That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
UK is just in the sweet spot of not having widespread residential air conditioning, because 30ºC is something only seen for a week or two a year, and that doesn’t inconvenience most people.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Yep - inter-seasonal heat storage on an individual house basis does not really work well*. The preferred concept has been "treat the grid as a battery" for the extra.
House batteries, or house heat batteries, are more interesting. But the best idea is always to reduce energy consumption first, then any techical solutions can be smaller and less expensive.
This is a problem for the USA. The whole place uses energy like a collection of Usonians, so any energy storage has to be 2-3 times bigger than here for a proportional impact.
* There are certain exceptions at community level, but it's all very out-of-the-ordinary and a bit specialist. Better to deploy the simple stuff.
Racial tensions can be temporary, such as when a large number of West Indians came and cultural grating, occured, particularly with youths.
However there was enough common culture (and goodwill) to enable integration within a generation or two.
However, when there is no cultural commonality, and a strong religious culture of a different religion which is all encompasing and frowns on marriage to outsiders, you end up with segregation.
What we are now seeing is a Falls and Bogside in many mainland cities and the working class native population reacting by starting to go all Shankhill/Riverside.
Not only that, we are seeing the rise of sectarian political parties, as a result (as in Ulster). The Gallowayish parties are already a thing, and Reform is a kind of weaker rightwing reaction to that. I predict we will see much more overtly and robustly xenophobic "white people" parties in time
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Storing from summer to winter is never going to be viable, or realistic.
Storing from day to night certainly can be.
Especially adding if you work away from home then night will be both when you use the electricity, run your washing machine/dryer etc, and plug in your car etc
Currently those who are away from home during the day don't gain much from solar EV, unless they can add a battery in which case it is transformative.
Yes, but it doesn't cost much at all to add such a battery. It doesn't have to be that big or that expensive.
Government departments are being asked to fund pay rises out of existing budgets.
ROTFL
It depends on the department. Clearly not true for teachers etc. But it will put a squeeze on the administrative civil service. Isn't that what your mob want ?
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
UK is just in the sweet spot of not having widespread residential air conditioning, because 30ºC is something only seen for a week or two a year, and that doesn’t inconvenience most people.
I can inform PB that aircon is barely known in houses/apartments in central France, despite temps now often hitting the high 30s (and becoming unbearable)
eg I've been looking for apartments to rent in the Auvergne this week. In one area I found about 40 flats (often very nice), only two had aircon. I also noticed they were considerably more expensive
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I think it's about half that in terms of households with solar. It should be said that there is a reason for that - even with higher energy prices, the investment just isn't worth it for a lot of people in terms of the time it would take to recover the up-front cost (and potential for repair costs) given the roof space, direction in which it faces, and part of the country.
That might well shift over time, but the fact we could have more solar panels in more places isn't some secret - it's just that a lot of people have done the maths and it doesn't at the moment add up. That's hard-nosed businesses as well as individuals. I mean Tesco have a lot of car parks and a lot of roofs - some have solar panels, but a lot don't and not, I suspect, because they haven't considered if it's a good investment.
What is deeply frustrating (at least for those like me obsessed with the balance of payments) is that even with those figures we are only generating about 84% of the power we need and are importing the rest. We really want to get to a situation between wind and solar that we are a net exporter of energy. We are a long way short of that. https://grid.iamkate.com/
One large nuclear plant (or a dozen small ones) solves that problem forever.
Cost of installation (if complication free) is £7k for 3.5Kw (peak) system (by the look of it sans batteries).
They say you can save best case amount of £600 pa if you export to the grid on smart export guarantee, based on July 2024 prices.
That is a twelve year payback.
If there are complications causing an extra thousand or two on installation or the amount saved isn't as much as hoped then the payback becomes much longer.
A lot seems to depend on whether price of eleftricity rises or falls over the coming years, given these figures are for still quite historically high prices.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
The VAT isn't meant to apply to special needs, so special needs schools should be least effected.
Yes and no...its potentially a big mess.
Labour has so far refused to exempt around a dozen schools which exclusively teach children with special needs from paying VAT and business rates. The party has instead stressed that children in receipt of EHCPs will be exempt from any fee rises. Headmasters have warned they will be forced to pass on the cost of VAT to parents without an EHCP in place before the tax raid comes into force.
Just 7,600 special needs pupils at private schools currently have an EHCP, while 103,000 do not, according to the Independent Schools Council (ISC), an industry body for private schools.
I think it was announced yesterday that those funded by local authorities, the local authority has to ask for the refund from central government, but that could be a very lengthy process.
Yes. It is not only his home State is the most important out of the 50 in finalising the result, it is also that the States to the west of Penn in the central north of the country where Biden did well and a Californian woman of colour may not like Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, which are all incredibly close, are likely to like Shapiro more than someone from the South West.
It really is a no brainer.
What advantages does Shapiro have over Mark Kelly?
Both seem like good picks.
And both infinitely better than Vance.
Penn has, according to that piece, a 30% chance of being the State that is going to determine the election on the current map. It has 19 electoral votes in this cycle compared to Az's 11. It is an absolute must win for Harris. Arizona would be nice too and Kelly is an interesting guy (as is Buttigieg) but the advantage that Shapiro can give Harris in the key state is invaluable. She cannot afford to put aside any advantage that she might gain there.
Yes but Harris needs to win a swathe of swing states, not just one.
Neither Arizona alone nor Penn alone will decide the election, a group of states include Penn and some states mainly in the Mid West and Mountain West (like Arizona) will decide the election.
Hypothetically (I don't know) if Kelly helps more in the Mountain West and Mid West than Shapiro does, then that's an advantage to him.
It seems like it has to be either of them, but doesn't seem to me like it absolutely has to be one over the other, they're both good picks - which is better than can be said about Vance.
AZ and NV alone (even +GA) would not win the election for Harris.
PA, MI and WI would*.
So it is probably on balance better to focus on shoring up support in the latter 3 than it is in the others, albeit they could really do with nabbing one of NV, AZ and GA because it gives a nice buffer.
