I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
"Facts" which are up for debate have not been established as facts.
Quite rightly, because then they're opinions.
Truly objective facts are very few and far between. People wanting others to accept their subjective opinion as a fact is not appropriate.
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
The interpretation of what facts mean is subjective not the facts themselves.
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
The interpretation of what facts mean is subjective not the facts themselves.
Whether something is a fact or not, is entirely up for debate.
This is the frustration with the push back from the right over Net Zero. Have some daft decisions been made about not licensing extraction? Sure, and they should be reversed. Extract everything that is commercially viable to extract.
But that only gets us so far, and as output continues to ramp down we leave ourselves increasingly exposed to exports.
The right insist that this is the right strategy - Reform clowns literally want to copy Trump and switch windfarms off.
The answer is both - extract all the oil and gas which is commercially viable to extract as we establish the renewables generation which will replace oil and gas.
But do we get that? No. Labour, the SNP and Scottish Greens want to shut oil and gas down quickly, leaving extractable fuel in the ground as we replace them with imports earlier. Tories and Reform want to pretend we don't need renewables because more oil and gas will sort us long term.
Can't both sides recognise their folly?
One of the problems with leaving (viable) oil and gas in the ground is we are only going to be importing it from elsewhere, generally places with much poorer environmental regs than the UK. So we are going to be offshoring the emissions problem, pretending it doesn't exist. Win win for the CCC, get the issue of the UK's books and it doesn't look as bad for the UK emissions ledger.
I think we will see gas use drop considerably over the next decade but how quickly will depend a lot on battery storage, its safety and effectiveness. My concern over offshore wind is for the sheer volume of turbines going up related to the environmental damage predicted, as seen with Berwick Bank and bird losses.
Important point raised re the congestion of the North Sea with turbines, shipping etc now being an issue for extraction.
The problem we have is the middle ground in politics is not very well populated at the minute
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The offset isn't real - if you are going to make people redundant you need to explicitly say what government functions are going to be reduced or binned off.
Because there are often obvious consequences that the last Tory Government was too thick to understand.
Reduce the number of people processing asylum claims those awaiting their claim to be processed take longer to be processed which means they need to be housed for longer
which means you need to house more people than you have space for so suddenly that little staff saving results in £10bn being spent to hire run down hotels.
I have given this example on here many times but after 35 years of working with local authorities a cycle applies, and it happened 35 years ago and it still happens.
A journeyman (or woman) Chief Executive is brought in to cut costs. He/she pores over spreadsheets and determines that labour is their biggest cost, so in order to cut costs they cut staff. Easy!
Let's take kerbside refuse collectors. In a.medium sized authority it would be reasonable to assume a 100 collectors and drivers. So the CE decides after much calculation that they can make do with 70 ( it's always a cut of circa 30%). So we have just saved just under a third of our labour cost. We can also get rid of 30% of our vehicles and their associated costs. Happy days!
However householder start complaining that their bins/ recycling service is failing (and don't forget ratepayers pay their council tax for one thing, to get their bins emptied). So to offset the failing service they hire in first ten, then twenty, then thirty agency staff. These workers will require a corresponding number of vehicles and these will be hired in at an astronomical rate. It probably takes two years to get back up to 70 permanent staff and 30 expensive agency staff, by which time the CE who saved 30% on service provision costs has moved on to a bigger local authority to do the same.
The next CE comes in and is tasked with reducing agency and vehicle hire costs so he/she tupees over the 30 agency staff onto the books and buys the corresponding vehicles required.
So often, cost savings costs more than they save.
I suspect Kemi's civil service sackings maintain a similar result.
A recruitment freeze would be needed as well so no agency staff can be brought in if she really wants to get numbers down. It must also only be non essential staff cut
What does essential mean? Can agency staff be brought in to do the job a politician decided wasn't essential, but turned out to have stymied the whole process?
No, once decided non essential the post is scrapped, permanently made redundant
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
The interpretation of what facts mean is subjective not the facts themselves.
Whether something is a fact or not, is entirely up for debate.
Philosophically everything is subjective.
"Archaeology is the search for FACT, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall."
Reform is slightly socialist compared to the Tories.
Interesting - he must think his target voters don't want to buy new houses but tasteful old ones when they retire to Much Binding in the Wold or Walmington-on-Sea. And they don't want new houses spoiling the chocolate box picture, maybe?
