CNN are ballsachingly pro-Biden and SSRS who did the legwork are not the greatest of pollsters, but I still think you can put the worry beads away.
CNN are nearly as bad as Fox News these days....they critized Trump for not stopping to talk to the media on the way to the hospital, then critized for stopping on the way back to make a video....
The big takeaways from the Johnson speech are that he still hasn't worked out Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leading the Labour party and that the Tories have been running the country for the last 10 years.
Do you think he has realised he is shit at being PM though? I think he has, as has everyone else with half a brain.
The big takeaways from the Johnson speech are that he still hasn't worked out Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leading the Labour party and that the Tories have been running the country for the last 10 years.
Since he's not been running the country for the last 10 years why shouldn't he seek to rejuvenate and reset the Government for his period in office? That is smart politics. Once parties rest on their laurels of the past that is when they get out of touch and lose, smart parties that want to keep winning need to keep rejuvenating themselves and moving on.
We are where we are because of legislation passed with the votes of those who form the current government, including the Prime Minister. If Johnson wants to now claim they were wrong, so be it.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
I thought an idea with most modern proposals of tidal was that the water would be pumped in naturally but with some, not necessarily all water able to be stored to be released when needed?
If you're foregoing generating some electricity at the time that happens then that should be fine if you have a smart system where cheaper offshore wind is generating electricity at the time and some tidal power is saved for when the wind is not available.
The solution should be a smart mix of both, not all or none.
Wealth is a tricky subject. What is the real wealth of a couple aged 66 both entitled to £9,000+ per annum state pension (inflation proofed) and no other income or assets. They would pay no income tax or NI. Their 'wealth' on one basis is nil. But to buy a guaranteed income of £18000 per annum would cost several hundred thousand pounds. Which is their real wealth. You would have a difficult task taxing it.
Far easier to tax those who have the same wealth saved up in a visible non tax- payer funded form. But could it truly be fair?
Yes, I bet a couple of teachers retiring on an indexed-linked pension of £30,000 each at 65 wouldn't regard themselves as 'rich' - but between them they have an asset worth around £2.2m.
(Best buy annuity rates for an index-linked pension at 65 are around 2.5% to 3% depending on the exact terms).
The richest person I know is my missus' aunt, who was a deputy head teacher for 1 year before taking early retirement at the age of 52. She freely admits that despite eating out every day and taking around 6-7 expensive holidays a year she literally can't spend all the money she gets from her pension.
She is in her 70s now, but if her mum who is still alive at 101 is anything to go by then she could be getting this pension for 50 years.
The average worker who gets nothing like this back from the government is going to be taxed even harder to pay for this stuff and it's completely unfair.
Teachers can't take early retirement at 52 and haven't been able to for quite a while - if they ever were able to. However, putting that to one side, retiring at 52 would mean she was a teacher for a maximum of 30 years, including just one year as a deputy. On that basis, it is hard to imagine she would be getting a pension of more than £30,000 per annum. That is potentially very comfortable, but it is taxable and it is not going to allow you eat out every day and take 6-7 expensive holidays a year.
Yes, there's a lot of myths on here about teachers' pensions. If anybody wants to look at the reality, they can have a play around on here:
This shows, for example, that a teacher who retires at 65 with 40 years service on £35K (at the high end for a main scale teacher) at the time of retirement will get a pension of £17.5K and a lump sum of £52.5K. Retiring at 60 reduces the pension to £13.5K. Only senior staff will have a salary high enough to get anywhere near the £30K pension many cite on here. It's also worth noting that teachers (and civil servants) pay a lot more of their salary into their pension than they did 10 years ago.
All true I’m sure. The point is, it doesn’t matter how you slice it, public sector pensions are hugely hugely valuable. As I said upthread at 65 years multiply the annual pension by 43 and at 60 years probably by something like 50. That’s the market today, driven as it is by super low interest rates.
So even £17.5K translates to over three quarters of a million. In the context of any future wealth tax why should this be ignored compared to someone who has saved differently and has more visible assets?
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
The Hydrogen part of his plan, as trailed, would be intended to deal with the storage issue (and a few others). There's some hopeful stuff about this in an alternative plan punished in the Guardian (the areas of overlap and difference are interesting).
Sadly both plans ignore tidal, which we should certainly exploit as well.
Tidal would be great but the RSBP is a monster, no politician with a sense of self-preservation will fuck with it
Well eggs and omelettes.
I’m sure our feathered friends would thank us for providing a cleaner environment through carbon free power from tides in the long run.
Really it beggars belief we haven’t done more on tidal. We are an island surrounded by some of the biggest tides in the world. It’s totally predictable, reliable, clean, and secure. It’s an area ideal for govt to step in with a few billion as seed corn to take the hits as stuff is ironed out in pilot projects. It’s also hugely exportable technology once you’ve built up your know how.
Even Greta bloody Thunberg would probably not object.
We should get on with it!
Agreed. For what we've blown on the undelivered nuclear projects (and the time we've wasted), we could just about have built the first large scale project by now.
Perhaps the Conservatives should come up with a new tax, one that this is a fixed annual sum levied on every individual?
Taxes are things that lots of people (particularly on the left) think should be increased but only for other people. I always think there should be a "voluntary tax" to see how many people genuinely want to pay more. It would be the ultimate in virtue signalling, with those that are paying more voluntarily publishing their extra funding that they are paying over so doctors and public "servants" can have even bigger pensions.
Can be turned on its head somewhat. The warm glow one feels through donating to charity actually detracts from the tax-take as these days each donation can be offset against income tax (Gift Aid). Blair policy I think. I`d like to see this practice ended.
If you recall, the coalition government tried to restrict it. There was a tsunami of indignation from the luvvies and Guardian-reading classes generally, and they had to give up the idea:
Wow is there nothing that isn't blamed on (a) Tony Blair or (b) "Luvvies"/Guardian readers in PB Tory Land? Gift Aid was actually introduced by the Tories in 1990, but rather characteristically they thought it should only be available to those rich enough to be giving away £600 or more. Labour simply made it available to all taxpayers by abolishing the lower limit, perhaps that is what irks people on here. Personally I think charity is something that should be encouraged.
My favourite is the financial crash was Bill Clinton's fault for encouraging home ownership amongst the impecunious.
Bill Clinton de-regulated parts of the financial markets - in exactly the way that Bush I refused to do. This enabled the banks to play Monopoly with even more money. What could possibly go wrong?
Sure. A factor. There were so many factors. But hardly the prime culprit for the abdication of the noble art of risk management by almost the entire financial sector.
A law that forced banks to give loans to unsuitable people was always going to end in banks doing whatever they could to get that dirt quality asset off their books. That's exactly what we saw happen with a whole bunch of dodgy asset classes created to help hide the dirt.
I heard a radio interview with an American women that perfectly described the scam. She had some equity in a modest house but was persuaded to borrow more and buy a bigger one "for the same monthly payment". After a year the small print kicked in and her payments doubled or trebled and she was rapidly under water. The bank foreclosed, hoovering up her original equity in the process. Now she was unemployed, homeless and stony broke. Thanks, Bill.
The big takeaways from the Johnson speech are that he still hasn't worked out Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leading the Labour party and that the Tories have been running the country for the last 10 years.
Since he's not been running the country for the last 10 years why shouldn't he seek to rejuvenate and reset the Government for his period in office? That is smart politics. Once parties rest on their laurels of the past that is when they get out of touch and lose, smart parties that want to keep winning need to keep rejuvenating themselves and moving on.
We are where we are because of legislation passed with the votes of those who form the current government, including the Prime Minister. If Johnson wants to now claim they were wrong, so be it.
Are you aware that Johnson wasn't even an MP let alone the PM for most of the last decade?
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
Indeed but backup technology is improving and offshore wind now is coming in at below £40/MWh and still falling, can tidal or nuclear do that?