*also note that assumes Harris wins the sole EV vote from Nebraska which is oft overlooked. I assume given that no one talks about it that she would but it doesn’t feel like a great idea to rely on it?
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I think it's about half that in terms of households with solar. It should be said that there is a reason for that - even with higher energy prices, the investment just isn't worth it for a lot of people in terms of the time it would take to recover the up-front cost (and potential for repair costs) given the roof space, direction in which it faces, and part of the country.
That might well shift over time, but the fact we could have more solar panels in more places isn't some secret - it's just that a lot of people have done the maths and it doesn't at the moment add up. That's hard-nosed businesses as well as individuals. I mean Tesco have a lot of car parks and a lot of roofs - some have solar panels, but a lot don't and not, I suspect, because they haven't considered if it's a good investment.
What is deeply frustrating (at least for those like me obsessed with the balance of payments) is that even with those figures we are only generating about 84% of the power we need and are importing the rest. We really want to get to a situation between wind and solar that we are a net exporter of energy. We are a long way short of that. https://grid.iamkate.com/
One large nuclear plant (or a dozen small ones) solves that problem forever.
Fund the RR mini nukes, or phone S Korea. Our existing nuclear plans are pants.
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
It seems strange that a band change should be delayed until a change when the occupier changes. What's the rationale? Who would create a system such that Councils are prevented from getting the money they are entitled to from their wealthier residents?
Just checked what happened to the plumber, and he said he was shopped by his ex-wife after they divorced . I assume the VOA have a power to review if the property has been altered.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
UK is just in the sweet spot of not having widespread residential air conditioning, because 30ºC is something only seen for a week or two a year, and that doesn’t inconvenience most people.
I can inform PB that aircon is barely known in houses/apartments in central France, despite temps now often hitting the high 30s (and becoming unbearable)
eg I've been looking for apartments to rent in the Auvergne this week. In one area I found about 40 flats (often very nice), only two had aircon. I also noticed they were considerably more expensive
Suggest you invest in a moderately sized desk fan.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
Mm - define 'economically viable'.
Birmingham to Crewe is certainly the least costly. But I'd say 'economically viable' would be your balance of costs and benefits. So: a) what benefits does the economic case of the business case say it delivers? b) does it deliver those if the other sections are not delivered? c) what about the other non-quantified benefits (which are in all likelihood greater than those which have been quantified) - e.g. regeneration benefits, e.g. capacity relief, e.g. sections which deliver parts of other proposed investments?
Answer: it's complicated!
Its not that complicated.
If they don't build phase 2a to Crewe, six tracks (four Trent Valley and Two HS2) will converge on un grade separated Colwich Junction and two track Shugborough Tunnel.
It's a total clusterfuck. That is such a pinchpoint that an upgrade to bypass it all was already planned before being canned when HS2 came along.
Er, the Stone avoiding line diverges *before* Shugborough Tunnel. So it's four lines, not two, that operate there.
It would still be a pinch point but not quite as bad a one as you think.
Colwich is where the line to stoke on trent goes of and the WCML goes down to 2 track north of it through Shugborough Tunnel.
All it carries is two of the Euston to Manchesters per hour (down trains thereof also conflict with up trains from Stafford at Colwich).
If the "stone avoiding line" had a route back to the West Coast Main Line north of Stafford, you might have a point, but it dosent south of Crewe. Although the Stoke to Crewe Line being electrified in the last few years helps.
It carries far more than 2tph at peak periods. More like 8 (or four each way).
Also, if there were no crossover at Stone it couldn't carry trains to Stoke.
I agree it would be better if it were grade separated, but your earlier claim of 'six tracks going down to two tracks' was simply daft.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I think it's about half that in terms of households with solar. It should be said that there is a reason for that - even with higher energy prices, the investment just isn't worth it for a lot of people in terms of the time it would take to recover the up-front cost (and potential for repair costs) given the roof space, direction in which it faces, and part of the country.
That might well shift over time, but the fact we could have more solar panels in more places isn't some secret - it's just that a lot of people have done the maths and it doesn't at the moment add up. That's hard-nosed businesses as well as individuals. I mean Tesco have a lot of car parks and a lot of roofs - some have solar panels, but a lot don't and not, I suspect, because they haven't considered if it's a good investment.
What is deeply frustrating (at least for those like me obsessed with the balance of payments) is that even with those figures we are only generating about 84% of the power we need and are importing the rest. We really want to get to a situation between wind and solar that we are a net exporter of energy. We are a long way short of that. https://grid.iamkate.com/
One large nuclear plant (or a dozen small ones) solves that problem forever.
Fund the RR mini nukes, or phone S Korea. Our existing nuclear plans are pants.
actually do both - RR mini nukes is going to be a duopoly where we can still (just about) be a player...
And S Korea have a standardised design we should be using not allowing the French to use as yet another pilot scheme...
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Storing from summer to winter is never going to be viable, or realistic.
Storing from day to night certainly can be.
Especially adding if you work away from home then night will be both when you use the electricity, run your washing machine/dryer etc, and plug in your car etc
Currently those who are away from home during the day don't gain much from solar EV, unless they can add a battery in which case it is transformative.
Never say never. There's no physics reason why it is not possible, we just haven't found it yet.
(In fact it's possible now ofc but not very efficiently. We could use the summer electricity to split water, then generate electricity from the hydrogen in the winter.)
Gravity storage, e.g. pumping water uphill, is known technology that works well. You can pump water uphill in the summer and use it to generate electricity in winter. We tend to use stored power like that on shorter cycles at present, but it can also work as long-term storage.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
The VAT isn't meant to apply to special needs, so special needs schools should be least effected.
It's comparatively unusual to find schools devoted entirely to SEND. More often, you find standard private schools taking SEND children in as they find it easier to cope with the smaller class sizes and quieter atmosphere.
Which means, of course, if enough children leave, the school becomes unviable and shuts and takes no more SEND students, who go back into the state sector.