I think that there is interest in comparing Reform's implied positions (them not having any thought-though, consistent ones yet) with Victorian / Edwardian views.
eg The distributionists I mentioned the other week, who draw on GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc:
More generally they developed a policy agenda distinct from any of the main three parties during this time, including promoting guilds and the nuclear family, introducing primary elections and referendums, antitrust action, tax reform to favour small businesses, and transparency regarding party funding and the Honours Lists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
This is the frustration with the push back from the right over Net Zero. Have some daft decisions been made about not licensing extraction? Sure, and they should be reversed. Extract everything that is commercially viable to extract.
But that only gets us so far, and as output continues to ramp down we leave ourselves increasingly exposed to exports.
The right insist that this is the right strategy - Reform clowns literally want to copy Trump and switch windfarms off.
The answer is both - extract all the oil and gas which is commercially viable to extract as we establish the renewables generation which will replace oil and gas.
But do we get that? No. Labour, the SNP and Scottish Greens want to shut oil and gas down quickly, leaving extractable fuel in the ground as we replace them with imports earlier. Tories and Reform want to pretend we don't need renewables because more oil and gas will sort us long term.
Can't both sides recognise their folly?
One of the problems with leaving (viable) oil and gas in the ground is we are only going to be importing it from elsewhere, generally places with much poorer environmental regs than the UK. So we are going to be offshoring the emissions problem, pretending it doesn't exist. Win win for the CCC, get the issue of the UK's books and it doesn't look as bad for the UK emissions ledger.
I think we will see gas use drop considerably over the next decade but how quickly will depend a lot on battery storage, its safety and effectiveness. My concern over offshore wind is for the sheer volume of turbines going up related to the environmental damage predicted, as seen with Berwick Bank and bird losses.
Important point raised re the congestion of the North Sea with turbines, shipping etc now being an issue for extraction.
The problem we have is the middle ground in politics is not very well populated at the minute
The dilemma is that humanity cannot extract and burn all the remaining exploitable reserves of oil and gas without seriously disrupting the Earth's climate. Some of it has to be left in the ground, or at least not be burned.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
I think you are splitting hairs here. I suspect the sort of civil servant Kemi has in mind are lazy pen pushers who work from home like people working for HMRC, Companies House, the DVLA and the passport office. After police numbers were cut by the coalition I don't believe she would dare do it again.
Civil Service number went up because of ( pretend I didn't write it) Brexit.
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
The interpretation of what facts mean is subjective not the facts themselves.
Whether something is a fact or not, is entirely up for debate.
Philosophically everything is subjective.
Which philosophy says England doesn't have a higher population than Scotland?
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
It is possible to target Net Zero while still seeking to maximise North Sea oil and gas extraction.
And when you have a government locking in demand for natural gas as part of its decarbonisation strategy, through CCGT and blue hydrogen plants with CO2 capture, there is every incentive to 'drill, baby, drill' rather than import LNG from Qatar.
I may have mentioned this previously.
Yes, "Net Zero" means balancing off emissions from more North Sea fossil with renewables. Its not "get rid of North Sea fossils".
I am going to be hammering this point hard in my run for Holyrood. The Reform clowns want to protect the NE by importing more gas into England and literally shutting down off-shore wind.
Isn't Reform shutting down offshore wind technology a diktat from their handlers in the Whitehouse on behalf of Putin?
If only it were that sophisticated. It strikes me as more the result of someone spending too much time following MAGA accounts on X.
Doug Burgum shuttering the Danish wind farm development when it was 90% complete was pretty crazy. But while I can understand that US energy policy is now determined by whatever whim takes hold of Trump, I can't really get my head around Farage deciding it's something to ape.
Farage apes all of Trump’s policies. He hero worships Trump.
That’s a really bad smoking problem the Russians have got.
That might be right. It is hard to see Ukraine targeting Moscow just to burn some polystyrene so this may well be an accident (or false flag or just miscaptioned).
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
The interpretation of what facts mean is subjective not the facts themselves.
Whether something is a fact or not, is entirely up for debate.
Philosophically everything is subjective.
Which philosophy says England doesn't have a higher population than Scotland?
Solipsism means we can be sceptical of all claimed "facts".
That’s a really bad smoking problem the Russians have got.
I wouldn't want to be downwind of that smoke.
The great thing about some of these fires is that they don't all need to be a result of Ukrainian actions: as sanctions bite, trained men are sent to the front, equipment ages without replacement, and management start incurring greater losses, there will be more fires and accidents.
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
There is an easy win for the country which is zonal pricing of energy. Benefits around £3bn a year. This however would hurt southern users so the Tories reject it. That is why despite being a Tory party member I am not sure I will vote for them next year. They are too obsessed with older voters in the South East.