Given how increasingly cheap offshore wind is I see no reason we shouldn't be maximising our generation of it.
Tidal can absolutely do that, nuclear won't but I'm not suggesting nuclear as a technology worth pursuing. Offshore wind just strikes me as our version of the German solar disaster. We will end up spending billions on it and we'll have to deal with all of the downsides of not having reliable power generation.
It should be part of the mix, no doubt, but the idea that we should be reliant on it to provide 100% of consumer electricity is just ridiculous. It can't cycle up or cycle down.
Agreed, I'm not suggesting (and I don't think anyone is) that it should be 100% of our electricity alone. It should be a major element though.
Boris just said we would have 100% of consumer energy from offshore wind and reeled off a list of example. It is being suggested.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
Wealth is a tricky subject. What is the real wealth of a couple aged 66 both entitled to £9,000+ per annum state pension (inflation proofed) and no other income or assets. They would pay no income tax or NI. Their 'wealth' on one basis is nil. But to buy a guaranteed income of £18000 per annum would cost several hundred thousand pounds. Which is their real wealth. You would have a difficult task taxing it.
Far easier to tax those who have the same wealth saved up in a visible non tax- payer funded form. But could it truly be fair?
Yes, I bet a couple of teachers retiring on an indexed-linked pension of £30,000 each at 65 wouldn't regard themselves as 'rich' - but between them they have an asset worth around £2.2m.
(Best buy annuity rates for an index-linked pension at 65 are around 2.5% to 3% depending on the exact terms).
The richest person I know is my missus' aunt, who was a deputy head teacher for 1 year before taking early retirement at the age of 52. She freely admits that despite eating out every day and taking around 6-7 expensive holidays a year she literally can't spend all the money she gets from her pension.
She is in her 70s now, but if her mum who is still alive at 101 is anything to go by then she could be getting this pension for 50 years.
The average worker who gets nothing like this back from the government is going to be taxed even harder to pay for this stuff and it's completely unfair.
Teachers can't take early retirement at 52 and haven't been able to for quite a while - if they ever were able to. However, putting that to one side, retiring at 52 would mean she was a teacher for a maximum of 30 years, including just one year as a deputy. On that basis, it is hard to imagine she would be getting a pension of more than £30,000 per annum. That is potentially very comfortable, but it is taxable and it is not going to allow you eat out every day and take 6-7 expensive holidays a year.
She retired about 25 years ago, so maybe the rules have changed. I am pretty sure younger teachers won't be getting anything like the same pension when they retire.
That makes a bit more sense. My 56 year-old wife can't take her teacher pension until she is 66. She was a teacher for around 20 years and ended as a deputy, and will not be hitting close to even £15,000 a year.
That must be a typo at the end - teachers can take their pension at 55 [I did] and although that is to rise it will not go to 66! That is the new OAP age.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Yeah, stick it all in the mix and sell the surplus.
Precisely!
Offshore Wind now is increasingly cheap and cheaper as far as I understand than coal or any other alternative...
Rather more expensive than onshore wind. And solar from N Africa might be significantly cheaper in time.
Not anymore its not. The price difference has been eliminated thanks to increasingly massive and powerful turbines that can't work on land.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
Indeed but backup technology is improving and offshore wind now is coming in at below £40/MWh and still falling, can tidal or nuclear do that?
Given how increasingly cheap offshore wind is I see no reason we shouldn't be maximising our generation of it.
Tidal can absolutely do that, nuclear won't but I'm not suggesting nuclear as a technology worth pursuing. Offshore wind just strikes me as our version of the German solar disaster. We will end up spending billions on it and we'll have to deal with all of the downsides of not having reliable power generation.
It should be part of the mix, no doubt, but the idea that we should be reliant on it to provide 100% of consumer electricity is just ridiculous. It can't cycle up or cycle down.
Agreed, I'm not suggesting (and I don't think anyone is) that it should be 100% of our electricity alone. It should be a major element though.
Boris just said we would have 100% of consumer energy from offshore wind and reeled off a list of example. It is being suggested.
100% of household, not consumer. There's a very, very big difference. Especially if manufacturers grow that difference will grow too.
The UK is currently running at over 50% of household consumption being wind generation already.
Increasingly? I think he always has been. He is someone who thinks leadership is about saying how he would like things to be on a wing and a prayer, with no road map how to get there. He is Mr Back of a Fag Packet. As I have said all along, he is shit and has no leadership skills. Only those with no understanding of leadership think that he has.
Having had problems with energy company databases in the past I would advise people to refuse a smart meter due to the potential for incompetence, rather than a deliberate policy to manage energy shortages.
The potential for a cock-up to result in your supply being terminated, with call centre staff unable to fix the issue, is far too great.
Having them be required to send someone round to access the property to terminate the supply acts as a safeguard against those types of error.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
Or tidal or storage or other new technologies or . . .
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
That is exactly what the UK is doing already. 🙄
But government policy is supposed to wean us off gas and French imports. Energy independence is the stated goal and yet we're talking about a huge investment in an energy source that doesn't do that. As I said it's complete bullshit.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
That may be a good policy, depending how much of the time it's needed.
EU: "So, you claim to hold all the cards. And be prepared to walk unless we yield. And yet under the protocols you yourselves are imposing, you won't actually be able to functionally trade because you haven't actually built any systems or physically infrastructure to do so. You say you will leave but have done nothing to make that even a viable threat never mind an implementable reality."
UK: Outrageous. We are so ready. An internal border for Kent would be so worth it for our Freedom
EU: Great! So can we see the system that you will require our trucks to use to cross your border from 1st January?
UK: No
EU: Tell you what. We're going to leave the room for a minute. Have a think about how you would like us to spin your climbdown when you accept that you can't leave. We'll be happy to help
Wealth is a tricky subject. What is the real wealth of a couple aged 66 both entitled to £9,000+ per annum state pension (inflation proofed) and no other income or assets. They would pay no income tax or NI. Their 'wealth' on one basis is nil. But to buy a guaranteed income of £18000 per annum would cost several hundred thousand pounds. Which is their real wealth. You would have a difficult task taxing it.
Far easier to tax those who have the same wealth saved up in a visible non tax- payer funded form. But could it truly be fair?
Yes, I bet a couple of teachers retiring on an indexed-linked pension of £30,000 each at 65 wouldn't regard themselves as 'rich' - but between them they have an asset worth around £2.2m.
(Best buy annuity rates for an index-linked pension at 65 are around 2.5% to 3% depending on the exact terms).
The richest person I know is my missus' aunt, who was a deputy head teacher for 1 year before taking early retirement at the age of 52. She freely admits that despite eating out every day and taking around 6-7 expensive holidays a year she literally can't spend all the money she gets from her pension.
She is in her 70s now, but if her mum who is still alive at 101 is anything to go by then she could be getting this pension for 50 years.
The average worker who gets nothing like this back from the government is going to be taxed even harder to pay for this stuff and it's completely unfair.
Teachers can't take early retirement at 52 and haven't been able to for quite a while - if they ever were able to. However, putting that to one side, retiring at 52 would mean she was a teacher for a maximum of 30 years, including just one year as a deputy. On that basis, it is hard to imagine she would be getting a pension of more than £30,000 per annum. That is potentially very comfortable, but it is taxable and it is not going to allow you eat out every day and take 6-7 expensive holidays a year.
She retired about 25 years ago, so maybe the rules have changed. I am pretty sure younger teachers won't be getting anything like the same pension when they retire.
That makes a bit more sense. My 56 year-old wife can't take her teacher pension until she is 66. She was a teacher for around 20 years and ended as a deputy, and will not be hitting close to even £15,000 a year.
That must be a typo at the end - teachers can take their pension at 55 [I did] and although that is to rise it will not go to 66! That is the new OAP age.
She was told 66. If that is not the case, it is very good news indeed. But it will mean a lower annual income (which I don't think she'll mind!).
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
That may be a good policy, depending how much of the time it's needed.
