Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
Not for a determined government. As MM notes, with the right legislation, they could get it going this parliament; no need for enquiries.
But Labour aren't going to do it, so in that respect, you're right.
On that note.
It cost £297m to produce the Lower Thames Crossing's 359,866 page long planning application.
That's more than it cost Norway to build the world's longest road tunnel.
This is why I get depressed just thinking about Britain now. It is humiliation after humiliation.. Chagos and this in 2 days
What a pathetic shambles of a country, what a great falling off
And this is why thinking about Britain is a bit like phone calls with my demented mother. The reality is distressing. Avert the gaze
Well you could always bugger off and not come back. You clearly neither understand nor like the place. Yet, mysteriously, you seek to be paid for your continuous denigration of your motherland.
Its not a conversation with the demented you are having, it is you playing Jack Manningham in Gas Light...
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Echoes a thing I was thinking about here recently- the difference between "what's the endpoint?" and "what's the next useful thing to do?"
At some point in the not-too-distant future, humanity needs to Stop Burning Stuff to release energy. The cumulative consequences are too bad, the amount of stuff available is too finite and too useful for other things. Sorry, but that's how it is. However, in the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities to substantially reduce the amount of stuff being burnt. Coal is now out of the electricity mix, and this year we have had windy and sunny days where gas has made a pretty minimal contribution.
Wind and solar both have plenty of potential to expand, and work well as incremental developments rather than Big Berthas. And yes, that leaves the question of what to do when they both fail- at the moment, burning methane is the best answer we have. Changing that needs to happen, but that's about the endgame. We can get most of the way to where we need by gradually doing things that we do understand how to do- electrification with renewables and stopping some of the silly shoddy wastes of energy.
(Anecdote: as one of those dreadful WFH types, I'm currently having a garden office built. Yes, I know. It's not having solar panels- it's not something the builder had experience of, and keeping things simple felt desirable. But I probably should have explored it more at this stage, and it's an obvious thing to do as the Next Damnfool Project.)
You should have installed solar panels on there, because increasingly, the biggest cost of getting them installed is labour. If you're already getting building work done, then the incremental cost of a few panels may well be negligible.
It is remarkable how many Brexiteers revel in voting for a lie on the side of a bus.
Boast about it, even.
Maybe one day they will figure it out...
You really are incapable of considering the possibility that other people can look at the same facts, weigh them differently, and come to a different conclusion aren’t you? You assume they must all be stupid. Says more about you really.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Echoes a thing I was thinking about here recently- the difference between "what's the endpoint?" and "what's the next useful thing to do?"
At some point in the not-too-distant future, humanity needs to Stop Burning Stuff to release energy. The cumulative consequences are too bad, the amount of stuff available is too finite and too useful for other things. Sorry, but that's how it is. However, in the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities to substantially reduce the amount of stuff being burnt. Coal is now out of the electricity mix, and this year we have had windy and sunny days where gas has made a pretty minimal contribution.
Wind and solar both have plenty of potential to expand, and work well as incremental developments rather than Big Berthas. And yes, that leaves the question of what to do when they both fail- at the moment, burning methane is the best answer we have. Changing that needs to happen, but that's about the endgame. We can get most of the way to where we need by gradually doing things that we do understand how to do- electrification with renewables and stopping some of the silly shoddy wastes of energy.
(Anecdote: as one of those dreadful WFH types, I'm currently having a garden office built. Yes, I know. It's not having solar panels- it's not something the builder had experience of, and keeping things simple felt desirable. But I probably should have explored it more at this stage, and it's an obvious thing to do as the Next Damnfool Project.)
My father-in-law has been very sceptical of solar panels for a long time. Thought they were useless. This reached a nadir when his brother-in-law bought some crappy decades-old solar panels and moaned about how little energy they produced.
And then. A guy came to have his alloy wheel fixed. This guy sells solar panels. They get to talking, and my father-in-law now has a few dozen of the latest and greatest bi-facial solar panels ready to put up on his shed. They'll generate so much power at peak that he had to order two inverters to handle the load. He's so proud of them, talking about how many volts he could pick up on them when it was overcast, while they're still standing about in shrink-wrap.
I'll certainly be doing solar panels as soon as I can.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking of solar like it is now: as in, there are some panels on some rooves.
There will be 1,000x as many panels generating electricity in the UK (or Ireland) in 25 years time as now.
They will be so cheap, that almost every surface, horizontal or vertical, will be generating energy.
I can't find the numbers on solar insolation on December just now, but I think the surface area of solar panels required at ~51N would be impractical. Not on cost grounds, but just in terms of space.
Perhaps building three months worth of natural gas storage and shifting the summer surplus to power the winter makes it possible.
Why do pollsters try to extract quantitative results from qualitative research methods?
' On Kemi Badenoch: "Unconvincing" "As bad as Suella Braverman" "Strong, honest" "It sounds a bit corporate. There was a lack of sincerity. It needed more oomph" "It was a bit Liz Truss-y"
💥 On Tom Tugendhat: "Impressed" "He's a soldier, so he's probably a bit more down to earth" "More engaging" "Limp. Boring" "I was drawn into what he was saying... confident, articulate" "More capable compared to the bluffing and blustering of everyone else... maybe he is less self-serving'
💥 On Rob Jenrick: "Cringeworthy" "Honest" "Too animated. Too much coffee" "I liked what he said about the migration. But then he ruined it with all the cheap jokes and snides, and the fact he thought he was really fun with it put me right off" "A bit flimsy. A smug face" "That's not someone I would even want leading the school PTA"
💥 On James Cleverly: "He went on about things they didn't deliver, like on Brexit" "Good candour" "Patronising" "Arrogant" "Arrogant" "Arrogant" "Arrogant" "The worst"' https://x.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1842161408806621353
So voters like the candidate who's currently trending last. Will the (s)electorate of the leadership campaign care?
7 people in a focus group. For all we know they did several and the outlet chose the one it preferred.
Stop reaching for conspiracy theories. There are limits to what one can tell from a single focus group and it may not reflect broader views well, but claims that polling companies or BBC5Live are deliberately skewing results are unfounded and, AIUI, against PB rules.
I have not suggested polling impropriety I have suggested that it is possible that several focus groups were conducted and 5Live chose its preferred option. It's not against PB policy to criticise 5live - at least I hope it's not.
You wrote, "Sorry but there's been some real utter bullshit from pollsters on this leadership campaign. We've had all this ramping of Cleverly, polls of Tory members where he inexplicably comes top and wins all head to heads." You didn't say from 5Live there, you said, from pollsters.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
Not for a determined government. As MM notes, with the right legislation, they could get it going this parliament; no need for enquiries.
But Labour aren't going to do it, so in that respect, you're right.
On that note.
It cost £297m to produce the Lower Thames Crossing's 359,866 page long planning application.
That's more than it cost Norway to build the world's longest road tunnel.
(Yes, they're activists, but it looks fairly well done)
From the site you reference: "The Development Consent Order (DCO) planning application was actually 554 documents (not 2,383 claimed), and totalled 63,330 pages, not 359,000 [7]."
Only 63,330 pages - so that's OK then.
I think this is a bit like the people who tried to argue that the number Dom Cummings painted on the side of a bus was arguably slightly out.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking of solar like it is now: as in, there are some panels on some rooves.
There will be 1,000x as many panels generating electricity in the UK (or Ireland) in 25 years time as now.
They will be so cheap, that almost every surface, horizontal or vertical, will be generating energy.
I can't find the numbers on solar insolation on December just now, but I think the surface area of solar panels required at ~51N would be impractical. Not on cost grounds, but just in terms of space.
Perhaps building three months worth of natural gas storage and shifting the summer surplus to power the winter makes it possible.
From ChatGPT, so it may be wildly inaccurate:
Love it. We have an orange warning for rain here tomorrow, so perhaps I'll check how badly wrong it is then.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
Not for a determined government. As MM notes, with the right legislation, they could get it going this parliament; no need for enquiries.
But Labour aren't going to do it, so in that respect, you're right.
On that note.
It cost £297m to produce the Lower Thames Crossing's 359,866 page long planning application.
That's more than it cost Norway to build the world's longest road tunnel.