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
There is an easy win for the country which is zonal pricing of energy. Benefits around £3bn a year. This however would hurt southern users so the Tories reject it. That is why despite being a Tory party member I am not sure I will vote for them next year. They are too obsessed with older voters in the South East.
Labour have rejected it too. What's their reasoning?
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
There is an easy win for the country which is zonal pricing of energy. Benefits around £3bn a year. This however would hurt southern users so the Tories reject it. That is why despite being a Tory party member I am not sure I will vote for them next year. They are too obsessed with older voters in the South East.
Labour have rejected it too. What's their reasoning?
A single national price would help ensure the system was “fair, affordable, secure and efficient”.
I make partisan points - I know that so this is going to sound hypocritical:
We need to take party politics out of facts. We are sliding into US style fascism where the facts are up for debate.
There are ample opportunities for all parties to set out their analysis of how we got here and what we do about it. But we struggle to do that because parties - including my own - deny reality for partisan reasons.
Facts are up for debate, that's not fascism that's free speech and healthy.
Fascism is saying that facts aren't up for debate and imposing one person's facts onto others who don't agree with them.
Almost all facts are subjective and need debating, accepting what one person says unquestioningly leads to Orwellian abuses.
The interpretation of what facts mean is subjective not the facts themselves.
Whether something is a fact or not, is entirely up for debate.
Philosophically everything is subjective.
Which philosophy says England doesn't have a higher population than Scotland?
Solipsism means we can be sceptical of all claimed "facts".
Oh so you're a solipsist, are you. I hadn’t realised. Gosh. Heavy waters.
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Of course it is and the whole CO2 stuff is some global conspiracy, for whatever reason, by the Illuminati lizards who run the world.
Utter rubbish
The conspiracy structure is
1) The high council 2) who tell The Illuminati what to do 3) who tell the Zeta Reticulans what to do 4) who tell the Lizard Men in People Suits what to do.
The Trans Gay Illegal Immigrant Alien AIs are more like zero hours contractors, filling in where required.
As a result, even a simple crop circle takes 10 years and 49,000 pages of meeting minutes to arrange.
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
There is an easy win for the country which is zonal pricing of energy. Benefits around £3bn a year. This however would hurt southern users so the Tories reject it. That is why despite being a Tory party member I am not sure I will vote for them next year. They are too obsessed with older voters in the South East.
Labour have rejected it too. What's their reasoning?
My feeling is that any policy will have winners and losers. This policy will push up prices in London and the South East and take them down in Scotland and the North. Labour is the party of London and the Tories the South East. It will be interesting to see if Reform pick up on this as they are becoming the party of the North of England.
What is most disappointing is that the parties put their own political base above the country. This is the same with both Labour and the Tories and up here the SNP.
JD Vance calls Canterbury Cathedral exhibit 'ugly' ... Mr Vance said: "It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring 'marginalized communities' by making a beautiful historical building really ugly." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly64e0v34jo
Trendy vicar.
He is actually right though, it looks absolutely hideous. Shockingly inappropriate and utterly without any feeling for the building.
I mean, I don't know that somebody who has a face like a smacked arse and the soul of a Mafia Don is in a position to lecture. But he does, for once, have a point.
JD Vance sounds quite like Mr Bufton-Tufton mowing his lawn in Tunbridge Wells on a Saturday afternoon, harrumphing in time to the Flymo. But I don't think he likes his Christianity escaping from the small box where he keeps it, and asking him awkward questions; we've seen that before with him. (Side note: that's a human characteristic, we all do it, and we all need challenging sometimes.)
I think it's a fascinating exhibit. I'm in that part of Kent for a few days in December, and I'll go and have a look. A cathedral is a place where it is appropriate to ask questions about God, and cathedrals are - and always have been - buildings for everyone, so I think it's a great idea to poke some assumptions. Some people will huff and puff, and others will have think a bit more deeply.
It was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey who famously said "The duty of the church is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable", which is hackneyed but a good aphorism.
We seem quite happy with Sheela-na-gigs, and this is far less provocative than those. I'd frame it far more as a Cathedral doing what cathedrals have always done.
Is this one of those exhibitions that tours round most cathedrals? Is each instance unique? How do they get the paint/medium off the stone?
(Addressed to anyone who knows, not to you specifically.)
I wonder how they'd feel if some unauthorised artist plastered graffiti on the outside walls!
I'd guess that it will be some peelable surface - which could be paint on or stick on.