True, but pushing offshore wind as the gateway to energy independence or becoming an energy superpower on the back of an intermittent power generation technology is clearly mega bullshit.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
That is exactly what the UK is doing already. 🙄
But government policy is supposed to wean us off gas and French imports. Energy independence is the stated goal and yet we're talking about a huge investment in an energy source that doesn't do that. As I said it's complete bullshit.
If we can reliably export wind most of the time and import only when its needed then that would be a good thing would it not?
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
Or tidal or storage or other new technologies or . . .
But we're not investing in tidal or storage options and we've made gas uneconomic. We already had a power outage due to the wind not blowing, expect it to get worse.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
We'll probably be forced to fit smart meters as a condition of moving to a new supplier, i.e. blackmail. Yes one reason they're being promoted is almost certainly to allow remote disconnection, say of non-payers, or more often rationing, i.e. turning down heating systems on a very cold day when electric heating would otherwise overload the system and cause widespread blackouts.
We're being told to move to electric heating from gas. Gas networks don't have such an acute problem and usually manage to supply all consumers on a very cold day, e.g. they coped in 2010 without any real possibility of cuts. Nor do heat networks, which are used by 65% of buildings in Denmark, have much problem.
The government's energy policy since ~2007-08 of making everything electric (except it seems planes, ships and trains) is imbecilic. That's being polite.
The big takeaways from the Johnson speech are that he still hasn't worked out Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leading the Labour party and that the Tories have been running the country for the last 10 years.
Since he's not been running the country for the last 10 years why shouldn't he seek to rejuvenate and reset the Government for his period in office? That is smart politics. Once parties rest on their laurels of the past that is when they get out of touch and lose, smart parties that want to keep winning need to keep rejuvenating themselves and moving on.
We are where we are because of legislation passed with the votes of those who form the current government, including the Prime Minister. If Johnson wants to now claim they were wrong, so be it.
Are you aware that Johnson wasn't even an MP let alone the PM for most of the last decade?
He became an MP in May 2015, so has been in Parliament for the entire time the Tories have been in power on their own and for over half of the time since the general election in May 2010.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
That is exactly what the UK is doing already. 🙄
But government policy is supposed to wean us off gas and French imports. Energy independence is the stated goal and yet we're talking about a huge investment in an energy source that doesn't do that. As I said it's complete bullshit.
If we can reliably export wind most of the time and import only when its needed then that would be a good thing would it not?
Export to who? It's not like oil or gas which can be stuck on a giant container ship and shipped all across the globe. We can sell energy to via an interconnect to France, Ireland and Belgium. There isn't a huge market for our energy as both France and Belgium are already net exporters of energy and Ireland is a tiny market.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
That may be a good policy, depending how much of the time it's needed.
True, but pushing offshore wind as the gateway to energy independence or becoming an energy superpower on the back of an intermittent power generation technology is clearly mega bullshit.
True but I don't mind that kind of bullshit if it's what's needed to get green energy past nationalistic dumbfucks.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
Patel will get asylum seekers to blow at them in exchange for the navy not sinking them.
Wealth is a tricky subject. What is the real wealth of a couple aged 66 both entitled to £9,000+ per annum state pension (inflation proofed) and no other income or assets. They would pay no income tax or NI. Their 'wealth' on one basis is nil. But to buy a guaranteed income of £18000 per annum would cost several hundred thousand pounds. Which is their real wealth. You would have a difficult task taxing it.
Far easier to tax those who have the same wealth saved up in a visible non tax- payer funded form. But could it truly be fair?
Yes, I bet a couple of teachers retiring on an indexed-linked pension of £30,000 each at 65 wouldn't regard themselves as 'rich' - but between them they have an asset worth around £2.2m.
(Best buy annuity rates for an index-linked pension at 65 are around 2.5% to 3% depending on the exact terms).
The richest person I know is my missus' aunt, who was a deputy head teacher for 1 year before taking early retirement at the age of 52. She freely admits that despite eating out every day and taking around 6-7 expensive holidays a year she literally can't spend all the money she gets from her pension.
She is in her 70s now, but if her mum who is still alive at 101 is anything to go by then she could be getting this pension for 50 years.
The average worker who gets nothing like this back from the government is going to be taxed even harder to pay for this stuff and it's completely unfair.
Teachers can't take early retirement at 52 and haven't been able to for quite a while - if they ever were able to. However, putting that to one side, retiring at 52 would mean she was a teacher for a maximum of 30 years, including just one year as a deputy. On that basis, it is hard to imagine she would be getting a pension of more than £30,000 per annum. That is potentially very comfortable, but it is taxable and it is not going to allow you eat out every day and take 6-7 expensive holidays a year.
Yes, there's a lot of myths on here about teachers' pensions. If anybody wants to look at the reality, they can have a play around on here:
This shows, for example, that a teacher who retires at 65 with 40 years service on £35K (at the high end for a main scale teacher) at the time of retirement will get a pension of £17.5K and a lump sum of £52.5K. Retiring at 60 reduces the pension to £13.5K. Only senior staff will have a salary high enough to get anywhere near the £30K pension many cite on here. It's also worth noting that teachers (and civil servants) pay a lot more of their salary into their pension than they did 10 years ago.
All true I’m sure. The point is, it doesn’t matter how you slice it, public sector pensions are hugely hugely valuable. As I said upthread at 65 years multiply the annual pension by 43 and at 60 years probably by something like 50. That’s the market today, driven as it is by super low interest rates.
So even £17.5K translates to over three quarters of a million. In the context of any future wealth tax why should this be ignored compared to someone who has saved differently and has more visible assets?
I don't disagree. I'm merely pointing out that an average teacher's retirement income is not sufficient to have a lifestyle akin to somebody who is absolutely rolling in money, as many on here seem to suggest.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
Or tidal or storage or other new technologies or . . .
But we're not investing in tidal or storage options and we've made gas uneconomic. We already had a power outage due to the wind not blowing, expect it to get worse.
Does it really matter if a few hundred thousand pensioners freeze to death though? we will be carbon neutral, and a tiny part of the world's net carbon emissions will have been expunged.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
Patel will get asylum seekers to blow at them in exchange for the navy not sinking them.
We're all joking now, but we're making a gargantuan bet on an unreliable technology. Think how gas and oil still shoulder the burden in terms of home heating and car running.
The numbers are so far away from adding up its not true.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
That is exactly what the UK is doing already. 🙄
But government policy is supposed to wean us off gas and French imports. Energy independence is the stated goal and yet we're talking about a huge investment in an energy source that doesn't do that. As I said it's complete bullshit.
If we can reliably export wind most of the time and import only when its needed then that would be a good thing would it not?
Export to who? It's not like oil or gas which can be stuck on a giant container ship and shipped all across the globe. We can sell energy to via an interconnect to France, Ireland and Belgium. There isn't a huge market for our energy as both France and Belgium are already net exporters of energy and Ireland is a tiny market.
I thought we were investing in interconnectors to Scandinavia and the Netherlands too?
Plus as I said before if we overinvest in bountiful clean, cheap energy then it should be possible to incentivise businesses that are energy-intensive but don't need to be 24/7 to operate when there is a surplus of energy and to shutdown when there is a shortage. With smart metres and electric vehicles at home there is the capability to do similar there too so people can charge their cars cheaper when there is a surplus.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The issue is, at what point in the tidal cycle are you doing this, and in which direction?
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
Or tidal or storage or other new technologies or . . .
But we're not investing in tidal or storage options and we've made gas uneconomic. We already had a power outage due to the wind not blowing, expect it to get worse.
Does it really matter if a few hundred thousand pensioners freeze to death though? we will be carbon neutral, and a tiny part of the world's net carbon emissions will have been expunged.