But @Dura_Ace was right - this isn't about good educational policy. Labour don't care about that any more than Hood, Spielman or Cummings do.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
UK is just in the sweet spot of not having widespread residential air conditioning, because 30ºC is something only seen for a week or two a year, and that doesn’t inconvenience most people.
I can inform PB that aircon is barely known in houses/apartments in central France, despite temps now often hitting the high 30s (and becoming unbearable)
eg I've been looking for apartments to rent in the Auvergne this week. In one area I found about 40 flats (often very nice), only two had aircon. I also noticed they were considerably more expensive
Suggest you invest in a moderately sized desk fan.
They generally do have fans, but there comes a point (35C?) when fans just churn up the hot air
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
UK is just in the sweet spot of not having widespread residential air conditioning, because 30ºC is something only seen for a week or two a year, and that doesn’t inconvenience most people.
I can inform PB that aircon is barely known in houses/apartments in central France, despite temps now often hitting the high 30s (and becoming unbearable)
eg I've been looking for apartments to rent in the Auvergne this week. In one area I found about 40 flats (often very nice), only two had aircon. I also noticed they were considerably more expensive
They have quite a number of heat related deaths when they have a hot spell.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
UK is just in the sweet spot of not having widespread residential air conditioning, because 30ºC is something only seen for a week or two a year, and that doesn’t inconvenience most people.
For solar aren't we in the worst possible position of not needing AC when the sun shines, but we do need far more energy to keep us warm when it does not?
Solar is nice to have, but is no solution to energy requirements/climate change as the sun shines the least in winter when we need the most energy. For that wind is far better.
A good thing with solar and wind is they're pretty complementary. Sunny days when the wind isn't blowing can complement dark days when the wind is.
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
The VAT isn't meant to apply to special needs, so special needs schools should be least effected.
It's comparatively unusual to find schools devoted entirely to SEND. More often, you find standard private schools taking SEND children in as they find it easier to cope with the smaller class sizes and quieter atmosphere.
Which means, of course, if enough children leave, the school becomes unviable and shuts and takes no more SEND students, who go back into the state sector.
But @Dura_Ace was right - this isn't about good educational policy. Labour don't care about that any more than Hood, Spielman or Cummings do.
Or just as likely, don't have a clue what such policy might be.
(Though talk to primary school teachers, and they will tell you the Blair/Brown governments did a great job.)
Well, yes, always best to get the pain in first even if that means a prolonged mid term trough. If you have a majority of 170 and the main opposition party in disarray, so much the better.
The problem with increasing taxes is 50 years of almost constant propaganda that any and every tax rise is inherently wrong. I'm not sure that's true but nobody wants to be worse off though I would point out misery loves company and if we can see the next guy suffering to a similar or even greater extent that mitigates our discomfort to a degree.
I don't know what else Reeves could or should have done - in truth, £20 billion isn't a lot of money set against the totality of public expenditure. It's a third of what we spend on defence, a fifth of what we're paying in debt interest every year. In essence, she's tinkering at the edges to try to get the deficit down a little and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I do know the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance (which was absurd) for non-benefit paying pensioners will be sending some to the barricades or to the equal futility of supporting the Conservatives but it was an anomaly which needed to be rectified (the Conservatives could hardly do it given the age of their voters). It's not in itself a game changer but sends a signal.
CGT on all house sales is going to be one of the big changes - downsizing and taking the profit on the family home funds retirement (or at least the preferred retirement lifestyle) for many but to what extent is any of that "earned" or simply a function of the housing market and inflation? Mr & Mrs Stodge Senior bought their four bedroom house in the mid 60s for £10k and sold it nearly forty years for over £500k. Now, that's a decent return in anybody's language but to what extent was that anything other than supply and demand plus inflation?
My one disappointment with yesterday's announcements was social care. Perhaps Labour have their own ideas - the Dilnot commission has been around almost as long as the Conservatives were last in power but I presume the problem isn't a solution in and of itself but a politically sellable solution (any workable proposal can be a suicide note).
Labour are the ones holding the hot potato or more accurately the grenade with the pin out - IF CGT reduces or closes down the option of funding a retirement lifestyle from asset appreciation how do we get the various schemes and savings plans out there to provide the kind of retirement lifestyle to which most aspire or will that inherently force people to work well into their 70s?
They are not planning CGT on all house sales?
Naah. Complete clog on mobility (stamp duty is bad enough). No country does this, though they may have anti flipping provisions saying you have to live there for n years before the exemption kicks in
I suspect the CGT rate will go up in the autumn - as we know an increasing proportion of property is kept for investment purposes, I do think CGT could be a source of income for the Treasury.
On the subject of house sales, where I appear to have hit a bit of a nerve with some, serious question, the asset appreciation is surely the epitome of unearned profit as house prices were rising faster than inflation for years. Yes, you can spend on the property to increase value but we all know houses were increasing in value if they just had four walls and a roof (and sometimes not even then).
The problem there is that CGT on houses is based on the unindexed original purchase price - not the inflation indexed version of the price (I can't remember when it was implemented as we got burnt so badly on a rental property Mrs Eek vetos the idea).
So you couldn't use an indexed version of the purchase price for primary homes and a secondary price for others.
Equally I spent a fortune on an extension 20 years ago. I can tell you roughly what it cost but every builder involved in the project has died / closed down and I can't remember exactly what it cost only a very rough ballpark of £80,000...
Hence it really is a completely stupid idea...
The Government could change the system if it wanted and no Government has a monopoly on stupid ideas, I mean, we have a Council Tax system based on 1991 valuations.
I do think property is the elephant in the taxation room - if you can't impose CGT (or a sales tax) on house transactions, how about revisiting the valuations and making them more relevant to the actual value of the property now (that will mean more bands to cover the vast range of house values)? In addition, you have Land Value Taxation as an option - if you don't want to tax the property, tax the land it sits on (land is very hard to hide).
None of this is without substantial political risk but if you are looking to tap into unearned income to balance the books it's a place to start.
I think we will get a full revaluation quite quite quickly, with a taper limiting change.