(Yes, they're activists, but it looks fairly well done)
From the site you reference: "The Development Consent Order (DCO) planning application was actually 554 documents (not 2,383 claimed), and totalled 63,330 pages, not 359,000 [7]."
Only 63,330 pages - so that's OK then.
I think this is a bit like the people who tried to argue that the number Dom Cummings painted on the side of a bus was arguably slightly out.
Nearly a sixfold error is worth pointing out.
The site also points out that much of the document is autogenerated, and the stuff about the planning costing £300m is way off - the £120m land purchases are included in the figure, for instance. Presumably land in rural Norway is a bit cheaper.
It is remarkable how many Brexiteers revel in voting for a lie on the side of a bus.
Boast about it, even.
Maybe one day they will figure it out...
One number to "figure out" is 3,025. That is the number of days since the Brexit vote. And every one of those days, you have been triggered by that bus.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking of solar like it is now: as in, there are some panels on some rooves.
There will be 1,000x as many panels generating electricity in the UK (or Ireland) in 25 years time as now.
They will be so cheap, that almost every surface, horizontal or vertical, will be generating energy.
I can't find the numbers on solar insolation on December just now, but I think the surface area of solar panels required at ~51N would be impractical. Not on cost grounds, but just in terms of space.
Perhaps building three months worth of natural gas storage and shifting the summer surplus to power the winter makes it possible.
From ChatGPT, so it may be wildly inaccurate:
Love it. We have an orange warning for rain here tomorrow, so perhaps I'll check how badly wrong it is then.
Using one of the intermediate figures in that, average electricity use for a house is, I think, about 15kWh per day - that's the figure used when they say a power station can power x,000 homes.
ChatGPT says you'd get electricity generation of 0.1875kWh/m2/day. So you'd need 80m2 per house. That's not as bad as I thought.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Echoes a thing I was thinking about here recently- the difference between "what's the endpoint?" and "what's the next useful thing to do?"
At some point in the not-too-distant future, humanity needs to Stop Burning Stuff to release energy. The cumulative consequences are too bad, the amount of stuff available is too finite and too useful for other things. Sorry, but that's how it is. However, in the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities to substantially reduce the amount of stuff being burnt. Coal is now out of the electricity mix, and this year we have had windy and sunny days where gas has made a pretty minimal contribution.
Wind and solar both have plenty of potential to expand, and work well as incremental developments rather than Big Berthas. And yes, that leaves the question of what to do when they both fail- at the moment, burning methane is the best answer we have. Changing that needs to happen, but that's about the endgame. We can get most of the way to where we need by gradually doing things that we do understand how to do- electrification with renewables and stopping some of the silly shoddy wastes of energy.
(Anecdote: as one of those dreadful WFH types, I'm currently having a garden office built. Yes, I know. It's not having solar panels- it's not something the builder had experience of, and keeping things simple felt desirable. But I probably should have explored it more at this stage, and it's an obvious thing to do as the Next Damnfool Project.)
You should have installed solar panels on there, because increasingly, the biggest cost of getting them installed is labour. If you're already getting building work done, then the incremental cost of a few panels may well be negligible.
One one hand, you're clearly right.
On the other, it would have been another pile of thinking at once. I'm pretty sure the misery of a building project scales as a high power of its complextiy. Retrofitting in a few years time will undoubtedly be more expensive, but less hassle at any given moment. And it's single-storey, so a retrofit should be relatively easy.
Besides, I had enough trouble getting this much Damnfool Project past Mrs Romford.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Indeed! Given the Republican candidate has received >50% of the vote every election since 1996, it's probably not going to make much difference. There are 6 other candidates other than Trump or Harris, but few are likely to get many votes. RFK was polling around 5%, but has now withdrawn (but will be on the ballot).
However, in 1992, Perot got 28% in Alaska, his second high proportion in the country (after Maine).
ITV 7 o'clock tonight: Boris Johnson: The Interview
In an ITV News Special, Boris Johnson sits down for an exclusive interview with ITV's Tom Bradby, ahead of the publication of the former Prime Minister's political memoir to talk about his time in office
It is remarkable how many Brexiteers revel in voting for a lie on the side of a bus.
Boast about it, even.
Maybe one day they will figure it out...
One number to "figure out" is 3,025. That is the number of days since the Brexit vote. And every one of those days, you have been triggered by that bus.
Get over it.
It's not as if the Remain side didn't also spout a load of lies and half-truths.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
Are you the world's most boring man?
I can just imagine conversation in your house, if indeed anyone still lives with or talks to you, about how you'd compare absolutely anything to being "not remotely as stupid as Brexit".
1. Microwaving a salad - Because at least you know it’s pointless before you do it, unlike, say… a certain referendum. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
2. Trying to charge a banana with a USB cable Yes, it’s illogical, but at least it doesn’t affect trade agreements with 27 countries. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
3. Asking Siri for directions to Narnia Siri might be confused, but at least it won’t be not remotely as stupid as Brexit
4. Throwing a surprise party for your goldfish Goldfish have short memories, but still longer to live than some of those who voted to leave. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
5. Using mayonnaise as sunblock You’ll get weird looks, sure, but at least your supply chains for critical goods won’t collapse. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
6. Washing your hands with peanut butter Not effective, but still a more sensible strategy than negotiating with Brussels for three years. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
7. Declaring war on a vending machine Vending machines can be frustrating, but at least they don’t demand a backstop for Ireland. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
8. Knitting a sweater out of spaghetti It won’t keep you warm, but at least it’s not triggering a constitutional crisis. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
9. Trying to vacuum the lawn A waste of time, sure—but not on the scale of proroguing Parliament to avoid making a decision. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
10. Attempting to fly by flapping your arms really hard. This may result in a sore shoulder, but won’t result in a catastrophic drop in GDP. Not remotely as stupid as Brexit.
"Not remotely as stupid as Brexit."
How stupid did Remainers have to be not to be able to stop the really stupid people pushing a stupid Brexit?
Remain - beaten by the side of a bus.
Leave - fooled by the side of a bus.
Except - that really doesn't work, does it?
Unless - you aren't really suggesting that Remainers were taken in by Cameron's "renegotiation"? That our relationship with the EU was "fundamentally changed"? REALLY?
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
What does that even mean?
We voted Leave. That Leave vote had to be enacted one way or another - we had to Leave - or democracy would have died
As long as we left then any number of further votes were (and are) permissible
Indeed I think we should have done exactly that. It should have been a 2 stage referendum - leave or remain. Then, if leave, soft or hard Brexit
ITV 7 o'clock tonight: Boris Johnson: The Interview
In an ITV News Special, Boris Johnson sits down for an exclusive interview with ITV's Tom Bradby, ahead of the publication of the former Prime Minister's political memoir to talk about his time in office
Eat your heart out, Laura.
ITV ratings tank for this evening then. Normally Emmerdale I think.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking of solar like it is now: as in, there are some panels on some rooves.
There will be 1,000x as many panels generating electricity in the UK (or Ireland) in 25 years time as now.
They will be so cheap, that almost every surface, horizontal or vertical, will be generating energy.
I can't find the numbers on solar insolation on December just now, but I think the surface area of solar panels required at ~51N would be impractical. Not on cost grounds, but just in terms of space.
Perhaps building three months worth of natural gas storage and shifting the summer surplus to power the winter makes it possible.
From ChatGPT, so it may be wildly inaccurate:
Love it. We have an orange warning for rain here tomorrow, so perhaps I'll check how badly wrong it is then.
Excellent: it'll help clean any panels that are dirty.
Even Geo Monbiot thinks Labour’s carbon capture plan is moronic
“It's a good point. Instead of taking 4 million cars off the road with the sensible integrated transport policy it promised in 1997 but never delivered, the government proposes to do something "equivalent" to taking 4m cars off the road, that won't work and will cost far more.”
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
rcs1000 said: "I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another." (A man trying to sell expensive electric cars would say that, wouldn't he?)
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
Not for a determined government. As MM notes, with the right legislation, they could get it going this parliament; no need for enquiries.
But Labour aren't going to do it, so in that respect, you're right.
On that note.
It cost £297m to produce the Lower Thames Crossing's 359,866 page long planning application.
That's more than it cost Norway to build the world's longest road tunnel.