Maybe pensions savings and IHT is how the government will pay for it. 🤷♂️
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
The Hydrogen part of his plan, as trailed, would be intended to deal with the storage issue (and a few others). There's some hopeful stuff about this in an alternative plan punished in the Guardian (the areas of overlap and difference are interesting).
Sadly both plans ignore tidal, which we should certainly exploit as well.
Tidal would be great but the RSBP is a monster, no politician with a sense of self-preservation will fuck with it
Well eggs and omelettes.
I’m sure our feathered friends would thank us for providing a cleaner environment through carbon free power from tides in the long run.
Really it beggars belief we haven’t done more on tidal. We are an island surrounded by some of the biggest tides in the world. It’s totally predictable, reliable, clean, and secure. It’s an area ideal for govt to step in with a few billion as seed corn to take the hits as stuff is ironed out in pilot projects. It’s also hugely exportable technology once you’ve built up your know how.
Even Greta bloody Thunberg would probably not object.
We should get on with it!
A lot of them really are socialists masking as greens.
Wealth is a tricky subject. What is the real wealth of a couple aged 66 both entitled to £9,000+ per annum state pension (inflation proofed) and no other income or assets. They would pay no income tax or NI. Their 'wealth' on one basis is nil. But to buy a guaranteed income of £18000 per annum would cost several hundred thousand pounds. Which is their real wealth. You would have a difficult task taxing it.
Far easier to tax those who have the same wealth saved up in a visible non tax- payer funded form. But could it truly be fair?
Yes, I bet a couple of teachers retiring on an indexed-linked pension of £30,000 each at 65 wouldn't regard themselves as 'rich' - but between them they have an asset worth around £2.2m.
(Best buy annuity rates for an index-linked pension at 65 are around 2.5% to 3% depending on the exact terms).
The richest person I know is my missus' aunt, who was a deputy head teacher for 1 year before taking early retirement at the age of 52. She freely admits that despite eating out every day and taking around 6-7 expensive holidays a year she literally can't spend all the money she gets from her pension.
She is in her 70s now, but if her mum who is still alive at 101 is anything to go by then she could be getting this pension for 50 years.
The average worker who gets nothing like this back from the government is going to be taxed even harder to pay for this stuff and it's completely unfair.
Teachers can't take early retirement at 52 and haven't been able to for quite a while - if they ever were able to. However, putting that to one side, retiring at 52 would mean she was a teacher for a maximum of 30 years, including just one year as a deputy. On that basis, it is hard to imagine she would be getting a pension of more than £30,000 per annum. That is potentially very comfortable, but it is taxable and it is not going to allow you eat out every day and take 6-7 expensive holidays a year.
Yes, there's a lot of myths on here about teachers' pensions. If anybody wants to look at the reality, they can have a play around on here:
This shows, for example, that a teacher who retires at 65 with 40 years service on £35K (at the high end for a main scale teacher) at the time of retirement will get a pension of £17.5K and a lump sum of £52.5K. Retiring at 60 reduces the pension to £13.5K. Only senior staff will have a salary high enough to get anywhere near the £30K pension many cite on here. It's also worth noting that teachers (and civil servants) pay a lot more of their salary into their pension than they did 10 years ago.
All true I’m sure. The point is, it doesn’t matter how you slice it, public sector pensions are hugely hugely valuable. As I said upthread at 65 years multiply the annual pension by 43 and at 60 years probably by something like 50. That’s the market today, driven as it is by super low interest rates.
So even £17.5K translates to over three quarters of a million. In the context of any future wealth tax why should this be ignored compared to someone who has saved differently and has more visible assets?
I don't disagree. I'm merely pointing out that an average teacher's retirement income is not sufficient to have a lifestyle akin to somebody who is absolutely rolling in money, as many on here seem to suggest.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The issue is, at what point in the tidal cycle are you doing this, and in which direction?
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
It may be a dumb question but can you not use locks? Have a lock that is filled naturally then closed off when full and stored until needed?
Wealth is a tricky subject. What is the real wealth of a couple aged 66 both entitled to £9,000+ per annum state pension (inflation proofed) and no other income or assets. They would pay no income tax or NI. Their 'wealth' on one basis is nil. But to buy a guaranteed income of £18000 per annum would cost several hundred thousand pounds. Which is their real wealth. You would have a difficult task taxing it.
Far easier to tax those who have the same wealth saved up in a visible non tax- payer funded form. But could it truly be fair?
Yes, I bet a couple of teachers retiring on an indexed-linked pension of £30,000 each at 65 wouldn't regard themselves as 'rich' - but between them they have an asset worth around £2.2m.
(Best buy annuity rates for an index-linked pension at 65 are around 2.5% to 3% depending on the exact terms).
The richest person I know is my missus' aunt, who was a deputy head teacher for 1 year before taking early retirement at the age of 52. She freely admits that despite eating out every day and taking around 6-7 expensive holidays a year she literally can't spend all the money she gets from her pension.
She is in her 70s now, but if her mum who is still alive at 101 is anything to go by then she could be getting this pension for 50 years.
The average worker who gets nothing like this back from the government is going to be taxed even harder to pay for this stuff and it's completely unfair.
Teachers can't take early retirement at 52 and haven't been able to for quite a while - if they ever were able to. However, putting that to one side, retiring at 52 would mean she was a teacher for a maximum of 30 years, including just one year as a deputy. On that basis, it is hard to imagine she would be getting a pension of more than £30,000 per annum. That is potentially very comfortable, but it is taxable and it is not going to allow you eat out every day and take 6-7 expensive holidays a year.
Yes, there's a lot of myths on here about teachers' pensions. If anybody wants to look at the reality, they can have a play around on here:
This shows, for example, that a teacher who retires at 65 with 40 years service on £35K (at the high end for a main scale teacher) at the time of retirement will get a pension of £17.5K and a lump sum of £52.5K. Retiring at 60 reduces the pension to £13.5K. Only senior staff will have a salary high enough to get anywhere near the £30K pension many cite on here. It's also worth noting that teachers (and civil servants) pay a lot more of their salary into their pension than they did 10 years ago.
All true I’m sure. The point is, it doesn’t matter how you slice it, public sector pensions are hugely hugely valuable. As I said upthread at 65 years multiply the annual pension by 43 and at 60 years probably by something like 50. That’s the market today, driven as it is by super low interest rates.
So even £17.5K translates to over three quarters of a million. In the context of any future wealth tax why should this be ignored compared to someone who has saved differently and has more visible assets?
I don't disagree. I'm merely pointing out that an average teacher's retirement income is not sufficient to have a lifestyle akin to somebody who is absolutely rolling in money, as many on here seem to suggest.
The two retired teachers I know were jetting off around the world once a month prior to Covid. And then moaning about climate change.
Wealth is a tricky subject. What is the real wealth of a couple aged 66 both entitled to £9,000+ per annum state pension (inflation proofed) and no other income or assets. They would pay no income tax or NI. Their 'wealth' on one basis is nil. But to buy a guaranteed income of £18000 per annum would cost several hundred thousand pounds. Which is their real wealth. You would have a difficult task taxing it.
Far easier to tax those who have the same wealth saved up in a visible non tax- payer funded form. But could it truly be fair?
Yes, I bet a couple of teachers retiring on an indexed-linked pension of £30,000 each at 65 wouldn't regard themselves as 'rich' - but between them they have an asset worth around £2.2m.
(Best buy annuity rates for an index-linked pension at 65 are around 2.5% to 3% depending on the exact terms).
The richest person I know is my missus' aunt, who was a deputy head teacher for 1 year before taking early retirement at the age of 52. She freely admits that despite eating out every day and taking around 6-7 expensive holidays a year she literally can't spend all the money she gets from her pension.
She is in her 70s now, but if her mum who is still alive at 101 is anything to go by then she could be getting this pension for 50 years.
The average worker who gets nothing like this back from the government is going to be taxed even harder to pay for this stuff and it's completely unfair.
