it takes now. They look at the same national systems as DBS so just as valid.
Shhhh!
SNPbad!
Never deviate from PB’s favourite memes.
How is that an SNP story? You’ll be saying Rangers and Celtic being shit at football are due to the SNP next.
Disclosure Scotland is an executive agency of the Scottish Government. It works well. The English agency doesn’t.
Shall we judge the performance of the English government by Manchester United results?
I'm just thinking back to when Rangers went bust thanks to HMRC, an executive agency of UKG, requiring that taxes be paid. I seem to recall that quite a few fans blamed the SNP (albeit amongst other things).
Have had interesting conversations with my Spanish FIL these last few weeks out here. Spain isn't on the hook to Russia for energy - their gas comes from north Africa apparently. Spain supposedly told the EU where to stick its energy reduction targets and is unhappy with paying Ukraine-affected market prices for gas when its gas isn't affected.
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
The “National Grid” is robbing Scots blind. No normal country would put up with it.
Yes, and independence will fix that. The Tories, in their benevolence, will remove those charges and flood Scotland with English money, inducing a massive world leading renewables industry north of the border.
They will complete ignore places like Teesside, and cancel all the massive English offshore wind turbine projects in order to funnel cash into hands of the newly independent Scots.
Have had interesting conversations with my Spanish FIL these last few weeks out here. Spain isn't on the hook to Russia for energy - their gas comes from north Africa apparently. Spain supposedly told the EU where to stick its energy reduction targets and is unhappy with paying Ukraine-affected market prices for gas when its gas isn't affected.
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
There is a solution. If England doesn't want clean Scottish energy, lets stop transmitting it. Then the distance sent is much less, the cost falls, and life gets cheaper in Scotland. See, I have just written my first practical reason why Scotland should become independent.
Stockholm Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards your kidnapper Mansfield Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards the party who made your shitty town more shitty Buchan Syndrome: realising that however bonkers Sindy appears on the surface, there are genuine practical issues behind it that unionists have no answers to
Post of the week, so far.
The more you delve into the topic, the more practical issues you will find. Self-government is simply common sense, and independence is normal.
Personally I would be happy for Scots and Scotland if they vote for independence and make a success of it. It will lance the boil. But do you never have pause to think of how Brexit has gone so far? Why will Scotland breaking up from rUK be better?
Well Boris Johnson, Dave Davis, JRM, Frosty, IDS etc likely won’t be involved, so that’s a head start.
Comments
There are any number of articles describing the wrinkles. Here’s one picked at random:
https://www.energy-storage.news/three-new-energy-storage-projects-that-prove-the-versatility-and-value-of-batteries-for-the-grid/
Wind tends to have less predictable downtime, so current short term storage probably isn’t as attractive to add to the mix.
How do you know?
"Society pays the price for our cheap goods
Fast fashion, low airplane fares and our addiction to online deliveries have made us lose sight of what we should value
Libby Purves" (£)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/society-pays-the-price-for-our-cheap-goods-vcxj57znb
[I'm not a subscriber but can read a few articles each week by registering which is how I read this one].
In winter zero solar and heat pump needs 50kwh a day. Pre all the current energy crisis, overnight power was few p per kWh so could charge battery at say 4p and use to avoid peak rate prices of say 30, now perhaps 50p. But batteries are say £500 per kWh of capacity and I'd need another few, so difficult to justify.
Also interesting that electric car batteries are eg 75kwh or 90kwh for the EVs I have. So lots of scope for virtual storage solutions. Octopus does a Tesla tariff based on this idea - cheaper power if they can take it back sometime.
That gives quite a bit of headroom to use it as a domestic battery (though that also requires a charger and inverters which work in both directions, which is more expense).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/15/liz-truss-cabinet-predictions-who-could-be-in-and-who-would-lose-out
Tesla are running a trial with a decent number of Powerwall customers in California along those lines.
https://electrek.co/2022/07/15/tesla-powerwall-owners-joined-new-virtual-power-plant-california/
Once the economies of scale are out there, car and domestic charger manufacturers will likely start adding the capability as a relatively low cost option. That’s likely at least half a decade away, though.
Presumably the expired one is the US diplomatic passport issued to him when he was president, and one of the active ones is a regular US passport. What about the other active one?
Given his Latin American dictator shtick, you gotta wonder whether he mightn't have some time holed up in a foreign embassy in his future, à la Manuel Noriega. For more symbolism, he should allege the Feds stole his mother's bible. He could at least release some video footage of the raid. Is he losing his touch?
Strange how some of the media are using the phrase "three of his passports", implying he has more than three, whereas the words he actually wrote were "my three passports (one expired)", implying he has exactly three of which exactly two are active.