(Yes, they're activists, but it looks fairly well done)
From the site you reference: "The Development Consent Order (DCO) planning application was actually 554 documents (not 2,383 claimed), and totalled 63,330 pages, not 359,000 [7]."
Only 63,330 pages - so that's OK then.
I think this is a bit like the people who tried to argue that the number Dom Cummings painted on the side of a bus was arguably slightly out.
Nearly a sixfold error is worth pointing out.
The site also points out that much of the document is autogenerated, and the stuff about the planning costing £300m is way off - the £120m land purchases are included in the figure, for instance. Presumably land in rural Norway is a bit cheaper.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
It makes sense once you realise this has nothing to do with the Chagossians and little to do with the UK, but is mainly about the USA wanting to secure its base on Diego Garcia. The international law issues aren't the USA's problem - Britain, you sort that out. Which is why both Biden and Trump seem to think this a good result.
Do you think the story about the Americans privately opposing the deal is cobblers then?
Yes. It is cobblers.
No sign of any equivocation here and this is the horse's mouth
"We strongly condemn the agreement between the Republic of Mauritius and the United Kingdom on the status of the Chagos Archipelago as a strategic blunder that undermines U.S. interests and regional security. Far from being a diplomatic achievement, this deal represents a colossal failure by the British government, which has naively jeopardized the future of one of the most important military assets in the Indo-Pacific.
By conceding sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, the UK has weakened its control over Diego Garcia, a critical joint U.S.-UK military base. The agreement introduces unnecessary uncertainty and creates potential friction with Mauritius over the long-term status and operations of the base, threatening its ability to function effectively. Given Diego Garcia's central role in supporting U.S. military operations and maintaining regional stability, this move is shortsighted and irresponsible.
Moreover, the British government's willingness to compromise on such a vital strategic asset reflects a profound lack of foresight. By pursuing a deal that appears politically convenient, they have failed to safeguard the long-term security interests of both the UK and the United States. This agreement risks destabilizing the carefully calibrated balance of power in the IndoPacific, potentially creating vulnerabilities in a region already facing significant security threats."
THAT??
Rather than applauding this misguided agreement, we should be deeply concerned about the consequences it will have for U.S. strategic interests and the future of our critical defense partnerships in the region
I find it interesting the highly intelligent commentators think the Chagos deal was anything other than driven by the Americans, particularly when they pretty much say it was.
That's not to say the deal was the right one from a moral view.
It depends which Americans I suppose. The ones seeking to protect and extend US/western hegemony and those seeking to switch to autocracy.
The Americans I'm talking about are the US government, who essentially told the UK to sort out Diego Garcia. You can always find other opinions.
ITV 7 o'clock tonight: Boris Johnson: The Interview
In an ITV News Special, Boris Johnson sits down for an exclusive interview with ITV's Tom Bradby, ahead of the publication of the former Prime Minister's political memoir to talk about his time in office
Eat your heart out, Laura.
ITV ratings tank for this evening then. Normally Emmerdale I think.
Indeed! Given the Republican candidate has received >50% of the vote every election since 1996, it's probably not going to make much difference. There are 6 other candidates other than Trump or Harris, but few are likely to get many votes. RFK was polling around 5%, but has now withdrawn (but will be on the ballot).
However, in 1992, Perot got 28% in Alaska, his second high proportion in the country (after Maine).
Also Maine used it last time but it didn't matter because Biden got more than 50%.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
David Cameron puts more thought into pizza toppings.
@Peston There seems to be significant faux outrage from Tory leadership candidates Cleverly and Tugendhat about the Starmer government’s transfer of the Chagos islands to Mauritius.
Official sources tell me the transfer would have happened in materially the same way at roughly the same time if Sunak had somehow won the election.
The point is that the transfer was being negotiated on the recent Tory government’s watch - including by Cleverly as foreign secretary and then by Cameron - and the deadline was in effect set by Washington.
I am told that President Biden wanted the deal done before the 5 November presidential election. Biden wanted certainty about the future of the US military base on the Chagossian island of Diego Garcia, just in case Donald Trump were to win the election.
For confirmation that the deal was clinched on a timetable and in a style to suit the US administration, see Biden’s statement that “it is a clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome longstanding historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”.
Biden pointed out that the agreement between the UK and Mauritius meant the US had secured “the effective operation of the joint [military] facility on Diego Garcia into the next century.”
It is therefore curious Tugendhat should describe the transfer as “leaving our allies” exposed when the UK’s most important ally, America, has welcomed it.
And Cleverly’s denigration of Starmer as “weak, weak, weak” for formalising it seems eccentric when the negotiations with Mauritius were in full swing when he was in the cabinet.
As for Liz Truss’s assertion that Boris Johnson is to blame, I am told that Johnson was the last PM to wholly oppose giving up sovereignty over Chagos, and that the talks did not start properly till she was PM.
If anyone in the Tory party wants to know the nitty gritty of all this, possibly they could ask for an introduction from the former minister Lord Frost - because his spouse Harriet Matthews has been the lead official negotiator for the foreign office on the Chagos treaty with Mauritius.
I don’t believe much of this. The times reports the Americans are privately angry
The Times reports without any evidence the Americans are privately unhappy. Meanwhile the Americans actually say publicly on the record they are delighted. We can all decide which source we believe. The second also does the entire miserable history of the Chagos and Diego Garcia.
Even Geo Monbiot thinks Labour’s carbon capture plan is moronic
“It's a good point. Instead of taking 4 million cars off the road with the sensible integrated transport policy it promised in 1997 but never delivered, the government proposes to do something "equivalent" to taking 4m cars off the road, that won't work and will cost far more.”
The same reason the Tories repeatedly promised to do it. The Energy Department has been captured by industry lobbyists.
You'd hope that a new government would be fresh with ideas from Opposition, but Labour appear to act as though they are an empty vessel, with no ideas or plan of their own.
Hope this works but TSE’s garish socks in all their glory at our Workingman’s Lunch today.
Many thanks to @Sean_F , @kjh@Sandpit@HYUFD and others for their good wishes for Thursday. Only a mug would predict the result, but if I am successful, it will be 45 years since first being elected a Councillor.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
Not for a determined government. As MM notes, with the right legislation, they could get it going this parliament; no need for enquiries.
But Labour aren't going to do it, so in that respect, you're right.
On that note.
It cost £297m to produce the Lower Thames Crossing's 359,866 page long planning application.
That's more than it cost Norway to build the world's longest road tunnel.
(Yes, they're activists, but it looks fairly well done)
From the site you reference: "The Development Consent Order (DCO) planning application was actually 554 documents (not 2,383 claimed), and totalled 63,330 pages, not 359,000 [7]."
Only 63,330 pages - so that's OK then.
I think this is a bit like the people who tried to argue that the number Dom Cummings painted on the side of a bus was arguably slightly out.
Nearly a sixfold error is worth pointing out.
The site also points out that much of the document is autogenerated, and the stuff about the planning costing £300m is way off - the £120m land purchases are included in the figure, for instance. Presumably land in rural Norway is a bit cheaper.
Auto generated documentation is either
1) never read - in which case is it performative bullshit 2) read - in which case it is a vast cost.
This is how we end up, for domestic projects, with a telephone directory sized project document.
That no one ever reads.
Then, when an accident happens, the lawyers get all excited about page 1248, paragraph 4.
Simple, clear rules save people’s lives. And also prevents “life changing injuries”.
But that isn’t of interest to anyone important. so fuck that.
Even Geo Monbiot thinks Labour’s carbon capture plan is moronic
“It's a good point. Instead of taking 4 million cars off the road with the sensible integrated transport policy it promised in 1997 but never delivered, the government proposes to do something "equivalent" to taking 4m cars off the road, that won't work and will cost far more.”
The same reason the Tories repeatedly promised to do it. The Energy Department has been captured by industry lobbyists.
You'd hope that a new government would be fresh with ideas from Opposition, but Labour appear to act as though they are an empty vessel, with no ideas or plan of their own.
It is the most extraordinarily inept, disappointing start to a new government. It’s also inexplicable. They had 14 years to prepare - and we get THIS?
I don’t expect anything now. It will all be like this. Same as the wet late Tories, in essence, but with more bribes for unions, even higher taxes, extra bits of Woke, and terrible treacherous foreign policy decisions like Chagos
@Peston There seems to be significant faux outrage from Tory leadership candidates Cleverly and Tugendhat about the Starmer government’s transfer of the Chagos islands to Mauritius.