Teachers can't take early retirement at 52 and haven't been able to for quite a while - if they ever were able to. However, putting that to one side, retiring at 52 would mean she was a teacher for a maximum of 30 years, including just one year as a deputy. On that basis, it is hard to imagine she would be getting a pension of more than £30,000 per annum. That is potentially very comfortable, but it is taxable and it is not going to allow you eat out every day and take 6-7 expensive holidays a year.
She retired about 25 years ago, so maybe the rules have changed. I am pretty sure younger teachers won't be getting anything like the same pension when they retire.
That makes a bit more sense. My 56 year-old wife can't take her teacher pension until she is 66. She was a teacher for around 20 years and ended as a deputy, and will not be hitting close to even £15,000 a year.
That must be a typo at the end - teachers can take their pension at 55 [I did] and although that is to rise it will not go to 66! That is the new OAP age.
She was told 66. If that is not the case, it is very good news indeed. But it will mean a lower annual income (which I don't think she'll mind!).
Obviously the rules have changed since my time when the NPA was 60 - now 65. However, you can still do what I did and take it from 55 with the sum reduced to take account of the extra years. I got what I considered a great deal with the pension and lump sum. The former for me is now around £26k sterling plus I also now have the OAP of about £7k. Here in Spain that equates to around €35k after tax - pretty comfortable to be honest although hardly super rich. Fortunately my tastes are [mostly] modest! Given the relatively large nmbers of teachers who die in service or shortly after I think the early retirement option is a no-brainer if you can afford it. Glancing at the TP web-site you can certainly do it - the Union rep should be able to advise.
For once Johnson isn't lying. We could well become a massive wind energy leader thanks to North Sea.
I don't disagree, it was the childish 'we have decided to become a world leader' which struck me. The UK can't decide anything of the sort, it has to work on it and others will be doing the same.
The hydrogen revolution dovetails with Britain’s colossal gamble on offshore wind, heading for 75 GW by mid-century if the Committee on Climate Change gets its way. The logical endgame is the construction of giant wind farms in the shallow waters of the North Sea - where flow conditions are superb - to generate power for exclusive use in hydrogen production. This would whittle down the cost.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
Or tidal or storage or other new technologies or . . .
But we're not investing in tidal or storage options and we've made gas uneconomic. We already had a power outage due to the wind not blowing, expect it to get worse.
Does it really matter if a few hundred thousand pensioners freeze to death though? we will be carbon neutral, and a tiny part of the world's net carbon emissions will have been expunged.
I thought your usual spiel was Does it really matter if a few hundred thousand pensioners die alone in care homes though? Pret a Manger will be 1% closer to hitting its sales targets.
For once Johnson isn't lying. We could well become a massive wind energy leader thanks to North Sea.
I don't disagree, it was the childish 'we have decided to become a world leader' which struck me. The UK can't decide anything of the sort, it has to work on it and others will be doing the same.
Since when did the UK become a world leader in anything any politician ever said we would lead the world in??
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The issue is, at what point in the tidal cycle are you doing this, and in which direction?
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
It may be a dumb question but can you not use locks? Have a lock that is filled naturally then closed off when full and stored until needed?
That is mostly how these schemes work - inflow (at least some through turbines) on the rising tide, then outflow on the falling tide, again through turbines. The pond in such schemes is there to "store" water at high tide, so that it will flow, more slowly, out while the tide level in general falls. Spreading the generation across at least part of the tidal cycle.
The non-barrage systems simply use the actual tidal flow to generate electricity - nothing at slack water. But since tides are phased around the country....
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
Or tidal or storage or other new technologies or . . .
But we're not investing in tidal or storage options and we've made gas uneconomic. We already had a power outage due to the wind not blowing, expect it to get worse.
That power cut was due to the cable suddenly failing, not the wind not blowing. You have similar failures of split from large power plants tripping off the grid from time to time - it was a grid failure, not an energy generation failure.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The issue is, at what point in the tidal cycle are you doing this, and in which direction?
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
It may be a dumb question but can you not use locks? Have a lock that is filled naturally then closed off when full and stored until needed?
The generation capacity depends on the height difference between your water store and the sea.
If you are generating on both the tidal inflow and outflow then by definition there has to be a period where the two levels are the same, and no power is available.
Tidal streams are of course out of sync around the coasts, so with the right turbine placement you could generate electricity 100% of the time, but suitable estuaries for lagoons are limited (both by position and by SPA / SAC / Ramsar protection).
Perhaps the Conservatives should come up with a new tax, one that this is a fixed annual sum levied on every individual?
Taxes are things that lots of people (particularly on the left) think should be increased but only for other people. I always think there should be a "voluntary tax" to see how many people genuinely want to pay more. It would be the ultimate in virtue signalling, with those that are paying more voluntarily publishing their extra funding that they are paying over so doctors and public "servants" can have even bigger pensions.
Can be turned on its head somewhat. The warm glow one feels through donating to charity actually detracts from the tax-take as these days each donation can be offset against income tax (Gift Aid). Blair policy I think. I`d like to see this practice ended.
If you recall, the coalition government tried to restrict it. There was a tsunami of indignation from the luvvies and Guardian-reading classes generally, and they had to give up the idea:
Wow is there nothing that isn't blamed on (a) Tony Blair or (b) "Luvvies"/Guardian readers in PB Tory Land? Gift Aid was actually introduced by the Tories in 1990, but rather characteristically they thought it should only be available to those rich enough to be giving away £600 or more. Labour simply made it available to all taxpayers by abolishing the lower limit, perhaps that is what irks people on here. Personally I think charity is something that should be encouraged.
My favourite is the financial crash was Bill Clinton's fault for encouraging home ownership amongst the impecunious.
Bill Clinton de-regulated parts of the financial markets - in exactly the way that Bush I refused to do. This enabled the banks to play Monopoly with even more money. What could possibly go wrong?
Sure. A factor. There were so many factors. But hardly the prime culprit for the abdication of the noble art of risk management by almost the entire financial sector.
A law that forced banks to give loans to unsuitable people was always going to end in banks doing whatever they could to get that dirt quality asset off their books. That's exactly what we saw happen with a whole bunch of dodgy asset classes created to help hide the dirt.
Deregulation and poor regulation was a factor for sure. And Greenspan's tone and complacency was very negatively influential. But none of this should have led to the collapse of the financial system. To achieve that you needed mis-selling and fraud on an industrial scale, retail and wholesale, you needed to turn every bad dollar into hundreds via poorly understood derivatives (and derivatives of derivatives), and you needed to jettison risk management and the basic industry standards of competence and due diligence, all in pursuit of the personal enrichment and glory of the "players" and those who weren't but benefited from the trickle-down. Crime of the century. Culprits didn't pay.
The hydrogen revolution dovetails with Britain’s colossal gamble on offshore wind, heading for 75 GW by mid-century if the Committee on Climate Change gets its way. The logical endgame is the construction of giant wind farms in the shallow waters of the North Sea - where flow conditions are superb - to generate power for exclusive use in hydrogen production. This would whittle down the cost.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
That is exactly what the UK is doing already. 🙄
But government policy is supposed to wean us off gas and French imports. Energy independence is the stated goal and yet we're talking about a huge investment in an energy source that doesn't do that. As I said it's complete bullshit.
If we can reliably export wind most of the time and import only when its needed then that would be a good thing would it not?
Export to who? It's not like oil or gas which can be stuck on a giant container ship and shipped all across the globe. We can sell energy to via an interconnect to France, Ireland and Belgium. There isn't a huge market for our energy as both France and Belgium are already net exporters of energy and Ireland is a tiny market.
I thought we were investing in interconnectors to Scandinavia and the Netherlands too?
Plus as I said before if we overinvest in bountiful clean, cheap energy then it should be possible to incentivise businesses that are energy-intensive but don't need to be 24/7 to operate when there is a surplus of energy and to shutdown when there is a shortage. With smart metres and electric vehicles at home there is the capability to do similar there too so people can charge their cars cheaper when there is a surplus.