I hope he hasn't got a British one.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-multiple-passports-us-citizens-2017-11
"South Staffordshire Water says it was target of cyber attack as criminals bungle extortion attempt
The parent company for Cambridge Water and South Staffs Water stresses it is still supplying safe water for customers."
https://news.sky.com/story/south-staffordshire-water-says-it-was-target-of-cyber-attack-as-criminals-bungle-extortion-attempt-12674039
But that isn't the real problem. The problem is we are building wind farms as fast as it is physically possible to do. That involves, to start with, site surveys for finding suitable locations. These take a lot of time and you have to get them right. Get it wrong and at best you end up putting your turbines on the spawning grounds of some rare fish and wipe out a species. At worst your wind turbines fall over because the seabed conditions aren't suitable.
So you need side scan sonar, magnetometry (to make sure you don't stick them on one of the innumerable mines littering the seabed from two world wars), bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, 2DHR seismic, environmental monitoring and sampling with both baseline and habitat assessments and measurements of currents and local tide effects. Once you have done all of that you then need a geotechnical vessel to come in and take cores to make sure the ground conditions can support the turbine.
And of course in spite of new survey vessels being built there is a waiting list of many months or often years before one becomes available to do this work.
The you need the vessels to actually install the turbines - and again there are very long waiting lists for these in spite of more being built.
I love offshore wind. It is a great and obvious solution but you can no more just slap the things up any faster than we are doing than you can drill an oil or gas well on demand. It all takes time. Often lots of time.
And before anyone starts moaning that we should have been doing this years ago, we were. Since 2008 we have been the fastest growing generator of offshore wind farms in the world and we are home to the 3 largest individual offshore wind farms in the world.
Civil disobedience is the only solution
BY THOMAS FAZI"
https://unherd.com/2022/08/britains-elites-have-lost-control/
(I'm not in favour of civil disobedience myself).
I should have added that the 4 largest offshore windfarms in the world currently under construction - all of a similar size to the current largest at Hornsea - are all being built in UK waters.
There was some convergence in the 90s and 2000s, but at some point the US kept delivering decent growth and the UK fell away.
Seattle is of course one of the wealthier bits, too.
Then it is onto Belfast Wednesday and Manchester Friday in a crucial week for Rishi Sunak if the polling is to be believed.
Alun Cairns, former Welsh secretary, switches support believing the Foreign Secretary is ‘best placed to secure our Union’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/08/15/third-tory-mp-ditches-rishi-sunak-liz-truss-next-pm/ (£££)
Some of this is demographics. Some is the consequences of QE in driving inequality. Some is due to global rebalancing. And some is due to commodities having gotten a lot more expensive.
Also 600 is barely touching the sides of our requirements.
Truss "best placed to save our Union". Are you sure Alun, maybe the "Great Boris Canal" (from Nation Cymru) might help? Or maybe not.
Football: slightly faltering start for Liverpool this season. Although they're not the worst team in red, to be fair.
The passports weren’t deliberately seized - they were picked up by the FBI filter team which goes through all the documents to ensure agents investigating the case haven’t picked up stuff not covered by the warrant, and offered back to Trump’s lawyers straight away.
https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1559324841681063936
A Challenger tank weighs as much as an Airbus.
https://twitter.com/JonHawkes275/status/1559237912352399375
Trying to hypothecate a tax from bp/shell to subsidise energy bills is is childish politics by Sunak, Davey and Starmer. All that the “windfall” tax imposed so far has done is slash the equity value of junior North Sea producers and make it even more difficult for them to access finance for new investment.
Meanwhile, the next PM is being comprehensively outplayed by Keir Starmer!! Not sure that bodes well.
It is simply not true to say that 80% of profits are from their trading business.
Stockholm Syndrome describes people who support their kidnapper / abuser. I think the UK political equivalent for Tory voters could be called Mansfield Syndrome.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1559423785673039874
The state is indeed falling apart across the board, schools, universities, courts, social care, NHS, immigration and asylum, now with the added handicaps of Brexit and energy prices to business. Yet what is proposed is to sack 20% of the Civil Servants needed to get back on track.
It is like the dying days of the Major regime, only with a much worse economy and debt situation.
https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1559420252093644800?t=0bp59cBQnYOx4QASysWd0g&s=19
But the Mansfield Syndrome still bites hard amongst some voters. It doesn't matter that they can see the basics falling apart around them as you describe. They were persuaded that it was all someone else's fault and only the Tories & Brexit could fix things. Despite things getting clearly worse not better, its a persuasive mental delusion that "it will be better tomorrow".
That ToryTV focus group in Bury North was interesting. 9 Tory 2019 voters and 7 already likely to vote Labour. Of the two holdouts, the bloke my age displayed all signs of Mansfield Syndrome. So the challenge for Labour is to offer something at which at least explains why things are this bad and the first practical steps on the journey to fix them, and they could walk it.
And in the upside down, the LibDems need to do the same to southern Tories who seem to be increasingly disillusioned with Leonite Tory rhetoric and increasingly stupid policies. A LibDem platform of similar policies to Labour but less threatening can do the Tories serious damage. And as Labour keep stealing LD policies that feels doable.