I have used paint-on protection to pre-protect walls against graffiti (so you can just hose it all off and repaint to protect for next time), or once to waterproof a shower set against a stone house wall.
Amuses me that the link shows the explanation about the exhibition directly underneath their welcome to Sarah Mullaly, rather giving the impression that the exhibition is to welcome her.
Be interesting to hear if the exhibition does go on tour. Some of the exhibitions that tour cathedrals are amazing. I remember one about the moon.
FPT - I was startled to see in my Aeroplane Monthly that Rochester Cathedral recently put on show a locally made Shorts floatplane, showcasing the plane restoration volunteers' efforts and more generally engineering in the area (evidently from a local historical but also educational perspective with family activities, which usually means stuff for children).
They thereby helped out the plane restorers by giving them a display venue to make their work known. Which is nice.
More generally a key point about temporary exhibitions is that they will not be there for long. Another point is that they exist to do different things, sometimes experimental. So grumping about them is pointless, especially if it is to do with the Christian message anyway.
I have some great photos of my son under the Earth at Ely Cathederal a few years back. I'm unsure what that had to do with the Christian message.
Likewise, Chester Cathedral has, for the past few years, had a large model railway in it for a few weeks in the summer. Again, this seems more to do with pulling in the punters than it does religion (although the link between vicars and railways are much stronger than just Rev Awdry).
I'm not a fan of graffiti. But it'll be temporary, and won't have damaged the cathedral's fabric. Sometimes people should just shrug and say "That's not for me".
It’s about finding ways to connect with people and bring them into a situation where they can hear the Christian message.
If only a handful of people who come to see the railway exhibition are inspired to ask why people spent so much time and effort building the cathedral and progress from that to faith it will have been worthwhile
I'm going to add a further perspective there. The first para is imo a bit too "them" and "us" - Church of England ecclesiology and theology is broader.
It is more inclusive, and the boundaries are blurred, and recognises on the one hand that people who are not "members" also have some orientation to spirituality, or the divine, or the numinous (choose your word), and welcome that. There are ancient and modern traditions which are far more than a transactional "I was saved" followed by a rationalistic religiosity, whether catholic, celtic, Orthodox, or others. Close contact with many traditions is one of the advantages of the CofE.
On the other hand, the cathedral is part of the community, and the building is part of the town, looked after by the Cathedral Authorities, so model railways and so on are fine.
Cathedrals have always been at the centre of both sacred and secular (but not usually profane *) events, and have spent the last half century or more recovering that position. The "great unwashed" are welcome because
* Though from some particular perspectives some things may be perceived as profane. as the Celebration of the Car held in Coventry Cathedral some years ago by people with a green emphasis, or "Greens" seeing the opportunity for a PR stunt (there was a naked protest 'in the spirit of Lady Godiva').
That I think is the tenor of the attitude of the Telegraph coverage - Canterbury Cathedral is supposed to belong to "us" cultural conservatives (see Restore Trust), whilst Canterbury Cathedral would perhaps look more at the NT stories of JC being in company with tax collectors and other ne'er do wells, so having a responsibility to dialogue with all. That's also often the tenor of "Rave in the Nave" type events.
I'm not clear about this - have they actually spray painted the stonework? Is it reversible? If not that's fecking vandalism.
No of course they haven't spray-painted it. If they had, it would have been reversible.
It's a Grade 1 listed building.
It's getting quite funny how the extreme right are getting triggered, Ten Jail Terms Tommy is on it now.
I think the real question is “how much extra are we willing to pay to use fuel from a renewable secure source over fossil fuels?”. This is clearly somewhere above 0 but has a limit and needs to factor in a lot and isn’t just a fixed % of fossil fuels.
Hi BigG - I had a very rough 24 hours after my flu and covid vaccination double whammy. Started 13 h after the jabs and wasn't really happy until 48 h. Stick with it, its worth the short dose of pain.
Just flu jab for me, but then spent the rest of the morning chopping apple wood. Apple is so so hard to chop compared to most other wood (great burner though, but will have to wait a couple of years). Injection spot now aches.
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
There is an easy win for the country which is zonal pricing of energy. Benefits around £3bn a year. This however would hurt southern users so the Tories reject it. That is why despite being a Tory party member I am not sure I will vote for them next year. They are too obsessed with older voters in the South East.
Labour have rejected it too. What's their reasoning?
@NickPalmer told us, that when he asked (as an MP) about tidal, he got given (by the civil servants) a report which claimed tidal is completely uneconomic. But was based on rather ridiculous assumptions.