Rationally because it is an absolutely f*cking obvious thing to do. Politically because big changes need to be soon to give recovery time, and because it will broadly be Tory (now Lib Dem) heartlands that have been given the most free money over decades by the revaluation not being say 25 years ago.
I'd prefer greater change. but I think this is the least we can expect.
Just chatting to a plumber I am babysitting installing a new boiler in a Tenant's, and his Council Tax recently jumped from £1200 to£3k a year as they noticed big PD extensions added years ago. That's a Council that could have had that extra revenue every year for more than a decade, and something about lack of capacity in Councils to carry out necessary work.
Um - what triggered the change in band because currently the band only changes when the occupier changes...
I know this as there has been a flag on our account for 18+ years that when we move the house shifts up 2 bands...
It seems strange that a band change should be delayed until a change when the occupier changes. What's the rationale? Who would create a system such that Councils are prevented from getting the money they are entitled to from their wealthier residents?
Just checked what happened to the plumber, and he said he was shopped by his ex-wife after they divorced . I assume the VOA have a power to review if the property has been altered.
So the trigger was change of ownership - as for the rest of your question I posted a blog post from the VOA earlier today with the rational...
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
UK is just in the sweet spot of not having widespread residential air conditioning, because 30ºC is something only seen for a week or two a year, and that doesn’t inconvenience most people.
For solar aren't we in the worst possible position of not needing AC when the sun shines, but we do need far more energy to keep us warm when it does not?
Solar is nice to have, but is no solution to energy requirements/climate change as the sun shines the least in winter when we need the most energy. For that wind is far better.
A good thing with solar and wind is they're pretty complementary. Sunny days when the wind isn't blowing can complement dark days when the wind is.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Storing from summer to winter is never going to be viable, or realistic.
Storing from day to night certainly can be.
Especially adding if you work away from home then night will be both when you use the electricity, run your washing machine/dryer etc, and plug in your car etc
Currently those who are away from home during the day don't gain much from solar EV, unless they can add a battery in which case it is transformative.
Never say never. There's no physics reason why it is not possible, we just haven't found it yet.
(In fact it's possible now ofc but not very efficiently. We could use the summer electricity to split water, then generate electricity from the hydrogen in the winter.)
Gravity storage, e.g. pumping water uphill, is known technology that works well. You can pump water uphill in the summer and use it to generate electricity in winter. We tend to use stored power like that on shorter cycles at present, but it can also work as long-term storage.
It's more expensive than comparable battery storage to build, unless you can find a mega geographical feature to take advantage of. And there aren't enough of those for significant long term storage, anyway.
And stuff like this is also pants. Y'all are gonna love this but I finally geolocated Energy Vault's 25MW/100 MWh gravity-based storage project in Rudong County, Jiangsu, China.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Storing from summer to winter is never going to be viable, or realistic.
Storing from day to night certainly can be.
Especially adding if you work away from home then night will be both when you use the electricity, run your washing machine/dryer etc, and plug in your car etc
Currently those who are away from home during the day don't gain much from solar EV, unless they can add a battery in which case it is transformative.
Never say never. There's no physics reason why it is not possible, we just haven't found it yet.
(In fact it's possible now ofc but not very efficiently. We could use the summer electricity to split water, then generate electricity from the hydrogen in the winter.)
Gravity storage, e.g. pumping water uphill, is known technology that works well. You can pump water uphill in the summer and use it to generate electricity in winter. We tend to use stored power like that on shorter cycles at present, but it can also work as long-term storage.
Again technology that works better on a daily basis than an annual one though. Far better for tidal then solar.
Pushing water up hill when the tide is generating power, then back when its not, can work and repeat on a daily or even twice-daily basis.
I'd shudder to think the cost of pushing water uphill for six months then letting it back down for another six months, with each bit of water effectively being moved once per year instead of twice per day.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
Mm - define 'economically viable'.
Birmingham to Crewe is certainly the least costly. But I'd say 'economically viable' would be your balance of costs and benefits. So: a) what benefits does the economic case of the business case say it delivers? b) does it deliver those if the other sections are not delivered? c) what about the other non-quantified benefits (which are in all likelihood greater than those which have been quantified) - e.g. regeneration benefits, e.g. capacity relief, e.g. sections which deliver parts of other proposed investments?
Answer: it's complicated!
Its not that complicated.
If they don't build phase 2a to Crewe, six tracks (four Trent Valley and Two HS2) will converge on un grade separated Colwich Junction and two track Shugborough Tunnel.
It's a total clusterfuck. That is such a pinchpoint that an upgrade to bypass it all was already planned before being canned when HS2 came along.
Er, the Stone avoiding line diverges *before* Shugborough Tunnel. So it's four lines, not two, that operate there.
It would still be a pinch point but not quite as bad a one as you think.
Colwich is where the line to stoke on trent goes of and the WCML goes down to 2 track north of it through Shugborough Tunnel.
All it carries is two of the Euston to Manchesters per hour (down trains thereof also conflict with up trains from Stafford at Colwich).
If the "stone avoiding line" had a route back to the West Coast Main Line north of Stafford, you might have a point, but it dosent south of Crewe. Although the Stoke to Crewe Line being electrified in the last few years helps.
It carries far more than 2tph at peak periods. More like 8 (or four each way).
Also, if there were no crossover at Stone it couldn't carry trains to Stoke.
I agree it would be better if it were grade separated, but your earlier claim of 'six tracks going down to two tracks' was simply daft.
Eh?
You can't go Colwich - Stone Avoiding line - back to WCML (before Crewe and slowly at any rate)
It is basically a branch.
The WCML is four track, then two HS2 tracks will join it a few miles before it becomes 2 track through Shugborough Tunnel.
As to 4TPH in the peak service, to Stoke avoiding Stafford is still 2PH (3 tph from Manchester to Euton, but one goes via Wilmslow and Crewe).
There is an extra Manchester to Euston via Stoke in the morning peak, but that goes via Stafford and Birmingham, same as all the Crosscountries (as did the London Midland Euston to Crewe via Stafford and Stoke before they decided to bypass Stoke and send it fast from Stafford to Crewe).