Official sources tell me the transfer would have happened in materially the same way at roughly the same time if Sunak had somehow won the election.
The point is that the transfer was being negotiated on the recent Tory government’s watch - including by Cleverly as foreign secretary and then by Cameron - and the deadline was in effect set by Washington.
I am told that President Biden wanted the deal done before the 5 November presidential election. Biden wanted certainty about the future of the US military base on the Chagossian island of Diego Garcia, just in case Donald Trump were to win the election.
For confirmation that the deal was clinched on a timetable and in a style to suit the US administration, see Biden’s statement that “it is a clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome longstanding historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”.
Biden pointed out that the agreement between the UK and Mauritius meant the US had secured “the effective operation of the joint [military] facility on Diego Garcia into the next century.”
It is therefore curious Tugendhat should describe the transfer as “leaving our allies” exposed when the UK’s most important ally, America, has welcomed it.
And Cleverly’s denigration of Starmer as “weak, weak, weak” for formalising it seems eccentric when the negotiations with Mauritius were in full swing when he was in the cabinet.
As for Liz Truss’s assertion that Boris Johnson is to blame, I am told that Johnson was the last PM to wholly oppose giving up sovereignty over Chagos, and that the talks did not start properly till she was PM.
If anyone in the Tory party wants to know the nitty gritty of all this, possibly they could ask for an introduction from the former minister Lord Frost - because his spouse Harriet Matthews has been the lead official negotiator for the foreign office on the Chagos treaty with Mauritius.
I don’t believe much of this. The times reports the Americans are privately angry
The Times reports without any evidence the Americans are privately unhappy. Meanwhile the Americans actually say publicly on the record they are delighted. We can all decide which source we believe. The second also does the entire miserable history of the Chagos and Diego Garcia.
No offence but you’re a dismal fucking halfwit so let’s just leave it there
Even Geo Monbiot thinks Labour’s carbon capture plan is moronic
“It's a good point. Instead of taking 4 million cars off the road with the sensible integrated transport policy it promised in 1997 but never delivered, the government proposes to do something "equivalent" to taking 4m cars off the road, that won't work and will cost far more.”
Even Geo Monbiot thinks Labour’s carbon capture plan is moronic
“It's a good point. Instead of taking 4 million cars off the road with the sensible integrated transport policy it promised in 1997 but never delivered, the government proposes to do something "equivalent" to taking 4m cars off the road, that won't work and will cost far more.”
Hope this works but TSE’s garish socks in all their glory at our Workingman’s Lunch today.
Many thanks to @Sean_F , @kjh@Sandpit@HYUFD and others for their good wishes for Thursday. Only a mug would predict the result, but if I am successful, it will be 45 years since first being elected a Councillor.
Wishing you the best.
If @TSE was playing hardball, those would be Trump Gold Assassination Edition High-Tops !
Even Geo Monbiot thinks Labour’s carbon capture plan is moronic
“It's a good point. Instead of taking 4 million cars off the road with the sensible integrated transport policy it promised in 1997 but never delivered, the government proposes to do something "equivalent" to taking 4m cars off the road, that won't work and will cost far more.”
That was my thought exactly. You could take an awful lot of cars off the road for 22billion. And you'd have a tangible benefit at the end of it.
22,000 miles of fully segregated cycle superhighway for that kind of money.
To but that in perspective, London only has 40 miles of CS (220 miles including lower quality cycle lanes) and they have completely transformed cycling in the city.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Natural gas generally is an amazing fuel.
And what are we as a country planning to do?
Rip out our gas grid, ignore the stuff under the ground here and ban new fields in the North Sea.
We seem to have decided on national suicide, at least if our energy policy is anything to go by.
@Peston There seems to be significant faux outrage from Tory leadership candidates Cleverly and Tugendhat about the Starmer government’s transfer of the Chagos islands to Mauritius.
Official sources tell me the transfer would have happened in materially the same way at roughly the same time if Sunak had somehow won the election.
The point is that the transfer was being negotiated on the recent Tory government’s watch - including by Cleverly as foreign secretary and then by Cameron - and the deadline was in effect set by Washington.
I am told that President Biden wanted the deal done before the 5 November presidential election. Biden wanted certainty about the future of the US military base on the Chagossian island of Diego Garcia, just in case Donald Trump were to win the election.
For confirmation that the deal was clinched on a timetable and in a style to suit the US administration, see Biden’s statement that “it is a clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome longstanding historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”.
Biden pointed out that the agreement between the UK and Mauritius meant the US had secured “the effective operation of the joint [military] facility on Diego Garcia into the next century.”
It is therefore curious Tugendhat should describe the transfer as “leaving our allies” exposed when the UK’s most important ally, America, has welcomed it.
And Cleverly’s denigration of Starmer as “weak, weak, weak” for formalising it seems eccentric when the negotiations with Mauritius were in full swing when he was in the cabinet.
As for Liz Truss’s assertion that Boris Johnson is to blame, I am told that Johnson was the last PM to wholly oppose giving up sovereignty over Chagos, and that the talks did not start properly till she was PM.
If anyone in the Tory party wants to know the nitty gritty of all this, possibly they could ask for an introduction from the former minister Lord Frost - because his spouse Harriet Matthews has been the lead official negotiator for the foreign office on the Chagos treaty with Mauritius.
I don’t believe much of this. The times reports the Americans are privately angry
The Times reports without any evidence the Americans are privately unhappy. Meanwhile the Americans actually say publicly on the record they are delighted. We can all decide which source we believe. The second also does the entire miserable history of the Chagos and Diego Garcia.
No offence but you’re a dismal fucking halfwit so let’s just leave it there
There's absolutely no way that whoever is operating Joe Biden would have released such a glowing statement if the administration were unhappy. Why would they? Let's be happy that it fell on Labour, who were only too happy to embrace it as part of their Britain-hating agenda.
My Friday photo quota is from a Bromptoning friend who has spent a few days in Manchester enjoying not being killed by the drivers of Mansfield, and not needing his full suspension bike because of the roads of Mansfield.
Salford's cycling traffic island. A bit OTT, it's what happens when road designers are let loose on cycling infra without appropriate indoctrination as to how it's different.
Albania feels like the most unEuropean place I’ve ever been in Europe. There are minarets. The women look like Iranians. The music is half Arabic. The mountains are wreathed in fog but there are palm trees
It should obviously be in the Caucasus
No surprise as Albania is the only plurality Muslim nation fully in Europe, 46% of Albanians are Muslim, 16% undeclared, 14% unaffiliated, 8% Roman Catholic, 7% Orthodox, 4% Bektashi and 4% atheist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Albania
BH?
(And I mean Bosnia and Herzegovina not German underwear.)
Also a few others depending on your definition of Europe.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
I really wish the Guardian would open up the comments on the Reeves article on CCS. Would be enormous fun.
Dale Vince didn't sound particularly convinced this morning on the radio. And he's as green energy as you can get. Tbh I haven't heard anyone convinced by it...
Maybe the pushers of the policy had some £30 grand croissants with the great and the good of Labour though
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
They weer hardly simmering with anti-EU sentiment even as they voted. They just didn't like the treaty proposals. Certainly not a good comparison
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Natural gas generally is an amazing fuel.
And what are we as a country planning to do?
Rip out our gas grid, ignore the stuff under the ground here and ban new fields in the North Sea.
We seem to have decided on national suicide, at least if our energy policy is anything to go by.
That's not quite true - they've stopped new licences, not new fields.
How would you reverse it? They currently have 90% tax relief for exploration and extraction (including the 100 new licenses from Sunak), and production will drop to near zero by 2050 even if there were more licences available.
National suicide would be providing an even bigger subsidy to hydrocarbons while offshore wind, tidal and solar await.
Even Geo Monbiot thinks Labour’s carbon capture plan is moronic
“It's a good point. Instead of taking 4 million cars off the road with the sensible integrated transport policy it promised in 1997 but never delivered, the government proposes to do something "equivalent" to taking 4m cars off the road, that won't work and will cost far more.”
That was my thought exactly. You could take an awful lot of cars off the road for 22billion. And you'd have a tangible benefit at the end of it.