There’s a couple of them about in the permanent structure of government.
One claimed that each tidal one would use a significant percentage of the countries concrete production. Because someone decided to claim that it would be built like a concrete dam. Except that no-one has ever proposed such as design.
What has been proposed - and a few smaller structures built as - is rock, sand and soil structures. They would look like a section of beach, more than anything, from the water, rather than a wall. Imagine a beach that created a closed pond, in a loop.
It’s often the case that a departmental policy becomes permanent. See the eternal love for ID cards in the Home Office.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
Storage heaters. It baffles me no-one seems to be pursuing this obvious solution. It needs just three simple updates to the basic 1960s models:
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
That's pretty much what domestic batteries, smart meters and funky power companies do. Whilst batteries are more expensive than storage heaters, the energy is much more useful stored as battery charge than as heat. (Once you turn energy into heat, you're not efficiently getting it back to do anything else with it.)
I have lived in a couple of houses with storage heaters. Typically the houses were baking in the early hours of the morning, and freezing after 10am.
Also, storage heaters aren't viable on a multi-day basis. The major problem with our current net zero energy aspirations is that our peak electrical demand is on dark cold still winter days, and these conditions can sometimes go on for a week or more, which gets beyond any reasonable level of storage we could plausibly build.
Storage heaters won't do anything to help with those conditions, they are only helpful to shift loads from daytime to nighttime - but we can do that with batteries now.
That’s a really bad smoking problem the Russians have got.
I wouldn't want to be downwind of that smoke.
The great thing about some of these fires is that they don't all need to be a result of Ukrainian actions: as sanctions bite, trained men are sent to the front, equipment ages without replacement, and management start incurring greater losses, there will be more fires and accidents.
Very much so, there’s a severe labour shortage due to military and emigration, sanctions make getting industrial parts difficult and expensive with long lead times.
A lot of russian industry has already gone to four-day weeks, and it’s not difficult to imagine that maintenance is either deferred or done by people not properly trained. (I can change a plug, but I’m not an electrician, changing that motor that runs the conveyor belt is just like changing a plug really, wires off, wires on, what could go wrong…?)
Fires could be accidents, equipment failures, kids playing with matches, more organised “partisan” anarchists working with Ukraine, or direct Ukranian action.
But however the fires start, they all help screw the russian economy and make winning the war more difficult. Sorry about the carbon footprint, and to anyone downwind of a large pile of plastics with a smoking problem.
Regarding storage heaters and the lack thereof, I'd say our [2.5 year old new build] house doesn't suffer from a lack of one, it is very well-insulated and takes very little gas to keep warm. Without gas, I'd imagine a heat pump could do the job, but we don't have one.
What is more of a shame I'd say is the lack of a hot water storage tank. In the morning in the summer it takes some time between turning the hot water tap on and hot water coming out, because the boiler needs to wake up, heat the water and then cycle the water around the house. Which means wasting cold water for a while until the hot comes through.
Saves gas, but wastes water, so environmental swings and roundabouts.
That's mainly a function of length of pipework between the boiler and the tap, and how well insulated it is. Swapping the boiler for a hot water cylinder won't make any difference to that.
My parents have a hot water cylinder with immersion heating in their new build - they use it as a load dump for their solar PV before they start exporting it.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
Storage heaters. It baffles me no-one seems to be pursuing this obvious solution. It needs just three simple updates to the basic 1960s models:
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
That's pretty much what domestic batteries, smart meters and funky power companies do. Whilst batteries are more expensive than storage heaters, the energy is much more useful stored as battery charge than as heat. (Once you turn energy into heat, you're not efficiently getting it back to do anything else with it.)
I have lived in a couple of houses with storage heaters. Typically the houses were baking in the early hours of the morning, and freezing after 10am.
When we bought our holiday home myself and a friend went in with sledgehammers and a skip before getting the builders in to put it back together. One of the things we removed were the storage heaters. Those bricks weigh a ton. Replaced with a wood burner and gas central heating.
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
There is an easy win for the country which is zonal pricing of energy. Benefits around £3bn a year. This however would hurt southern users so the Tories reject it. That is why despite being a Tory party member I am not sure I will vote for them next year. They are too obsessed with older voters in the South East.
Labour have rejected it too. What's their reasoning?
@NickPalmer told us, that when he asked (as an MP) about tidal, he got given (by the civil servants) a report which claimed tidal is completely uneconomic. But was based on rather ridiculous assumptions.