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I think it's about half that in terms of households with solar. It should be said that there is a reason for that - even with higher energy prices, the investment just isn't worth it for a lot of people in terms of the time it would take to recover the up-front cost (and potential for repair costs) given the roof space, direction in which it faces, and part of the country.
That might well shift over time, but the fact we could have more solar panels in more places isn't some secret - it's just that a lot of people have done the maths and it doesn't at the moment add up. That's hard-nosed businesses as well as individuals. I mean Tesco have a lot of car parks and a lot of roofs - some have solar panels, but a lot don't and not, I suspect, because they haven't considered if it's a good investment.
What is deeply frustrating (at least for those like me obsessed with the balance of payments) is that even with those figures we are only generating about 84% of the power we need and are importing the rest. We really want to get to a situation between wind and solar that we are a net exporter of energy. We are a long way short of that. https://grid.iamkate.com/
One large nuclear plant (or a dozen small ones) solves that problem forever.
Fund the RR mini nukes, or phone S Korea. Our existing nuclear plans are pants.
Yes. I dislike picking winners, but the RR SMRs are a viable technology with massive export potential. They have two competitors, an American company that has scrapped the idea thanks to a lack of orders, and the Chinese. Just put in the order for the first half dozen, encompassing half the development budget, and the rest should sort itself.
Or indeed the Koreans, as is very much in evidence in my part of the world. They work and are now easily enough replicable.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
UK is just in the sweet spot of not having widespread residential air conditioning, because 30ºC is something only seen for a week or two a year, and that doesn’t inconvenience most people.
I can inform PB that aircon is barely known in houses/apartments in central France, despite temps now often hitting the high 30s (and becoming unbearable)
eg I've been looking for apartments to rent in the Auvergne this week. In one area I found about 40 flats (often very nice), only two had aircon. I also noticed they were considerably more expensive
Suggest you invest in a moderately sized desk fan.
They generally do have fans, but there comes a point (35C?) when fans just churn up the hot air
Happily the extreme heat ends today
I was going to suggest a plug in air conditioning unit, but if you're only staying for a week that's a lot of kit to be carting on to the next place! We've got one - it makes it possible to sleep on the 4 or 5 days a year when it's impossible to sleep and is far more appropriately proportional than plugging a unit in. More portable too - though possibly not portable enough for a week's stay.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
Mm - define 'economically viable'.
Birmingham to Crewe is certainly the least costly. But I'd say 'economically viable' would be your balance of costs and benefits. So: a) what benefits does the economic case of the business case say it delivers? b) does it deliver those if the other sections are not delivered? c) what about the other non-quantified benefits (which are in all likelihood greater than those which have been quantified) - e.g. regeneration benefits, e.g. capacity relief, e.g. sections which deliver parts of other proposed investments?
Answer: it's complicated!
Its not that complicated.
If they don't build phase 2a to Crewe, six tracks (four Trent Valley and Two HS2) will converge on un grade separated Colwich Junction and two track Shugborough Tunnel.
It's a total clusterfuck. That is such a pinchpoint that an upgrade to bypass it all was already planned before being canned when HS2 came along.
Er, the Stone avoiding line diverges *before* Shugborough Tunnel. So it's four lines, not two, that operate there.
It would still be a pinch point but not quite as bad a one as you think.
Colwich is where the line to stoke on trent goes of and the WCML goes down to 2 track north of it through Shugborough Tunnel.
All it carries is two of the Euston to Manchesters per hour (down trains thereof also conflict with up trains from Stafford at Colwich).
If the "stone avoiding line" had a route back to the West Coast Main Line north of Stafford, you might have a point, but it dosent south of Crewe. Although the Stoke to Crewe Line being electrified in the last few years helps.
It carries far more than 2tph at peak periods. More like 8 (or four each way).
Also, if there were no crossover at Stone it couldn't carry trains to Stoke.
I agree it would be better if it were grade separated, but your earlier claim of 'six tracks going down to two tracks' was simply daft.
Eh?
You can't go Colwich - Stone Avoiding line - back to WCML (before Crewe and slowly at any rate)
It is basically a branch.
The WCML is four track, then two HS2 tracks will join it a few miles before it becomes 2 track through Shugborough Tunnel.
As to 4TPH in the peak service, to Stoke avoiding Stafford is still 2PH (3 tph from Manchester to Euton, but one goes via Wilmslow and Crewe).
There is an extra Manchester to Euston via Stoke in the morning peak, but that goes via Stafford and Birmingham, same as all the Crosscountries (as did the London Midland Euston to Crewe via Stafford and Stoke before they decided to bypass Stoke and send it fast from Stafford to Crewe).
Rail planning is one of those areas in which it is quite astonishing how many really quite knowledgeable people there are on here.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Storing from summer to winter is never going to be viable, or realistic.
Storing from day to night certainly can be.
Especially adding if you work away from home then night will be both when you use the electricity, run your washing machine/dryer etc, and plug in your car etc
Currently those who are away from home during the day don't gain much from solar EV, unless they can add a battery in which case it is transformative.
Never say never. There's no physics reason why it is not possible, we just haven't found it yet.
(In fact it's possible now ofc but not very efficiently. We could use the summer electricity to split water, then generate electricity from the hydrogen in the winter.)
Gravity storage, e.g. pumping water uphill, is known technology that works well. You can pump water uphill in the summer and use it to generate electricity in winter. We tend to use stored power like that on shorter cycles at present, but it can also work as long-term storage.
The problem is capital cost to benefit ratio for a setup used on slow cycles, and because there's maintenance etc.
If you need to store 10,000 kWh of energy in a reservoir for one house, you need a lorra-lorra water and a lorra-lorra gubbins for each house, eg It helps to happen to own a reservoir (techncially 2 reservoirs).
I'm too lazy to run the numbers on a day like this.
But roughly, consider an Olympic swimming pool 50m x 20m x 2m deep (this is Paris); that is 2000 cubic m of water. Put it 10m in the air, say on your roof.