22,000 miles of fully segregated cycle superhighway for that kind of money.
To but that in perspective, London only has 40 miles of CS (220 miles including lower quality cycle lanes) and they have completely transformed cycling in the city.
3/4 of a ton of tritium. You could really improve lots of places with that much….
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Echoes a thing I was thinking about here recently- the difference between "what's the endpoint?" and "what's the next useful thing to do?"
At some point in the not-too-distant future, humanity needs to Stop Burning Stuff to release energy. The cumulative consequences are too bad, the amount of stuff available is too finite and too useful for other things. Sorry, but that's how it is. However, in the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities to substantially reduce the amount of stuff being burnt. Coal is now out of the electricity mix, and this year we have had windy and sunny days where gas has made a pretty minimal contribution.
Wind and solar both have plenty of potential to expand, and work well as incremental developments rather than Big Berthas. And yes, that leaves the question of what to do when they both fail- at the moment, burning methane is the best answer we have. Changing that needs to happen, but that's about the endgame. We can get most of the way to where we need by gradually doing things that we do understand how to do- electrification with renewables and stopping some of the silly shoddy wastes of energy.
(Anecdote: as one of those dreadful WFH types, I'm currently having a garden office built. Yes, I know. It's not having solar panels- it's not something the builder had experience of, and keeping things simple felt desirable. But I probably should have explored it more at this stage, and it's an obvious thing to do as the Next Damnfool Project.)
My father-in-law has been very sceptical of solar panels for a long time. Thought they were useless. This reached a nadir when his brother-in-law bought some crappy decades-old solar panels and moaned about how little energy they produced.
And then. A guy came to have his alloy wheel fixed. This guy sells solar panels. They get to talking, and my father-in-law now has a few dozen of the latest and greatest bi-facial solar panels ready to put up on his shed. They'll generate so much power at peak that he had to order two inverters to handle the load. He's so proud of them, talking about how many volts he could pick up on them when it was overcast, while they're still standing about in shrink-wrap.
I'll certainly be doing solar panels as soon as I can.
I would do them like a shot but on a Grade 2* listed building I have been given a firm no. Much of my land is scheduled monument so that is out as well.
I have arrived at the Hotel Prishtina, in Prishtina, Kosovo, a mere << checks times >> 27 hours after initially setting out, involving three cab journeys, two coach journeys, one tube journey, seven train journeys, a flight to Albania, and a bus from Tirana to Kosovo
If Labour aren’t careful they could end up in the same position as the Tories after the last GE .
The so called landslide is built on sand . The next election when it comes could end up an anyone but Labour vote .
I say this as a normal Labour voter although I did end up voting Lib Dem this time as that was a way to get rid of the Tories.
To say I’m underwhelmed with Labour is being kind ! It’s been a total shambles which started with the moronic WFA policy and relentless doom and gloom which has trashed voters confidence.
Starmers so called EU reset where he’s so spineless and terrified of Reform he seems unable to just agree a youth mobility scheme which we have with other countries and his pathetic repeated factually incorrect statements on FOM .
I have arrived at the Hotel Prishtina, in Prishtina, Kosovo, a mere << checks times >> 27 hours after initially setting out, involving three cab journeys, two coach journeys, one tube journey, seven train journeys, a flight to Albania, and a bus from Tirana to Kosovo
Doddle
Been a while since I went but I will say this: swerve the local wine.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Natural gas generally is an amazing fuel.
And what are we as a country planning to do?
Rip out our gas grid, ignore the stuff under the ground here and ban new fields in the North Sea.
We seem to have decided on national suicide, at least if our energy policy is anything to go by.
That's not quite true - they've stopped new licences, not new fields.
How would you reverse it? They currently have 90% tax relief for exploration and extraction (including the 100 new licenses from Sunak), and production will drop to near zero by 2050 even if there were more licences available.
National suicide would be providing an even bigger subsidy to hydrocarbons while offshore wind, tidal and solar await.
Stopping new licences stops new fields. You can't even do a seismic survey without a licence. And no one is now going to bother investing in existing fields because they only remain viable if you continually bring on new satellite fields to support the infrastructure. One reason why Ineos are planning on shutting the Forties pipeline at least 10 years earlier than planned.
As to what you should do? Copy Norway. They have had a stable tax regime for decades. 78% petroleum tax but with the 90% reliefs for exploration and appraisal as well as Capital reliefs. When it costs on average £80 million to drill an exploration well and only 1 in 4 come in, no on will bother in the current political climate.
The Norwegian Government recently announced that if they maintain current evels of investment and activity then the remaining oil and gas reserves will be worth around 1.4 trillion dollars to the Norwegian economy. That is why oil companies are abandoning the UK and moving overseas - with Norway being a prime destination. Norway nows how to keep the industry running and benefit from the taxes.
@Peston There seems to be significant faux outrage from Tory leadership candidates Cleverly and Tugendhat about the Starmer government’s transfer of the Chagos islands to Mauritius.
Official sources tell me the transfer would have happened in materially the same way at roughly the same time if Sunak had somehow won the election.
The point is that the transfer was being negotiated on the recent Tory government’s watch - including by Cleverly as foreign secretary and then by Cameron - and the deadline was in effect set by Washington.
I am told that President Biden wanted the deal done before the 5 November presidential election. Biden wanted certainty about the future of the US military base on the Chagossian island of Diego Garcia, just in case Donald Trump were to win the election.
For confirmation that the deal was clinched on a timetable and in a style to suit the US administration, see Biden’s statement that “it is a clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome longstanding historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”.
Biden pointed out that the agreement between the UK and Mauritius meant the US had secured “the effective operation of the joint [military] facility on Diego Garcia into the next century.”
It is therefore curious Tugendhat should describe the transfer as “leaving our allies” exposed when the UK’s most important ally, America, has welcomed it.
And Cleverly’s denigration of Starmer as “weak, weak, weak” for formalising it seems eccentric when the negotiations with Mauritius were in full swing when he was in the cabinet.
As for Liz Truss’s assertion that Boris Johnson is to blame, I am told that Johnson was the last PM to wholly oppose giving up sovereignty over Chagos, and that the talks did not start properly till she was PM.
If anyone in the Tory party wants to know the nitty gritty of all this, possibly they could ask for an introduction from the former minister Lord Frost - because his spouse Harriet Matthews has been the lead official negotiator for the foreign office on the Chagos treaty with Mauritius.
I don’t believe much of this. The times reports the Americans are privately angry
The Times reports without any evidence the Americans are privately unhappy. Meanwhile the Americans actually say publicly on the record they are delighted. We can all decide which source we believe. The second also does the entire miserable history of the Chagos and Diego Garcia.
No offence but you’re a dismal fucking halfwit so let’s just leave it there
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Natural gas generally is an amazing fuel.
And what are we as a country planning to do?
Rip out our gas grid, ignore the stuff under the ground here and ban new fields in the North Sea.
We seem to have decided on national suicide, at least if our energy policy is anything to go by.
That's not quite true - they've stopped new licences, not new fields.
How would you reverse it? They currently have 90% tax relief for exploration and extraction (including the 100 new licenses from Sunak), and production will drop to near zero by 2050 even if there were more licences available.
National suicide would be providing an even bigger subsidy to hydrocarbons while offshore wind, tidal and solar await.
Oh and offshore wind is not waiting. We are building massive amounts of capacity. It is not an either/or.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
It was arch-Remainer Scott who decided to bring up Brexit yet again in a completely unrelated discussion. I agree with you that we should move on. But poor old Scott seems incapable of this.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
planet looks shitty enough as it is without crappy solar panels everywhere
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
I’m sure you do want to move on. Because the Labour prime minister was one of THE main proponents of a 2nd vote, and if he’d got his way he would have destroyed British democracy
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
Starmer has publically admitted he only supported Corbyn because he knew they wouldn't win the election, so he might be persuaded one day to admit he never really supported a second vote.
Problem with lawyers is they always think they're repesenting a client. They think jobs are like clients.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
It was arch-Remainer Scott who decided to bring up Brexit yet again in a completely unrelated discussion. I agree with you that we should move on. But poor old Scott seems incapable of this.