There’s a couple of them about in the permanent structure of government.
One claimed that each tidal one would use a significant percentage of the countries concrete production. Because someone decided to claim that it would be built like a concrete dam. Except that no-one has ever proposed such as design.
What has been proposed - and a few smaller structures built as - is rock, sand and soil structures. They would look like a section of beach, more than anything, from the water, rather than a wall. Imagine a beach that created a closed pond, in a loop.
It’s often the case that a departmental policy becomes permanent. See the eternal love for ID cards in the Home Office.
I'm hearing that elderly people of leisure like me won't get an ID card unless we ask for one.
Regarding storage heaters and the lack thereof, I'd say our [2.5 year old new build] house doesn't suffer from a lack of one, it is very well-insulated and takes very little gas to keep warm. Without gas, I'd imagine a heat pump could do the job, but we don't have one.
What is more of a shame I'd say is the lack of a hot water storage tank. In the morning in the summer it takes some time between turning the hot water tap on and hot water coming out, because the boiler needs to wake up, heat the water and then cycle the water around the house. Which means wasting cold water for a while until the hot comes through.
Saves gas, but wastes water, so environmental swings and roundabouts.
That's mainly a function of length of pipework between the boiler and the tap, and how well insulated it is. Swapping the boiler for a hot water cylinder won't make any difference to that.
My parents have a hot water cylinder with immersion heating in their new build - they use it as a load dump for their solar PV before they start exporting it.
(nerd ON)
There are lots of ways round that, depending.
Local water heater at the bathroom, as we get for eg electric showers. Local water storage (small tank). Hot water circulation system (large houses). Narrower pipes (so less water volume to run off), or even separate point to point for each hot tap.
And plenty more ...
(10mm 15mm and 22mm runs use water in the volume ratios 1 : 2.2 : 4.8.)
This is the frustration with the push back from the right over Net Zero. Have some daft decisions been made about not licensing extraction? Sure, and they should be reversed. Extract everything that is commercially viable to extract.
But that only gets us so far, and as output continues to ramp down we leave ourselves increasingly exposed to exports.
The right insist that this is the right strategy - Reform clowns literally want to copy Trump and switch windfarms off.
The answer is both - extract all the oil and gas which is commercially viable to extract as we establish the renewables generation which will replace oil and gas.
But do we get that? No. Labour, the SNP and Scottish Greens want to shut oil and gas down quickly, leaving extractable fuel in the ground as we replace them with imports earlier. Tories and Reform want to pretend we don't need renewables because more oil and gas will sort us long term.
Can't both sides recognise their folly?
One of the problems with leaving (viable) oil and gas in the ground is we are only going to be importing it from elsewhere, generally places with much poorer environmental regs than the UK. So we are going to be offshoring the emissions problem, pretending it doesn't exist. Win win for the CCC, get the issue of the UK's books and it doesn't look as bad for the UK emissions ledger.
I think we will see gas use drop considerably over the next decade but how quickly will depend a lot on battery storage, its safety and effectiveness. My concern over offshore wind is for the sheer volume of turbines going up related to the environmental damage predicted, as seen with Berwick Bank and bird losses.
Important point raised re the congestion of the North Sea with turbines, shipping etc now being an issue for extraction.
The problem we have is the middle ground in politics is not very well populated at the minute
I think there’s a need to revisit the assumptions that government use, regarding favourability of each type of electricity generation.
The overriding assumption should be the price of electricity, which more that almost any other factor has a direct impact on economic growth. If you have, to be very crude, a green-cheap axis, then it needs to be moved back towards cheap.
You also want to keep a mix of types, such that disruption of one type can’t affect prices too much, but also want to keep a minimum of excess capacity as that simply raises prices. Government also needs to get out of the way of subsidising things beyond experimental technology (Rolls-Royce SMR waves hello!), as that’s just wasting money.
If you’re going to have a lot of intermittent renewables, then they have to be developed alongside storage, the UK’s highest demand is on dark and still winter’s days. As others have posted, tidal is very regular and can generate huge amounts of power.
Government also needs to revisit nuclear regulations, and why other countries build their reactors for a fraction of the price of UK nuclear. France and Korea especially are not third-world countries inviting serious accidents, nuclear is a victim of the usual CS gold-plating of everything.
Happy news! The BBC are showing the 112min version of "Alien", which was the theatrical release, not the 116min version which the BFI were showing some days ago. The theatrical release doesn't contain the cocooned Dallas scene which I hate.