Potential energy (Ug) = m.g.h
Here m = 2,000 tonnes. h = 10m, g = 9.8 wotsits.
So potential energy = 196,000 kJ.
I make that 54kWh.
So unless I have a decimal point or something else wrong, which is very possible, I make it you need 10000/54 = 185 Olympic swimming pools of water raised through 10m.
Plenty of other factors apply - eg the round-trip efficiency will be ~2/3, you may not need the full storage number due to peak-trough (but I did not say you would).
Mel Stride has been backed this morning but remains the outsider of six. His price has more than halved to 14/1 in a thin Betfair market.
Probably a good way to lose the other half of their votes next election. fwiw I think Jenrick would be the best choice.
Jenrick I personally don't like at all, but you could be right.
This is one contest in which I have a genuinely open-mind.
As an outsider who'd like to be able to vote Con, my preference is Cleverly. Kemi might be brilliant, or she might be seriously disappointing. Tom Tug would be ok.
Cleverly is a wrong un as well as useless, I would count my fingers after shaking his hand.
The new government will never have more goodwill than they do now, a month into a large majority.
Yet they’ve actually been very timid with the annoucements, and made some basic errors such as cancelling infrastructure projects to pay for current spending, especially their old friends in the public sector unions.
The 22% raise for those who already earn well above average wage comes across as particularly egregious, and will no doubt inspire other unions to ask for the same. A 22% offer that’s been described as derisory by the union involved, the leader of which does his best to come across as Arthur Scargill with a stethoscope.
It's a curious set of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled because most of them were pie in sky crap (the restoring your railway ones) or could be argued to be ongoing expenditure (is it really investment if you are replacing an existing hospital)...
You then have the very contentious A303 Stonehenge tunnel and an A27 scheme which the locals seem to actively hate...
So I see a couple of political point scoring victories (A303,A27) hidden in the cost cutting there, a pile of populist crap (the restoring railways "projects") and a question over what is investment..
I don’t know about the A27, but the A303 has been top of the agenda for at least three decades now, and the HS2 link to Euston leaves a white elephant of a line that no-one actually going to London is going to use except with promotional fares, and adds more human congestion to the reduced number of trains on the legacy main lines. The Thames crossing has already spend a quarter of a billion on paperwork, and don’t start me on Heathrow’s third runway.
All of these should have been done a long, long time ago, and it’s disappointing to see a new government kick the can just as the last one did. And the one before that.
Heathrow's third runway isn't a money issue - that would be paid for by Heathrow.
As for HS2 - my opinion is that once it was designed it should have been built as is - but Euston should be being advertised as the 2/3 different projects it is so that people know where the money is going...
I'm less concerned about delaying the final part to Euston (a) because I think they will do it eventually and (b) it doesn't invalidate the rest of the line.
Much play is made that people don't want to journey to Old Oak Common. But they mostly don't want to go to Euston either. Almost everyone wants to go to a station in London and from there take local transport to their final destination. Old Oak Common fulfills that role as does Euston. A third of passengers would choose to get off at Old Oak Common anyway, it's marginal for many of the rest and almost everyone will make the trip to Old Oak Common if that's where the station is. The main effect is to overload the Elizabeth Line.
I'm a lot more concerned about the section to Crewe. If you don't put the capacity in to a similar specification as the southern part, it undermines the whole project.
edit - you already made both my points further down..
Isn't the Birmingham to Crewe bit the most economically viable part of the entire project?
After that I thought it was the HSb (Eastern Leg) and then the bit to Manchester?
Mm - define 'economically viable'.
Birmingham to Crewe is certainly the least costly. But I'd say 'economically viable' would be your balance of costs and benefits. So: a) what benefits does the economic case of the business case say it delivers? b) does it deliver those if the other sections are not delivered? c) what about the other non-quantified benefits (which are in all likelihood greater than those which have been quantified) - e.g. regeneration benefits, e.g. capacity relief, e.g. sections which deliver parts of other proposed investments?
Answer: it's complicated!
Its not that complicated.
If they don't build phase 2a to Crewe, six tracks (four Trent Valley and Two HS2) will converge on un grade separated Colwich Junction and two track Shugborough Tunnel.
It's a total clusterfuck. That is such a pinchpoint that an upgrade to bypass it all was already planned before being canned when HS2 came along.
Er, the Stone avoiding line diverges *before* Shugborough Tunnel. So it's four lines, not two, that operate there.
It would still be a pinch point but not quite as bad a one as you think.
Colwich is where the line to stoke on trent goes of and the WCML goes down to 2 track north of it through Shugborough Tunnel.
All it carries is two of the Euston to Manchesters per hour (down trains thereof also conflict with up trains from Stafford at Colwich).
If the "stone avoiding line" had a route back to the West Coast Main Line north of Stafford, you might have a point, but it dosent south of Crewe. Although the Stoke to Crewe Line being electrified in the last few years helps.
It carries far more than 2tph at peak periods. More like 8 (or four each way).
Also, if there were no crossover at Stone it couldn't carry trains to Stoke.
I agree it would be better if it were grade separated, but your earlier claim of 'six tracks going down to two tracks' was simply daft.
Eh?
You can't go Colwich - Stone Avoiding line - back to WCML (before Crewe and slowly at any rate)
It is basically a branch.
The WCML is four track, then two HS2 tracks will join it a few miles before it becomes 2 track through Shugborough Tunnel.
As to 4TPH in the peak service, to Stoke avoiding Stafford is still 2PH (3 tph from Manchester to Euton, but one goes via Wilmslow and Crewe).
There is an extra Manchester to Euston via Stoke in the morning peak, but that goes via Stafford and Birmingham, same as all the Crosscountries (as did the London Midland Euston to Crewe via Stafford and Stoke before they decided to bypass Stoke and send it fast from Stafford to Crewe).
Rail planning is one of those areas in which it is quite astonishing how many really quite knowledgeable people there are on here.
Although they don't include that particular poster, who not only doesn't know the track layout but describes a line as 'basically a branch' before noting it takes fast services...
Are Labour really going to bring in the school fees VAT in January mid way through a school year?