Always good to move on. However if you're going to stay angry for years and years it is preferable for it to be over something that actually happened. And say what you like about Brexit, it happened. There's been no 'Bobby in the shower' moment and nor will there be. We did that thing.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
planet looks shitty enough as it is without crappy solar panels everywhere
You should seriously consider visiting some countries other than Scotland.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
I’m sure you do want to move on. Because the Labour prime minister was one of THE main proponents of a 2nd vote, and if he’d got his way he would have destroyed British democracy
Hopefully in future any referendums will need a super majority.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
I’m sure you do want to move on. Because the Labour prime minister was one of THE main proponents of a 2nd vote, and if he’d got his way he would have destroyed British democracy
Hopefully in future any referendums will need a super majority.
In the 1975 referendum Remain got just over 2/3. Just.
I’m sure you do want to move on. Because the Labour prime minister was one of THE main proponents of a 2nd vote, and if he’d got his way he would have destroyed British democracy
Triggered by something that never happened.
I think you could get a clinical diagnosis for that...
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
planet looks shitty enough as it is without crappy solar panels everywhere
You should seriously consider visiting some countries other than Scotland.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Natural gas generally is an amazing fuel.
And what are we as a country planning to do?
Rip out our gas grid, ignore the stuff under the ground here and ban new fields in the North Sea.
We seem to have decided on national suicide, at least if our energy policy is anything to go by.
That's not quite true - they've stopped new licences, not new fields.
How would you reverse it? They currently have 90% tax relief for exploration and extraction (including the 100 new licenses from Sunak), and production will drop to near zero by 2050 even if there were more licences available.
National suicide would be providing an even bigger subsidy to hydrocarbons while offshore wind, tidal and solar await.
Stopping new licences stops new fields. You can't even do a seismic survey without a licence. And no one is now going to bother investing in existing fields because they only remain viable if you continually bring on new satellite fields to support the infrastructure. One reason why Ineos are planning on shutting the Forties pipeline at least 10 years earlier than planned.
As to what you should do? Copy Norway. They have had a stable tax regime for decades. 78% petroleum tax but with the 90% reliefs for exploration and appraisal as well as Capital reliefs. When it costs on average £80 million to drill an exploration well and only 1 in 4 come in, no on will bother in the current political climate.
The Norwegian Government recently announced that if they maintain current evels of investment and activity then the remaining oil and gas reserves will be worth around 1.4 trillion dollars to the Norwegian economy. That is why oil companies are abandoning the UK and moving overseas - with Norway being a prime destination. Norway nows how to keep the industry running and benefit from the taxes.
Norway's tax regime is roughly the same as our one at the moment then. And the windfall tax goes in 2028, making (in tax terms, at least) the UK more attractive.
I don't doubt that the noises that Labour are making is having a small effect on the course of O&G production in the short term. I just think the supposed impact of it is massively overstated in the face of these long term trends.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
Starmer has publically admitted he only supported Corbyn because he knew they wouldn't win the election, so he might be persuaded one day to admit he never really supported a second vote.
Problem with lawyers is they always think they're repesenting a client. They think jobs are like clients.
Mixed blessing, lawyers. They've provided some of the best and the worst over the years. Probably too many of them in politics, I'd agree with that.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
planet looks shitty enough as it is without crappy solar panels everywhere
You should seriously consider visiting some countries other than Scotland.
solar panels are different in other countries?
PS: just returned from Southern Spain
I've got solar panels built into my roof (when I got a new roof), rather than sitting on top of it. I think it looks rather good. Also, saved me a bundle on tiles.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
I’m sure you do want to move on. Because the Labour prime minister was one of THE main proponents of a 2nd vote, and if he’d got his way he would have destroyed British democracy
He did get his way. GE defeat, replaced Corbyn, now PM with a big majority.
Out of your league, I'm afraid, when it comes to political calculations.
Have decided not to think about the chagos islands surrender as it is so distressingly stupid it is physically painful
Not remotely as stupid as Brexit
You think it was stupid to implement the biggest vote for anything in the country's history?
If you do, just say so. At least you'd be logical, if not a democrat.
If the Brexit vote had been thwarted, I thought it through and it was probably the only time in my life I had every contemplated violence, I mean really paramilitary stuff. Whether I would have actually carried it out past a thought process, I dont know. The government's entire right to exist would have vanished, I would have seen them as nothing more than an occupying force that needed resistance.
I was no puritan on the matter of Brexit, I voted to leave with a heavy heart, and considered the moral obligation to carry out the will of the British people was limited to no longer being a member of the EU, as the ballot paper said. After that, whether we remained in single market or whatever, as far as democratic mandate was just a detail. We left, the mandate was fulfilled. Even if Starmer now tried to re-enter the EU, or re-enter the single market. It is not a betrayal. The instruction was carried out.
But. I wonder if I was alone in thinking for the first time about extreme political violence.
As a Remainder I basically agree with you.
The stupidity of Brexit was not it's enactment, but the fact that it's form was determined more by the internal politics of the Conservative party and it's relationship to UKIP than the will of the British people.
Had it not been enacted at all we would on one level have ceased to be a democracy - and in that circumstance political unrest would have been entirely justified (though I'd stop short of violence).
I agree with you both and I am sure that if the referendum had been annulled we would have seen widespread violence. After all, if you can simply cancel a vote - and cancel democracy - what is left for the voter, how else can they express their desires? That’s when and why violence starts
Dominic Cummings realised this - he wrote it at the time
It is incredible to me how 2nd voters like Starmer - have been able to get away with what they espoused. If they’d got their way Britain would have tipped into bloodshed
A secondary outcome of an annulled election would have been a collapse in turnout at all further elections. What’s the point in voting if it means nothing?
And the “2nd vote” itself would have been a desperate debacle as millions of Leave voters boycotted it
A second vote on the mere principle is one thing but a deal or no deal vote on Lord Frost's agreement would have been democratically acceptable.
Which is actually how people make decisions in real life. Your partner asks you if you want to eat out or cook. You decide to eat out and then find out that the only restaurant open is the horrible pizza place you both don't like. Only a madman would say "Well we've decided to eat out so eat out we must".
Yes because solemn national votes on massive constitutional issues are exactly like choosing whether to get pizza
But it's how most people think isn't it? A confirmatory vote on the deal would have annoyed Brexit zealots (partly because they'd be worried that they might lose) but I question how much it would have annoyed most people. The second Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty was way more outrageous but Ireland is hardly simmering with anti EU resentment 15 years down the line.
There wasn't a 2nd vote. There was never going to be a 2nd vote. I made good money laying it.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
I’m sure you do want to move on. Because the Labour prime minister was one of THE main proponents of a 2nd vote, and if he’d got his way he would have destroyed British democracy
Hopefully in future any referendums will need a super majority.
In the 1975 referendum Remain got just over 2/3. Just.
That seems a high bar to meet . I think above 60% seems fair . The problem though with many referendums is they become proxies for other issues.
I’m not entirely convinced by the buzzing heart of trendy downtown Pristina. It’s one of those cities where all the potentially chic little bars, restaurants, dives turn out to be opticians
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Natural gas generally is an amazing fuel.
And what are we as a country planning to do?
Rip out our gas grid, ignore the stuff under the ground here and ban new fields in the North Sea.
We seem to have decided on national suicide, at least if our energy policy is anything to go by.
That's not quite true - they've stopped new licences, not new fields.
How would you reverse it? They currently have 90% tax relief for exploration and extraction (including the 100 new licenses from Sunak), and production will drop to near zero by 2050 even if there were more licences available.
National suicide would be providing an even bigger subsidy to hydrocarbons while offshore wind, tidal and solar await.
Stopping new licences stops new fields. You can't even do a seismic survey without a licence. And no one is now going to bother investing in existing fields because they only remain viable if you continually bring on new satellite fields to support the infrastructure. One reason why Ineos are planning on shutting the Forties pipeline at least 10 years earlier than planned.
As to what you should do? Copy Norway. They have had a stable tax regime for decades. 78% petroleum tax but with the 90% reliefs for exploration and appraisal as well as Capital reliefs. When it costs on average £80 million to drill an exploration well and only 1 in 4 come in, no on will bother in the current political climate.