(PS Good article @MoonRabbit . I enjoyed it but was surprised it came from a Conservative. People are always surprising. )
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
There is an easy win for the country which is zonal pricing of energy. Benefits around £3bn a year. This however would hurt southern users so the Tories reject it. That is why despite being a Tory party member I am not sure I will vote for them next year. They are too obsessed with older voters in the South East.
Labour have rejected it too. What's their reasoning?
@NickPalmer told us, that when he asked (as an MP) about tidal, he got given (by the civil servants) a report which claimed tidal is completely uneconomic. But was based on rather ridiculous assumptions.
There’s a couple of them about in the permanent structure of government.
One claimed that each tidal one would use a significant percentage of the countries concrete production. Because someone decided to claim that it would be built like a concrete dam. Except that no-one has ever proposed such as design.
What has been proposed - and a few smaller structures built as - is rock, sand and soil structures. They would look like a section of beach, more than anything, from the water, rather than a wall. Imagine a beach that created a closed pond, in a loop.
It’s often the case that a departmental policy becomes permanent. See the eternal love for ID cards in the Home Office.
ID cards won't happen, thankfully. Too much opposition.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
The strike prices for solar have also risen. It's all the rage on PB to say how ludicrously cheap solar panels from China are, but if it is so cheap, solar companies are clearly raking in the difference, not British consumers.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega back in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
Still don't understand the interest in tidal. It doesn't solve intermittency, is highly intermittent itself over a month, cannot be used to store energy to any serious degree (even in lagoons), is pretty expensive.
As a sort of quasi-baseline maybe. But solar and EVs are going to make all this stuff redundant anyway.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
That’s a really bad smoking problem the Russians have got.
That might be right. It is hard to see Ukraine targeting Moscow just to burn some polystyrene so this may well be an accident (or false flag or just miscaptioned).
You’re assuming that the Russians are telling the truth when they say it’s a polystyrene warehouse
The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.
@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.
Of course it is and the whole CO2 stuff is some global conspiracy, for whatever reason, by the Illuminati lizards who run the world.
Utter rubbish
The conspiracy structure is
1) The high council 2) who tell The Illuminati what to do 3) who tell the Zeta Reticulans what to do 4) who tell the Lizard Men in People Suits what to do.
The Trans Gay Illegal Immigrant Alien AIs are more like zero hours contractors, filling in where required.
As a result, even a simple crop circle takes 10 years and 49,000 pages of meeting minutes to arrange.
And it’s really tough to get promoted. It’s taken me decades to even get to be a level 2 Reticulan
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
Well in the US a boxing title fight is usually $99 on the PPV, so that’s your starting point.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
Still don't understand the interest in tidal. It doesn't solve intermittency, is highly intermittent itself over a month, cannot be used to store energy to any serious degree (even in lagoons), is pretty expensive.
As a sort of quasi-baseline maybe. But solar and EVs are going to make all this stuff redundant anyway.
The low-frequency intermittency of tidal energy is precisely predictable, unlike wind and solar, and can therefore be mitigated with certainty
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Corrupt is only relevant if they are fierce seekers after truth. They’re not - basically it’s advertising dressed up as journalism.
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Leon’s stalker is on Twitter extolling the virtues of San Fransisco at the moment. Ignore the homeless and the crime and the violent protests, it’s a lovely place really.
Still don't understand the interest in tidal. It doesn't solve intermittency, is highly intermittent itself over a month, cannot be used to store energy to any serious degree (even in lagoons), is pretty expensive.
As a sort of quasi-baseline maybe. But solar and EVs are going to make all this stuff redundant anyway.
The low-frequency intermittency of tidal energy is precisely predictable, unlike wind and solar, and can therefore be mitigated with certainty
Monthly intermittency is pretty expensive to mitigate, though.
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Leon’s stalker is on Twitter extolling the virtues of San Fransisco at the moment. Ignore the homeless and the crime and the violent protests, it’s a lovely place really.
Well, actually it is. Unless you're not very well off.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
Well in the US a boxing title fight is usually $99 on the PPV, so that’s your starting point.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
Heh. It's the women's Ironman World Championship this evening, from Hawaii. I have a post about it ready to go when the broadcast starts, as there are some UK hopefuls. But the race will be around 8 and a half hours long, and the highlights about half an hour...
I'm quite excited, as a couple of ladies I know are taking part as age-groupers. I'm really tempted to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them finish. But probably not...