Millions of people are being hit by the sharpest fall in real wages for at least 20 years, official figures revealed on Tuesday
Regular pay, which excludes bonuses, plummeted by an eyewatering 4.1 per cent in the three months to June, compared to a year earlier, once inflation is taken into account, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The drop contrasts with a 5.4 per cent rise in June 2021 and highlights the scale of the cost-of-living crisis in Britain.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/regular-pay-fall-cost-living-crisis-ons-inflation-bank-of-england-b1018783.html
That feels very similar to energy generation in Scotland. TNUoS - Transmission Network Use of System charges from the National Grid make it 20% more expensive to generate renewable power in Scotland (where it is plentiful) vs England. Why? Because the PLC wants to recoup £dollah for use of its wires, and the power needs to be sent such a long way to reach that London.
This is insane. We need more renewable energy, not less. Yet the privatised "let the market decide" industry is using 30 years out of date models to penalise the power generation we have.
That’s nearly as funny as hearing that the enemy’s senior officers are rumoured to have abandoned 20,000 troops in Kherson region, surrounded by defenders and with almost no weapons.
The Sunak campaign said the plans include cutting the “back office” headcount, changing pay rewards from being based on longevity to performance, bringing back a version of the suspended fast-stream graduate recruitment programme, and championing the use of apprenticeships.
The Tory leadership hopeful and former chancellor said the “bloated post-Covid state is in need of a shake-up” and committed to reforms to create a “leaner” and “truly Rolls Royce service”.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/rishi-sunak-civil-service-job-cuts-b1018754.html
Pretty desperate stuff from Rishi who seems to be flailing around in search of headlines, even if you might agree with him on certain points.
Stockholm Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards your kidnapper
Mansfield Syndrome: feelings of trust and affection towards the party who made your shitty town more shitty
Buchan Syndrome: realising that however bonkers Sindy appears on the surface, there are genuine practical issues behind it that unionists have no answers to
Labour's problem is that the issues facing England are macro, not micro. Whilst starting to wipe excrement from the walls is going to be required, until they get to the root of why more poo is raining down they will make little difference.
This is Starmer's challenge. He guffs all the right platitudes. Without being able to tackle the root causes. Whether that is because of realpolitik or lack of comprehension we don't know.
What a legacy.
On one hand it is really obvious what practical step would do most to put a bit more sparkle in the economy and give the government bandwidth to begin to manage all the other problems.
On the other hand, mentioning that step is still guaranteed to drive Mansfield Man back into the arms of Momma Liz.
I do think inflation/energy should be more directly linked by politicians to the war in Ukraine.
SNPbad!
Never deviate from PB’s favourite memes.
SNPbad!
Never deviate from PB’s favourite memes.
Real wages are falling at a record rate as inflation soars above the average increase. The government, and the BoE want this because they are concerned that this commodity driven wave of inflaion will become imbedded if wages rise to meet it but it is only sustainable for a relatively short period of time and even then puts pressure in the system to "catch up" in subsequent years.
We have had pretty low inflation for quite a long time now and it has reset wage expectations. Most employees think, when being offered 6% or so that this is better than they have had for years but inflationary expectations will adjust rapidly as people find that "generous" increase is not matching the increase of food and fuel.
The more you delve into the topic, the more practical issues you will find. Self-government is simply common sense, and independence is normal.
What would reversing Brexit achieve? And how would it be achieved? Why would they have us back?
If the Government is paying wind farms and solar farms for every bit of power they produce, and even paying them to switch off when the grid is full, that's a costly situation (though obviously not at the moment) that will need to be addressed as wind power continues to expand. These pumped storage schemes need to be built fast. That or something similar, though personally I'd rather be pushing water around than putting massive batteries everywhere (though it might be clean, I don't know anything about it).
This also means there's a constant struggle to recruit people with the necessary skills, little incentive to train anyone (because they'll leave and the training expense will be wasted), which creates a large overhead, and then you have to deal with a proportion of absolute duffers who get brought in because there's no-one else available.
I'm not saying the staffing approach in the public sector is without its problems, but I'd be hard-pressed to say it was better in the private sector (though I've done very well out of it salary-wise).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62557849
That's significant because 'target' means there is both sufficient evidence and an intention to prosecute.
There's a certain delicious irony that a man who made loads of stupid allegations about vote rigging is about to be walloped for, er, vote rigging.
https://www.mygov.scot/organisations/disclosure-scotland
Shall we judge the performance of the English government by Manchester United results?
I was right. That’s the adjusted for inflation figure.
Lying bastards.
There's an awful lot of friction that could be removed from the relationship by acknowledging that there's little harm and a lot of good in shadowing EU standards for things like food and chemicals. And that friction is costing a chunk of GDP that we could never really afford to toss away, and certainly can't now.
But for some voters and politicians, that would be to betray Brexit, which is why it can't be done.
They will complete ignore places like Teesside, and cancel all the massive English offshore wind turbine projects in order to funnel cash into hands of the newly independent Scots.