Those are also tiny markets with surpluses. We are the next energy consumer in the region and the largest market except Germany. Also, being able to sell into a market is great, but we need to be able to cycle up when they need it rather than be able to sell it when we can offer it. They may not need the energy. Investing in a system that doesn't have the capability to cycle up and down on demand as the primary source is a horrible idea. Basing an export market on that is an even worse idea, what if we've sold energy futures to Germany and the wind isn't blowing?
Energy intensive business such as base metal production and manufacturing in general isn't a process that can simply be turned off, it needs a constant supply of reliable energy (which is why nuclear is still in the game). If we're moving to offshore wind as the primary generation method we will have to decide whether we will be a manufacturer of heavy goods in this country.
For once Johnson isn't lying. We could well become a massive wind energy leader thanks to North Sea.
I don't disagree, it was the childish 'we have decided to become a world leader' which struck me. The UK can't decide anything of the sort, it has to work on it and others will be doing the same.
Appealing to the braindead nationalists that make up his dwindling base of support.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
So we're back to gas power and importing energy from France.
Or tidal or storage or other new technologies or . . .
But we're not investing in tidal or storage options and we've made gas uneconomic. We already had a power outage due to the wind not blowing, expect it to get worse.
Does it really matter if a few hundred thousand pensioners freeze to death though? we will be carbon neutral, and a tiny part of the world's net carbon emissions will have been expunged.
I thought your usual spiel was Does it really matter if a few hundred thousand pensioners die alone in care homes though? Pret a Manger will be 1% closer to hitting its sales targets.
Tricky stuff, sarcasm.
Do you mind, they would be dying surrounded by their loved ones.
Its under government COVID that they are dying alone.
That's after our wonderful NHS sent COVID positive patients into them.
Hilary had polls with double digits leads much like this one at about this point
Certainly this poll is an outlier compared to the average, but Clinton was on 45% on the 538 national average at this point in 2016. Whereas Biden is on 51%, so he's still doing much better than Clinton was. Last time Trump won from behind mainly by getting most of the undecided voters. This time he's got to actually persuade a few people who look like they already decided some time ago to vote for Biden (and/or a fairly big polling error in the right direction in the right places).
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
That is exactly what the UK is doing already. 🙄
But government policy is supposed to wean us off gas and French imports. Energy independence is the stated goal and yet we're talking about a huge investment in an energy source that doesn't do that. As I said it's complete bullshit.
Energy independence is nonsense anyway. Far more efficient to have a pan European grid - interconnected with North Africa (which Spain already is, in a fairly small way).
The big takeaways from the Johnson speech are that he still hasn't worked out Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leading the Labour party and that the Tories have been running the country for the last 10 years.
Since he's not been running the country for the last 10 years why shouldn't he seek to rejuvenate and reset the Government for his period in office? That is smart politics. Once parties rest on their laurels of the past that is when they get out of touch and lose, smart parties that want to keep winning need to keep rejuvenating themselves and moving on.
We are where we are because of legislation passed with the votes of those who form the current government, including the Prime Minister. If Johnson wants to now claim they were wrong, so be it.
Are you aware that Johnson wasn't even an MP let alone the PM for most of the last decade?
He's been an MP for the last 65 months, so he's been an MP for most of the last decade.
For once Johnson isn't lying. We could well become a massive wind energy leader thanks to North Sea.
I don't disagree, it was the childish 'we have decided to become a world leader' which struck me. The UK can't decide anything of the sort, it has to work on it and others will be doing the same.
Throughout his political career Boris has been a world leader at imagining stuff. The hard work and difficult choices of manifesting it not so.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The issue is, at what point in the tidal cycle are you doing this, and in which direction?
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
It may be a dumb question but can you not use locks? Have a lock that is filled naturally then closed off when full and stored until needed?
That's what the lagoon is - a giant lock - but if you fill it at high tide you can't empty it to generate electricity at high tide, and if you decide to store the energy instead of releasing it for the first ebb tide then you miss out on the energy you would generate in the mean time.
I could be missing something very clever, but I don't see how it fits.
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The issue is, at what point in the tidal cycle are you doing this, and in which direction?
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
It may be a dumb question but can you not use locks? Have a lock that is filled naturally then closed off when full and stored until needed?
That is mostly how these schemes work - inflow (at least some through turbines) on the rising tide, then outflow on the falling tide, again through turbines. The pond in such schemes is there to "store" water at high tide, so that it will flow, more slowly, out while the tide level in general falls. Spreading the generation across at least part of the tidal cycle.
The non-barrage systems simply use the actual tidal flow to generate electricity - nothing at slack water. But since tides are phased around the country....
I do like these schemes. Unfortunately the press has a bad habit of constantly rubbishing them.
One of the very few things I get genuinely pissed off with Private Eye over is Old Sparky's antideluvian attitude to any energy generation that doesn't come from dead dinosaurs. This does fit with my experience of the power sector, who are just desperately stuck in the past. There are pockets of genuine innovation, but I remember discussing condition monitoring systems with one senior engineer who's response was essentially "It didn't work 30 years ago, it won't work now".
Sadly this has in fact been happening in Planned Parenthood clinics in the US.
Total horsesh1t.
Over 90% of US abortions are under 13 weeks, only 1% are post-21 weeks (& vey few significantly beyond that), and almost all of those are due to extreme risk to the health of the mother or very severe fetal medical conditions.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
That is exactly what the UK is doing already. 🙄
But government policy is supposed to wean us off gas and French imports. Energy independence is the stated goal and yet we're talking about a huge investment in an energy source that doesn't do that. As I said it's complete bullshit.
If we can reliably export wind most of the time and import only when its needed then that would be a good thing would it not?
Export to who? It's not like oil or gas which can be stuck on a giant container ship and shipped all across the globe. We can sell energy to via an interconnect to France, Ireland and Belgium. There isn't a huge market for our energy as both France and Belgium are already net exporters of energy and Ireland is a tiny market.
I thought we were investing in interconnectors to Scandinavia and the Netherlands too?
Plus as I said before if we overinvest in bountiful clean, cheap energy then it should be possible to incentivise businesses that are energy-intensive but don't need to be 24/7 to operate when there is a surplus of energy and to shutdown when there is a shortage. With smart metres and electric vehicles at home there is the capability to do similar there too so people can charge their cars cheaper when there is a surplus.
Those are also tiny markets with surpluses. We are the next energy consumer in the region and the largest market except Germany. Also, being able to sell into a market is great, but we need to be able to cycle up when they need it rather than be able to sell it when we can offer it. They may not need the energy. Investing in a system that doesn't have the capability to cycle up and down on demand as the primary source is a horrible idea. Basing an export market on that is an even worse idea, what if we've sold energy futures to Germany and the wind isn't blowing?
Energy intensive business such as base metal production and manufacturing in general isn't a process that can simply be turned off, it needs a constant supply of reliable energy (which is why nuclear is still in the game). If we're moving to offshore wind as the primary generation method we will have to decide whether we will be a manufacturer of heavy goods in this country.
I was actually thinking of hydrogen production as an energy intensive business, plus hydrogen will soon be able to be used as secondary generation so it becomes its own backup.
If we have bountiful cheap energy in this country then we will be able to expand not contract as a manufacturer of heavy goods.
Absolutely nailed on strategy. By the time we get to the 3rd debate Trump will fling a bucket of blood at Biden's perspex divider and claim its from the victims of Biden's plan to extend abortion into the 14th trimester
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The issue is, at what point in the tidal cycle are you doing this, and in which direction?
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
It may be a dumb question but can you not use locks? Have a lock that is filled naturally then closed off when full and stored until needed?
That's what the lagoon is - a giant lock - but if you fill it at high tide you can't empty it to generate electricity at high tide, and if you decide to store the energy instead of releasing it for the first ebb tide then you miss out on the energy you would generate in the mean time.