That feels bizarre to me.
They’re attempting to make it retrospective to this September, but can’t get the legislation through in time.
Which I suspect will lead to a well-funded legal challenge.
Any evidence to back the September claim up?
Because if they were doing that they would have had to do it yesterday and instead all they said January.. (Remember this sort of trick is something I'm very aware of - so the wording yesterday was interesting and carefully created a distinct line)...
Reality is that by implementing it in January and announcing yesterday after the school year and finished it's designed to minimise the number of people able to move schools before September which is probably a relief to both State and Private schools...
Although it does rather mess up people who are already struggling to pay school fees...
So we’ll get a winter of freezing pensioner headlines followed by a January of taking the little darlings out of school/could state schools be overwhelmed headlines. Plus whatever comes down the line in the budget in October.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much by way of a Labour honeymoon. That doesn’t mean that the Tories are going to suddenly look amazing (they’re not). But it will be interesting to see what the polls are coming out with early next year.
Not optimal… but then I guess they’re getting these hits out of the way early.
I LOL at Labour for the private school fees move.
I think Starmer reckons it'll be another foxhunting ban moment. But foxhunting was directly supported by very few people, and this move will affect many, many more people directly. It'll cheer those who hate people who are richer than them; but dismay many more.
Personally I’m a VAT supremacist, so this is grist to the mill. VAT on everything!
VAT on everything is a fair argument. But this is VAT on something very specific and targeted, mostly for ideological reasons rather than attempting to raise revenue.
It’s red meat to an activist base who think every private school is just like “Boris Johnson’s Eton”.
And it may well work out that Boris Johnson Eton comes out ahead on the changes, and it small / special needs schools that are the ones most effected.
If you want an extra £1bn from rich people there are much easier ways to get it.
Starmer doesn’t give a fuck how much money it raises. It was a high protein plant based meat substitute policy for his base that doesn’t repel centrist dickheads and can't be proved to cost a shitload of cash. He needed his base as hard as a fucking brick to work the GE for him.
It was and is smart politics. All of this wanking off about how much it will raise or cost totally misses the point of it. The lachrymose grief of the bottom half of the bourgeoisie is a splendid by-product, not the prime intent.
And the children with disrupted education, the good teachers now unemployed and the closed businesses?
All for a spiteful and envious policy that will damage the country overall.
And we've got five years of the crap that 20% of the electorate foisted on us.
This could be a re-run of the Wilson administration 1974-1979, just with a bigger majority.
Not really, to have a re-run like that you need a slender majority forcing decisions in a particular direction...
Well with talk like this, they had better deliver. If they don't, it's not entirely impossible to see them losing their majority in five years.
Rayner accuses Badenoch of not understanding why Tories lost election, with housing key factor Rayner starts by wishing Badenoch luck with her leadership bid. She says it was Badenoch’s ambition to be leader of the opposition, not hers.
She says she thinks there are a few things Badenoch “has not understood”.
One is that the Tories lost the election. Another is that they left services in a mess, including failing to meet their housing targets.
She says the Conservatives '“are talking to themselves, not the country”...
OTOH, if they do, then it's going to be a very long stint in opposition for Kemi.
If Labour manage to deliver a Britain in which housing is as affordable as it was for our parents' generation they will deserve a long spell in power. Can't disagree - housing is possibly the biggest issue there is right now.
They won't.
They could of course but the only way to do that is to effectvely nationalise housebuilding and have local councils or Central Government build hundreds of thousands of houses themselves. It won't happen - even though actually it would be a good idea if it did. People continue to refuse tounderstand that the problem with housebuilding is the housebuilders. When prices stagnate they stop building to ensure the prices start rising again.
Labour have an opportunity here at the start of Parliament and with a massive landslide majority.
Merge National Insurance and Income Tax and create a single Income Tax rate that is paid by all adults of all ages on the same income equitably.
No increase at all in Income Tax for those who are working and on PAYE.
Doubt they will do this. Will burn lots of political capital, will inevitably increase taxes for some groups, and althoygh logical, isn't a top priority.
I think they need to find a way of raising more money that isn't too unpopular. Reducing the very generous pension tax reliefs for higher earners is the obvious move imo.
Except that will result in a lot of people doing less work - little point doing a full 5 day week if tax makes it more sensible to work a 4 or even 3 day week...
The people who are impacted by those sort of changes aren't earning day to day living expenses they have savings and options...
Doubt it would be a major factor honestly. Anyone earning over £50k is a higher rate taxpayer.
Most of those are not so wealthy that they could easily afford a 20 or 40% drop in income.
Doing so because they only get 20% pension relief rather than 40% would be a very strange financial decision to make.
And yet that is what @MisterBedfordshire said earlier and is the experience of many others.
I carefully kept my income below £50,000 to ensure I kept child benefit for many years and last year played similar games to keep my income below £100,000...
Remove full tax relief on my large pension contribution and a 4 day week sounds very nice...
I may need to look at these games, and pulling my kids out of private school, when we get to the Autumn and we know the lie of the land in the budget. Already tough as it is. It will get harder.
Of course, that will mean much less tax for the exchequer, and a bigger burden on the State, but hey ho, that's what you get when you try and squeeze people dry.
There was an opportunity to reset the tax narrative for Labour and remove the cliff edges but they've failed to do so. Another 5 years at least with people going part time or using tax avoidance at £100k.
I've shifted down to 3.5 days per week in my new job to stay below the cliff edge from an earlier agreed 4 day week. I now get Wednesday afternoon and Fridays with my kids which I think is a better use of my time than working so I can give the government 62% of the increment.
I'm rapidly approaching the same conclusion.
F**k this. I've been away from them on-site for the past 9 days and haven't even seen them.
Ah man, 9 days on in a row is shitty, fully understand if you pick the part time route as well, it's a much less stressful life and I'm grateful we're able to do it.
This old centrist learnt a long time ago you work to live, you don't live to work.
No one ever retired wishing they had done more work - I know I didn't.