The Norwegian Government recently announced that if they maintain current evels of investment and activity then the remaining oil and gas reserves will be worth around 1.4 trillion dollars to the Norwegian economy. That is why oil companies are abandoning the UK and moving overseas - with Norway being a prime destination. Norway nows how to keep the industry running and benefit from the taxes.
Norway's tax regime is roughly the same as our one at the moment then. And the windfall tax goes in 2028, making (in tax terms, at least) the UK more attractive.
I don't doubt that the noises that Labour are making is having a small effect on the course of O&G production in the short term. I just think the supposed impact of it is massively overstated in the face of these long term trends.
At least we can agree on CCS, which is nice.
It is not ending in 2028. Indeed it is being extended at every opportunity. Originally it was only suposed to be until 2026, then 2028, then in March Hunt extended it to 2029. Now it has been extended by Labour to 2030 at the earliest.
It will be too late by then. And this is the issue we have covered so many times before. What matters is stability. Norway has kept the taxation system stable for decades so people can plan ahead. They also recognise the importance of the reliefs which is make or break for oil companies. Labour have made it absolutely clear they see no future for oil and gas in the UK and companies are taking them at their word. Saying it will have a small effect is laughable. I am looking at the companies ending activity right now and can see that it is going to have a massive effect.
It is also utterly pointless. We won't burn 1 bbl of oil less because we have shut down the North Sea. We will just import it from elsewhere.
I’m not entirely convinced by the buzzing heart of trendy downtown Pristina. It’s one of those cities where all the potentially chic little bars, restaurants, dives turn out to be opticians
However let’s give “urban gastro lounge” a go
An optician-themed bar could work.
If you fail the eye test, you've had too many, Sir.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
What proportion of incident solar energy for the month of December would you need to capture to power the UK (including surface transport and space heating)?
We're still in October, I'm relatively far south in SW Ireland, but even on a sunny day the peak solar insolation is now below 500W/m2. Certainly I'd envisage energy being more expensive in winter, but people will have to pay for alternative sources at far northern latitudes such as the UK.
Bodes pretty well for Africa, though.
Windier in the winter, which will help.
So long as you don't get one of those rather common polar highs which cause very cold, very calm weather. Hence the reason for backup systems.
Natural gas.
We hope.
The UK is uniquely shit as far as natural gas storage goes, but it is the perfect battery. It's clean, energy dense, efficient, dispatchable, and - this is most important - close to zero maintenance when it's not running. That last one is incredibly important: compared to any other form of electricity generation, natural gas turbines are people and maintenance lite. They sit there... you press a button... and just a few seconds later power begins to flow.
Natural gas generally is an amazing fuel.
And what are we as a country planning to do?
Rip out our gas grid, ignore the stuff under the ground here and ban new fields in the North Sea.
We seem to have decided on national suicide, at least if our energy policy is anything to go by.
That's not quite true - they've stopped new licences, not new fields.
How would you reverse it? They currently have 90% tax relief for exploration and extraction (including the 100 new licenses from Sunak), and production will drop to near zero by 2050 even if there were more licences available.
National suicide would be providing an even bigger subsidy to hydrocarbons while offshore wind, tidal and solar await.
Stopping new licences stops new fields. You can't even do a seismic survey without a licence. And no one is now going to bother investing in existing fields because they only remain viable if you continually bring on new satellite fields to support the infrastructure. One reason why Ineos are planning on shutting the Forties pipeline at least 10 years earlier than planned.
As to what you should do? Copy Norway. They have had a stable tax regime for decades. 78% petroleum tax but with the 90% reliefs for exploration and appraisal as well as Capital reliefs. When it costs on average £80 million to drill an exploration well and only 1 in 4 come in, no on will bother in the current political climate.
The Norwegian Government recently announced that if they maintain current evels of investment and activity then the remaining oil and gas reserves will be worth around 1.4 trillion dollars to the Norwegian economy. That is why oil companies are abandoning the UK and moving overseas - with Norway being a prime destination. Norway nows how to keep the industry running and benefit from the taxes.
Norway's tax regime is roughly the same as our one at the moment then. And the windfall tax goes in 2028, making (in tax terms, at least) the UK more attractive.
I don't doubt that the noises that Labour are making is having a small effect on the course of O&G production in the short term. I just think the supposed impact of it is massively overstated in the face of these long term trends.
At least we can agree on CCS, which is nice.
As has been explained, nearly infinite number of times, it's about a stable policy and tax regime.
People in the oil and gas industry like dealing with Norway. And always have. Even though they have high taxes on much of it. Because they have a stable attitude towards the tax and whole idea of oil and gas. You can make 20 years decisions. Put billions down and no you won't get spun around by the next government.
I work in banking. No one is interested in funding anything UK related in the North Sea - because the government is explicitly hostile to taking oil and gas out of the North Sea - both in Holyrood and London. You can put your money on a Norwegian deal and *know* that your regulatory/tax risk is about as low as it gets.
Surprised a couple of utterly none political friends have picked up on the £22bn investment in the north, in a very positive way.
Expect if a boat load of similar capital investment projects can be delivered in the next five years, especially in the poorest of areas, the country and politics could be rather different compared to what people expect today.
Feed a starving population and they'll be grateful, much of the population has been starved of investment for generations.
Which investment is that Kurt? Do you have a link? (Apologies if this is big news I'm somehow missing but I can't see it!)
Seems to be the announcement of 22Bn for carbon capture.
It will buy some nice offices etc.
There might even be money left over to spend on actually capturing carbon. But that’s a frivolity, really.
The £22bn covers CAPEX and OPEX and is only paid out by the government as each tonne of CO2 is actually captured and stored.
So paid out over 15 years, starting when projects commence commercial operation.
Its almost literally spending £22bn on hot air.
Its inevitable that we will need gas as some part of the energy mix past 2030 so therefore miss "net zero".
So we spend £22 bn on something that tries to make it look like we will hit net zero sometime a few years after 2030 (and past the next election).
That £22 bn could be far better spent on something else.
Clearly the government agrees with your assessment that there is a role for gas fired generation post 2030, hence looking to implement a CCGT with CCS.
Let's see if they think that when this government get their heads round what tidal can actually deliver.
I do know that Charles Hendry, who wrote the brilliant independent report on tidal lagoon power stations, has already met with Ed Milband and is having a formal briefing with him later this month.
The biggest problem, apart from that bullshit report that circulates in government about lagoons, is the timescale. Start a project and it will be completed beyond the next election. So you get all the negative stuff from the antis - environmental and other - this cycle....
The advantage of future carbon sequestration credits is that they involve spending no money now. Nor are they directly linked to actually doing anything. So a win, win.
You'd have tidallagoons well under construction by the next election.
And the mutliplier in the local economy of such a civil engineering project is, I understand 2.8 times. Wherever you build these, they are going to feel like they have been awarded the Olympics.
When is the CCS supposed to come on stream, anyway ? I suspect not this side of the next election.
It's just a far more expensive way of burning fossil fuels. A job preservation scheme for the oil and chemicals industry, with almost no economic rationale.
Utterly mad, when there is so much demand for productive capital investment elsewhere
CCS Is far into the future. So is, it is claimed, the actual spend. Also, the government won't be directly involved in any attempts to build actual plants. So they have the win of announcing spending, the win of not actually spending and the win of not having try to actually build anything.
So a perfect policy, really. No downsides *for the politicians*
Whereas a tidal lagoon will only come online years after an election. It will involve a bitter fight with the Enquiry Industrial Complex (bad stories for the government carefully planted in the press for years), might well involve government spending before the election. And someone else will get to cut the ribbon on the project when it opens.
Perfectly crap policy, really. No upsides *for the politicians*.
I'm afraid Elon is right: all non solar energy is doomed, because the price just keeps falling. In the future, every surface of every building, every bus stop, every car roof is going to be covered is solar cells of one kind or another.
It's simple maths.
And it makes it almost impossible for any of these other technologies - whether modular nuclear, or tidal or whatever - to make money. Because demand for electricity from the grid for half the year (the half when the sun is shining) is going to be zero.
And as battery technology follows the same price path as solar, then solar will next take out the early evening.
It's share will be forever growing, because panels last (effectively) forever, and more panels get made and installed every day.
planet looks shitty enough as it is without crappy solar panels everywhere
You should seriously consider visiting some countries other than Scotland.
solar panels are different in other countries?