I could be missing something very clever, but I don't see how it fits.
The tide comes in and out at different times of the day in different parts of the country which means it could be a form of baseload if there was enough of it distributed correctly.
Boris Johnson "get stuck into the detail"? We have never had (certainly in my lifetime) a head of government so comprehensively hopeless at all things prime-ministerial. You might just as well ask Billy Bunter to go and run the London Marathon, or Donald Trump to behave with dignity and humility. It isn't going to happen, and we are all going to suffer for it. Thank you, all you (once) fellow Conservative members who voted for this complete numpty.
The hydrogen revolution dovetails with Britain’s colossal gamble on offshore wind, heading for 75 GW by mid-century if the Committee on Climate Change gets its way. The logical endgame is the construction of giant wind farms in the shallow waters of the North Sea - where flow conditions are superb - to generate power for exclusive use in hydrogen production. This would whittle down the cost.
Perhaps the Conservatives should come up with a new tax, one that this is a fixed annual sum levied on every individual?
Taxes are things that lots of people (particularly on the left) think should be increased but only for other people. I always think there should be a "voluntary tax" to see how many people genuinely want to pay more. It would be the ultimate in virtue signalling, with those that are paying more voluntarily publishing their extra funding that they are paying over so doctors and public "servants" can have even bigger pensions.
Can be turned on its head somewhat. The warm glow one feels through donating to charity actually detracts from the tax-take as these days each donation can be offset against income tax (Gift Aid). Blair policy I think. I`d like to see this practice ended.
If you recall, the coalition government tried to restrict it. There was a tsunami of indignation from the luvvies and Guardian-reading classes generally, and they had to give up the idea:
Wow is there nothing that isn't blamed on (a) Tony Blair or (b) "Luvvies"/Guardian readers in PB Tory Land? Gift Aid was actually introduced by the Tories in 1990, but rather characteristically they thought it should only be available to those rich enough to be giving away £600 or more. Labour simply made it available to all taxpayers by abolishing the lower limit, perhaps that is what irks people on here. Personally I think charity is something that should be encouraged.
I think it should be encouraged too, but not at the expense of the exchequer.
If not abolished how about have the tax relief apply only to small donations? An incentive to give (over and above the warm feeling in the cockles) but not for HNW individuals to abuse with the sort of devious "schemes" that are often thought up and which are not really charitable.
That would be an improvement, though in addition to HNW individuals who undoubtedly do the abusing you need to add dubious practices of some charities whose role seems to me to be more about raising money for the people that work within the organisation above raising money on behalf of the good cause that underlies it.
Being a lefty, I guess you are are generally not in favour of charity - that needs should be met by the state? If so, in that we agree.
I'm a bit conflicted on charity. It's great to give money to good causes. OTOH, nobody in a wealthy country like this should imo be reliant on private charity. And there's a dark and sinister side to charitable activities. Power abuse as at Oxfam. Tax avoidance as discussed. The buying of status and respectability by unsavouries to deflect from other things - Jimmy Savile OBE being the obvious albeit extreme example.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
Patel will get asylum seekers to blow at them in exchange for the navy not sinking them.
We're all joking now, but we're making a gargantuan bet on an unreliable technology. Think how gas and oil still shoulder the burden in terms of home heating and car running.
The numbers are so far away from adding up its not true.
Tidal works. Solar Works. Wind works. Not all the time so you either need to store power or have back-up nuclear. Happily we are world leaders in small nuclear reactors. And storing power? Fit homes with solar and a battery pack in the garage...
This offshore wind stuff is just such a load of rubbish.
Why? It is a good and increasingly cheap natural resource the UK has.
The UK leading the world in cheap, clean and reliable power generation will enable the UK private sector to have a competitive advantage in anything that uses electricity, which in the 21st century is everything.
The disastrous idea of XR and the Blair/Brown Labour government was to simply tax and cut demand on electricity. Having bountiful cheap clean energy enables our manufacturers and every other consumer of it to compete.
Wind isn't reliable, though, it's an intermittent power generation system. Which is fine in a diversified grid which has power storage capacity for when the wind is blowing and no one has the lights on to be used when the lights are on and the wind isn't blowing. It's not fine here though, it's a very poor idea. Tidal barrages make much more sense here, we're an island nation. It inherently solves the storage issue.
Offshore wind actually is very reliable, onshore wind less so but that's why much more emphasis and investment is going to offshore now.
Tidal barrages make a lot of sense too but they are complementary not competitive. Tidal barrages can be used as storage and as a backup to wind can't they?
Both should be part of the solution. It isn't all or nothing.
Offshore wind needs a huge amount of backup capacity because it doesn't have a power storage mechanism. Tidal barrages are inherently better because they come with a power storage solution. I guess you could conceivably use a tidal reservoir as power storage for offshore wind, put the pumps into reverse with excess energy but I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You can't really store energy with tidal without some monumental inefficiencies, which would make it much more economic to use current battery technology.
Apart from anything else, if you try to store energy ar low tide by pumping enough water into the lagoon to be able to generate electricity at high tide you have to not only expend energy pumping the water into the lagoon, but you forego generating electricity at the same time.
They're useful in terms of being a highly predictable source, but they're not dispatchable. You might end up using a form of storage to time-shift some of the electricity produced by tidal.
No I mean use the excess energy from offshore wind to fill the tidal lagoon by reversing the pumps. As I said, I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The issue is, at what point in the tidal cycle are you doing this, and in which direction?
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
It may be a dumb question but can you not use locks? Have a lock that is filled naturally then closed off when full and stored until needed?
That's what the lagoon is - a giant lock - but if you fill it at high tide you can't empty it to generate electricity at high tide, and if you decide to store the energy instead of releasing it for the first ebb tide then you miss out on the energy you would generate in the mean time.
I could be missing something very clever, but I don't see how it fits.
I meant like a chain of locks. So your primary lock works as standard, but with a backup lock as storage? The backup lock can then be refilled at high tide.
Do not get a smart meter. Do not. The energy companies will use it to black you out when the inevitable gargantuan shortages of energy, any energy, cheap expensive, any, come. As they surely will.
Make no mistake, these policies are brave new world Maoism, and the results will be the same.
Have you got any evidence for this conspiracy theory nonsense?
And are you aware that blackouts and brownouts can occur without smart meters?
What happens when the wind stops blowing?
You rely upon backups or storage or interconnectors.
Oh Philip, do stop talking about things that you have absolutely zero knowledge of!
That is exactly what the UK is doing already. 🙄
But government policy is supposed to wean us off gas and French imports. Energy independence is the stated goal and yet we're talking about a huge investment in an energy source that doesn't do that. As I said it's complete bullshit.
If we can reliably export wind most of the time and import only when its needed then that would be a good thing would it not?
Export to who? It's not like oil or gas which can be stuck on a giant container ship and shipped all across the globe. We can sell energy to via an interconnect to France, Ireland and Belgium. There isn't a huge market for our energy as both France and Belgium are already net exporters of energy and Ireland is a tiny market.
I thought we were investing in interconnectors to Scandinavia and the Netherlands too?
Plus as I said before if we overinvest in bountiful clean, cheap energy then it should be possible to incentivise businesses that are energy-intensive but don't need to be 24/7 to operate when there is a surplus of energy and to shutdown when there is a shortage. With smart metres and electric vehicles at home there is the capability to do similar there too so people can charge their cars cheaper when there is a surplus.
Those are also tiny markets with surpluses. We are the next energy consumer in the region and the largest market except Germany. Also, being able to sell into a market is great, but we need to be able to cycle up when they need it rather than be able to sell it when we can offer it. They may not need the energy. Investing in a system that doesn't have the capability to cycle up and down on demand as the primary source is a horrible idea. Basing an export market on that is an even worse idea, what if we've sold energy futures to Germany and the wind isn't blowing?