It is a matter of some considerable regret to me that, having later in life broken into an area of work in which I am interested and have a small degree of talent, I will die before my work is done. I can make a small contribution but if I had had more money and started twenty years ago i could have done much more.
Comments
House batteries, or house heat batteries, are more interesting. But the best idea is always to reduce energy consumption first, then any techical solutions can be smaller and less expensive.
This is a problem for the USA. The whole place uses energy like a collection of Usonians, so any energy storage has to be 2-3 times bigger than here for a proportional impact.
* There are certain exceptions at community level, but it's all very out-of-the-ordinary and a bit specialist. Better to deploy the simple stuff.
A tragedy
Clearly not true for teachers etc. But it will put a squeeze on the administrative civil service.
Isn't that what your mob want ?
eg I've been looking for apartments to rent in the Auvergne this week. In one area I found about 40 flats (often very nice), only two had aircon. I also noticed they were considerably more expensive
Cost of installation (if complication free) is £7k for 3.5Kw (peak) system (by the look of it sans batteries).
They say you can save best case amount of £600 pa if you export to the grid on smart export guarantee, based on July 2024 prices.
That is a twelve year payback.
If there are complications causing an extra thousand or two on installation or the amount saved isn't as much as hoped then the payback becomes much longer.
A lot seems to depend on whether price of eleftricity rises or falls over the coming years, given these figures are for still quite historically high prices.
https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/advice/solar-panels/
Labour has so far refused to exempt around a dozen schools which exclusively teach children with special needs from paying VAT and business rates. The party has instead stressed that children in receipt of EHCPs will be exempt from any fee rises. Headmasters have warned they will be forced to pass on the cost of VAT to parents without an EHCP in place before the tax raid comes into force.
Just 7,600 special needs pupils at private schools currently have an EHCP, while 103,000 do not, according to the Independent Schools Council (ISC), an industry body for private schools.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/private-school-vat-special-needs-children-broken-labour/
I think it was announced yesterday that those funded by local authorities, the local authority has to ask for the refund from central government, but that could be a very lengthy process.
PA, MI and WI would*.
So it is probably on balance better to focus on shoring up support in the latter 3 than it is in the others, albeit they could really do with nabbing one of NV, AZ and GA because it gives a nice buffer.
*also note that assumes Harris wins the sole EV vote from Nebraska which is oft overlooked. I assume given that no one talks about it that she would but it doesn’t feel like a great idea to rely on it?
Our existing nuclear plans are pants.
At least it’s not on a Friday this time.
Just checked what happened to the plumber, and he said he was shopped by his ex-wife after they divorced
Also, if there were no crossover at Stone it couldn't carry trains to Stoke.
I agree it would be better if it were grade separated, but your earlier claim of 'six tracks going down to two tracks' was simply daft.
And S Korea have a standardised design we should be using not allowing the French to use as yet another pilot scheme...
Which means, of course, if enough children leave, the school becomes unviable and shuts and takes no more SEND students, who go back into the state sector.
But @Dura_Ace was right - this isn't about good educational policy. Labour don't care about that any more than Hood, Spielman or Cummings do.
Happily the extreme heat ends today
Solar is nice to have, but is no solution to energy requirements/climate change as the sun shines the least in winter when we need the most energy. For that wind is far better.
A good thing with solar and wind is they're pretty complementary. Sunny days when the wind isn't blowing can complement dark days when the wind is.
NEW THREAD
(Though talk to primary school teachers, and they will tell you the Blair/Brown governments did a great job.)
And stuff like this is also pants.
Y'all are gonna love this but I finally geolocated Energy Vault's 25MW/100 MWh gravity-based storage project in Rudong County, Jiangsu, China.
For a project with 1/30th the storage capacity of the Moss Landing battery facility in California, it's sure chonky.
https://x.com/wang_seaver/status/1818074729493971041
Pushing water up hill when the tide is generating power, then back when its not, can work and repeat on a daily or even twice-daily basis.
I'd shudder to think the cost of pushing water uphill for six months then letting it back down for another six months, with each bit of water effectively being moved once per year instead of twice per day.
You can't go Colwich - Stone Avoiding line - back to WCML (before Crewe and slowly at any rate)
It is basically a branch.
The WCML is four track, then two HS2 tracks will join it a few miles before it becomes 2 track through Shugborough Tunnel.
As to 4TPH in the peak service, to Stoke avoiding Stafford is still 2PH (3 tph from Manchester to Euton, but one goes via Wilmslow and Crewe).
There is an extra Manchester to Euston via Stoke in the morning peak, but that goes via Stafford and Birmingham, same as all the Crosscountries (as did the London Midland Euston to Crewe via Stafford and Stoke before they decided to bypass Stoke and send it fast from Stafford to Crewe).
Or indeed the Koreans, as is very much in evidence in my part of the world. They work and are now easily enough replicable.
If you need to store 10,000 kWh of energy in a reservoir for one house, you need a lorra-lorra water and a lorra-lorra gubbins for each house, eg It helps to happen to own a reservoir (techncially 2 reservoirs).
I'm too lazy to run the numbers on a day like this.
But roughly, consider an Olympic swimming pool 50m x 20m x 2m deep (this is Paris); that is 2000 cubic m of water. Put it 10m in the air, say on your roof.
Potential energy (Ug) = m.g.h
Here m = 2,000 tonnes. h = 10m, g = 9.8 wotsits.
So potential energy = 196,000 kJ.
I make that 54kWh.
So unless I have a decimal point or something else wrong, which is very possible, I make it you need 10000/54 = 185 Olympic swimming pools of water raised through 10m.
Plenty of other factors apply - eg the round-trip efficiency will be ~2/3, you may not need the full storage number due to peak-trough (but I did not say you would).
But it is a lot of water to be moved around.
They could of course but the only way to do that is to effectvely nationalise housebuilding and have local councils or Central Government build hundreds of thousands of houses themselves. It won't happen - even though actually it would be a good idea if it did. People continue to refuse tounderstand that the problem with housebuilding is the housebuilders. When prices stagnate they stop building to ensure the prices start rising again.