PS: just returned from Southern Spain
I've got solar panels built into my roof (when I got a new roof), rather than sitting on top of it. I think it looks rather good. Also, saved me a bundle on tiles.
might be ok built in , those ones stuck on like carbuncles are horrific
Comments
Its not a conversation with the demented you are having, it is you playing Jack Manningham in Gas Light...
And then. A guy came to have his alloy wheel fixed. This guy sells solar panels. They get to talking, and my father-in-law now has a few dozen of the latest and greatest bi-facial solar panels ready to put up on his shed. They'll generate so much power at peak that he had to order two inverters to handle the load. He's so proud of them, talking about how many volts he could pick up on them when it was overcast, while they're still standing about in shrink-wrap.
I'll certainly be doing solar panels as soon as I can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_Alaska
Get over it.
ChatGPT says you'd get electricity generation of 0.1875kWh/m2/day. So you'd need 80m2 per house. That's not as bad as I thought.
On the other, it would have been another pile of thinking at once. I'm pretty sure the misery of a building project scales as a high power of its complextiy. Retrofitting in a few years time will undoubtedly be more expensive, but less hassle at any given moment. And it's single-storey, so a retrofit should be relatively easy.
Besides, I had enough trouble getting this much Damnfool Project past Mrs Romford.
However, in 1992, Perot got 28% in Alaska, his second high proportion in the country (after Maine).
In an ITV News Special, Boris Johnson sits down for an exclusive interview with ITV's Tom Bradby, ahead of the publication of the former Prime Minister's political memoir to talk about his time in office
Eat your heart out, Laura.
A perpetual beacon of stupidity you can't resist lighting
Unless - you aren't really suggesting that Remainers were taken in by Cameron's "renegotiation"? That our relationship with the EU was "fundamentally changed"? REALLY?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35620821
We voted Leave. That Leave vote had to be enacted one way or another - we had to Leave - or democracy would have died
As long as we left then any number of further votes were (and are) permissible
Indeed I think we should have done exactly that. It should have been a 2 stage referendum - leave or remain. Then, if leave, soft or hard Brexit
“It's a good point. Instead of taking 4 million cars off the road with the sensible integrated transport policy it promised in 1997 but never delivered, the government proposes to do something "equivalent" to taking 4m cars off the road, that won't work and will cost far more.”
https://x.com/georgemonbiot/status/1842188696524661202?s=46&t=JkfxbHe62CiS_-1M2e4fCA
Why are they doing it??
Because every time, there you go, like some demented ARP Warden, screaming
"PUT OUT THAT FUCKING BEACON!!!!!"
What, this beacon? The one that has triggered you for 3,025 days?
And counting.
(A man trying to sell expensive electric cars would say that, wouldn't he?)
Do you have any idea how cheap hydro power is in parts of the Pacific Northwest? Or how little sun there is during Arctic winters? Or the energy success of Iceland? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Iceland
Does Musk plan to power his Mars colony with solar cells?
(Pedantic point: I am charmed by the idea of putting solar panels on surfaces deep inside large buildings.)
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/40037
You'd hope that a new government would be fresh with ideas from Opposition, but Labour appear to act as though they are an empty vessel, with no ideas or plan of their own.
Hope this works but TSE’s garish socks in all their glory at our Workingman’s Lunch today.
Many thanks to @Sean_F , @kjh @Sandpit @HYUFD and others for their good wishes for Thursday. Only a mug would predict the result, but if I am successful, it will be 45 years since first being elected a Councillor.
1) never read - in which case is it performative bullshit
2) read - in which case it is a vast cost.
This is how we end up, for domestic projects, with a telephone directory sized project document.
That no one ever reads.
Then, when an accident happens, the lawyers get all excited about page 1248, paragraph 4.
Simple, clear rules save people’s lives. And also prevents “life changing injuries”.
But that isn’t of interest to anyone important. so fuck that.
I don’t expect anything now. It will all be like this. Same as the wet late Tories, in essence, but with more bribes for unions, even higher taxes, extra bits of Woke, and terrible treacherous foreign policy decisions like Chagos
That’s it. That will be Labour 2024-28
If @TSE was playing hardball, those would be Trump Gold Assassination Edition High-Tops !
To but that in perspective, London only has 40 miles of CS (220 miles including lower quality cycle lanes) and they have completely transformed cycling in the city.
And what are we as a country planning to do?
Rip out our gas grid, ignore the stuff under the ground here and ban new fields in the North Sea.
We seem to have decided on national suicide, at least if our energy policy is anything to go by.
Salford's cycling traffic island. A bit OTT, it's what happens when road designers are let loose on cycling infra without appropriate indoctrination as to how it's different.
And his video review. More vids on the channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiqOnLsh64
And the Facebook photo gallery, which is quite interesting. Remarkably for Manchester, not a single piccie of rain or fog amongst 60 photos.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1327692218197070&id=100028689141916
(And I mean Bosnia and Herzegovina not German underwear.)
Also a few others depending on your definition of Europe.
Maybe the pushers of the policy had some £30 grand croissants with the great and the good of Labour though
Perhaps better to deny, from a current political point of view ?
How would you reverse it? They currently have 90% tax relief for exploration and extraction (including the 100 new licenses from Sunak), and production will drop to near zero by 2050 even if there were more licences available.
National suicide would be providing an even bigger subsidy to hydrocarbons while offshore wind, tidal and solar await.
Doddle
The so called landslide is built on sand . The next election when it comes could end up an anyone but Labour vote .
I say this as a normal Labour voter although I did end up voting Lib Dem this time as that was a way to get rid of the Tories.
To say I’m underwhelmed with Labour is being kind ! It’s been a total shambles which started with the moronic WFA policy and relentless doom and gloom which has trashed voters confidence.
Starmers so called EU reset where he’s so spineless and terrified of Reform he seems unable to just agree a youth mobility scheme which we have with other countries and his pathetic repeated factually incorrect statements on FOM .
A YMS is not frigging FOM .
As to what you should do? Copy Norway. They have had a stable tax regime for decades. 78% petroleum tax but with the 90% reliefs for exploration and appraisal as well as Capital reliefs. When it costs on average £80 million to drill an exploration well and only 1 in 4 come in, no on will bother in the current political climate.
The Norwegian Government recently announced that if they maintain current evels of investment and activity then the remaining oil and gas reserves will be worth around 1.4 trillion dollars to the Norwegian economy. That is why oil companies are abandoning the UK and moving overseas - with Norway being a prime destination. Norway nows how to keep the industry running and benefit from the taxes.
The reason a certain type of Leaver even years later will keep harping on about this unhappening event is they run on anger/grievance and the tank needs regular top ups.
Problem with lawyers is they always think they're repesenting a client. They think jobs are like clients.
I think you could get a clinical diagnosis for that...
PS: just returned from Southern Spain
I don't doubt that the noises that Labour are making is having a small effect on the course of O&G production in the short term. I just think the supposed impact of it is massively overstated in the face of these long term trends.
At least we can agree on CCS, which is nice.
Anyone know how to get it?
Out of your league, I'm afraid, when it comes to political calculations.
NEW THREAD
However let’s give “urban gastro lounge” a go
It will be too late by then. And this is the issue we have covered so many times before. What matters is stability. Norway has kept the taxation system stable for decades so people can plan ahead. They also recognise the importance of the reliefs which is make or break for oil companies. Labour have made it absolutely clear they see no future for oil and gas in the UK and companies are taking them at their word. Saying it will have a small effect is laughable. I am looking at the companies ending activity right now and can see that it is going to have a massive effect.
It is also utterly pointless. We won't burn 1 bbl of oil less because we have shut down the North Sea. We will just import it from elsewhere.
If you fail the eye test, you've had too many, Sir.
People in the oil and gas industry like dealing with Norway. And always have. Even though they have high taxes on much of it. Because they have a stable attitude towards the tax and whole idea of oil and gas. You can make 20 years decisions. Put billions down and no you won't get spun around by the next government.
I work in banking. No one is interested in funding anything UK related in the North Sea - because the government is explicitly hostile to taking oil and gas out of the North Sea - both in Holyrood and London. You can put your money on a Norwegian deal and *know* that your regulatory/tax risk is about as low as it gets.