Energy intensive business such as base metal production and manufacturing in general isn't a process that can simply be turned off, it needs a constant supply of reliable energy (which is why nuclear is still in the game). If we're moving to offshore wind as the primary generation method we will have to decide whether we will be a manufacturer of heavy goods in this country.
I was actually thinking of hydrogen production as an energy intensive business, plus hydrogen will soon be able to be used as secondary generation so it becomes its own backup.
If we have bountiful cheap energy in this country then we will be able to expand not contract as a manufacturer of heavy goods.
Bountiful, cheap, unreliable energy is not how to build a heavy goods manufacturing industry. The hydrogen stuff is just another pie in the sky idea.
Wealth is a tricky subject. What is the real wealth of a couple aged 66 both entitled to £9,000+ per annum state pension (inflation proofed) and no other income or assets. They would pay no income tax or NI. Their 'wealth' on one basis is nil. But to buy a guaranteed income of £18000 per annum would cost several hundred thousand pounds. Which is their real wealth. You would have a difficult task taxing it.
Far easier to tax those who have the same wealth saved up in a visible non tax- payer funded form. But could it truly be fair?
Yes, I bet a couple of teachers retiring on an indexed-linked pension of £30,000 each at 65 wouldn't regard themselves as 'rich' - but between them they have an asset worth around £2.2m.
(Best buy annuity rates for an index-linked pension at 65 are around 2.5% to 3% depending on the exact terms).
Agree, assuming you missed the 'not' out eg 'not regard themselves as rich'.
A combined income of £60K in retirement I think is very well off indeed, yet they they could have minimal assets that would attract any wealth tax at all, yet someone living on half that income from assets would be paying a wealth tax!
60k with no mortgage etc is extremely comfortable, ours is over £50 k and can’t spend it unless it went oh holidays etc, not an option so it goes to the grandchildren with increasingly generous presents. I don’t need or want anything physical but I’m lucky in the extreme.
As you can see this is close to my heart. I have an income of only £3K or £4K and I am retired. I live off of my assets which I accumulated for this purpose. I fail to see why my assets should be treated differently to a DB pension pot for wealth purposes, but if you include the value of a DB pot in a wealth calculation you will be bring into a wealth category many fairly lowish income people (as per Pagan's post - these pots are very valuable).
I have no issue with paying higher council tax on my property (as suggested in HYUFDs post) or in fact paying CGT on my residential property when I sell it, which I will do for the cash and downsize, but the wealth tax for people who have made their own provision for retirement is a can of worms.
It`s an interested topic to discuss but it won`t happen. Any government which introduced a tax on residential property when sold (or even worse when not sold) would never be re-elected.
So it can only happen with cross-party support, or done by a government that knows it isn’t going to be re-elected anyway but wants to do the right thing.
The hydrogen revolution dovetails with Britain’s colossal gamble on offshore wind, heading for 75 GW by mid-century if the Committee on Climate Change gets its way. The logical endgame is the construction of giant wind farms in the shallow waters of the North Sea - where flow conditions are superb - to generate power for exclusive use in hydrogen production. This would whittle down the cost.
Comments
But well deserved for a lifetime of excellent research in maths and physics.
If you're foregoing generating some electricity at the time that happens then that should be fine if you have a smart system where cheaper offshore wind is generating electricity at the time and some tidal power is saved for when the wind is not available.
The solution should be a smart mix of both, not all or none.
So even £17.5K translates to over three quarters of a million. In the context of any future wealth tax why should this be ignored compared to someone who has saved differently and has more visible assets?
For what we've blown on the undelivered nuclear projects (and the time we've wasted), we could just about have built the first large scale project by now.
https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/onshore-wind-and-solar-cheapest-new-power-option-for-most-of-planet-bnef/2-1-799038
Onshore is regulatory limited in the UK.
The UK is currently running at over 50% of household consumption being wind generation already.
The potential for a cock-up to result in your supply being terminated, with call centre staff unable to fix the issue, is far too great.
Having them be required to send someone round to access the property to terminate the supply acts as a safeguard against those types of error.
UK: Outrageous. We are so ready. An internal border for Kent would be so worth it for our Freedom
EU: Great! So can we see the system that you will require our trucks to use to cross your border from 1st January?
UK: No
EU: Tell you what. We're going to leave the room for a minute. Have a think about how you would like us to spin your climbdown when you accept that you can't leave. We'll be happy to help
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1313441294371389440
https://twitter.com/HawksmoorLondon/status/1313404794288189441?s=20
We're being told to move to electric heating from gas. Gas networks don't have such an acute problem and usually manage to supply all consumers on a very cold day, e.g. they coped in 2010 without any real possibility of cuts. Nor do heat networks, which are used by 65% of buildings in Denmark, have much problem.
The government's energy policy since ~2007-08 of making everything electric (except it seems planes, ships and trains) is imbecilic. That's being polite.
The numbers are so far away from adding up its not true.
And about as convincing as Trump's balcony moment.
Plus as I said before if we overinvest in bountiful clean, cheap energy then it should be possible to incentivise businesses that are energy-intensive but don't need to be 24/7 to operate when there is a surplus of energy and to shutdown when there is a shortage. With smart metres and electric vehicles at home there is the capability to do similar there too so people can charge their cars cheaper when there is a surplus.
I thought the idea was that, as the tide rose you generated power as water turned turbines entering the lagoon. Then, as the tide ebbed you would be able to do the reverse as you allowed water out of the lagoon through the turbines.
If, say the tide is a couple of hours into its ebb, and your electricity generation would be nearing its peak, how do you store energy in the lagoon at this time without losing all the energy from the ebb (and following flood) tides?
Any MP who can;t see that is pretty foolish.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313445293912920064
EDIT: https://www.teacherspensions.co.uk/members/planning-retirement/types-of-retirement/early-retirement.aspx
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/07/15/worlds-hydrogen-revolution-marvellous-chance-britain-does-not/
Have a 42nd Trimester abortion like South Park?
Tricky stuff, sarcasm.
The non-barrage systems simply use the actual tidal flow to generate electricity - nothing at slack water. But since tides are phased around the country....
If you are generating on both the tidal inflow and outflow then by definition there has to be a period where the two levels are the same, and no power is available.
Tidal streams are of course out of sync around the coasts, so with the right turbine placement you could generate electricity 100% of the time, but suitable estuaries for lagoons are limited (both by position and by SPA / SAC / Ramsar protection).
Energy intensive business such as base metal production and manufacturing in general isn't a process that can simply be turned off, it needs a constant supply of reliable energy (which is why nuclear is still in the game). If we're moving to offshore wind as the primary generation method we will have to decide whether we will be a manufacturer of heavy goods in this country.
Think it was in that book, anyway. While since I read it.
Its under government COVID that they are dying alone.
That's after our wonderful NHS sent COVID positive patients into them.
Far more efficient to have a pan European grid - interconnected with North Africa (which Spain already is, in a fairly small way).
The hard work and difficult choices of manifesting it not so.
That's how strange the times are.
I could be missing something very clever, but I don't see how it fits.
One of the very few things I get genuinely pissed off with Private Eye over is Old Sparky's antideluvian attitude to any energy generation that doesn't come from dead dinosaurs. This does fit with my experience of the power sector, who are just desperately stuck in the past. There are pockets of genuine innovation, but I remember discussing condition monitoring systems with one senior engineer who's response was essentially "It didn't work 30 years ago, it won't work now".
What could possibly go wrong?
Over 90% of US abortions are under 13 weeks, only 1% are post-21 weeks (& vey few significantly beyond that), and almost all of those are due to extreme risk to the health of the mother or very severe fetal medical conditions.
If we have bountiful cheap energy in this country then we will be able to expand not contract as a manufacturer of heavy goods.
He will save us from everything!!!!!!!
No doubt he will wow them with some press-ups on the floor or tell them a spiffing after-dinner speech and then waltz out.