"🙏🇺🇦 In Ukraine, civilian casualties from Russian strikes increased sharply in 2025: the total number of casualties in the first nine months of the year increased by 31% compared to 2024, - UN
❗️At least 214 civilians were killed and nearly 1,000 wounded in September 2025."
To give some comparison, 40,000 civilians died in the Blitz between September 1940 and May 1941, and we did not lose the war. Russia really needs to understand that killing civilians does not win you the war.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount. If anybody wants to actually know, rather than guess, about the Civil Service, this is invaluable:
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount.
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
The strike prices for solar have also risen. It's all the rage on PB to say how ludicrously cheap solar panels from China are, but if it is so cheap, solar companies are clearly raking in the difference, not British consumers.
Wind and especially solar is so cheap and competitive at this point that the govt doesn’t need to do much. It would be dumb to dump them
It might be worth looking again at nuclear and tidal schemes to see if they will ever provide value for money vs gas. Looks like a money pit.
There is a big gap for something reliable and cost effective that isn’t gas without paying a big premium. Battery storage might help with that.
it's so cheap they had to up the strike price for offshore wind in AR7 to £113/MWh to attract bidders, way above the NESO projection. Solar seems to be very cost effective, offshore wind much less so
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
The strike prices for solar have also risen. It's all the rage on PB to say how ludicrously cheap solar panels from China are, but if it is so cheap, solar companies are clearly raking in the difference, not British consumers.
Yep, their strike price is up too. It's fascinating looking at the NESO price projections for 2030, the assumption was costs would not increase as much as they have (or even drop) but its not been the case. I've seen first hand benefits from ripping storage heaters out and putting solar panels in for electric costs, the problem is no storage through winter when the sun doesn't shine
There is still a big surge in renewable companies enquiring if properties are suitable for solar and heat pumps, so the subsidy is still there
A balance on power generation source is needed and I much prefer seeing solar panels on roofs, not fields
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Leon’s stalker is on Twitter extolling the virtues of San Fransisco at the moment. Ignore the homeless and the crime and the violent protests, it’s a lovely place really.
I wonder how much the stalker is being paid to say that.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount. If anybody wants to actually know, rather than guess, about the Civil Service, this is invaluable:
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
That was kind of my point… @Mexicanpete wqs claiming that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount. If anybody wants to actually know, rather than guess, about the Civil Service, this is invaluable:
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
Interesting the Welsh government has 6,000 civil servants while the Scots need 29,000. Is the Scottish government nearly 5x as good?
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Leon’s stalker is on Twitter extolling the virtues of San Fransisco at the moment. Ignore the homeless and the crime and the violent protests, it’s a lovely place really.
... it kinda of is, for American standards. The places with antifa terrorist uprisings tend to have relatively low crime rates. Sorry to pop the bubble:
San Fran: 7 per 100,000 (murder rate) St Louis: 88 New Orleans: 52 Memphis: 48 Chicago: 29 Portland: 13
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
I hear a lot of criticism towards those who are sceptical of heat pumps, I've heard it and felt it myself, so people just keep their mouths shut instead and... don't buy heat pumps.
I'd need to be convinced it'd keep my family warm in Winter, and not disrupt my home, as well as save me money. Since I've never have that assurance, I haven't taken it any further.
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Leon’s stalker is on Twitter extolling the virtues of San Fransisco at the moment. Ignore the homeless and the crime and the violent protests, it’s a lovely place really.
... it kinda of is, for American standards. The places with antifa terrorist uprisings tend to have relatively low crime rates. Sorry to pop the bubble:
San Fran: 7 per 100,000 (murder rate) St Louis: 88 New Orleans: 52 Memphis: 48 Chicago: 29 Portland: 13
Sadiq Khan's London: 1
When you stop recording crime, recorded crime goes down.
Even the murder rates are suspect in the US, with many being classified as overdoses, accidents, or suicides.
It’s the low-level crime that really defines a city though, the petty theft and muggings.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
Well in the US a boxing title fight is usually $99 on the PPV, so that’s your starting point.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
Heh. It's the women's Ironman World Championship this evening, from Hawaii. I have a post about it ready to go when the broadcast starts, as there are some UK hopefuls. But the race will be around 8 and a half hours long, and the highlights about half an hour...
I'm quite excited, as a couple of ladies I know are taking part as age-groupers. I'm really tempted to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them finish. But probably not...
A chap here has just completed 7 Iron Triathlons in 7 days (apparently a total of 16.8 miles sea swimming, 784 miles of cycling and 183.4 miles running) for charity. I find it tiring enough getting through seven days normally so well done him.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
I hear a lot of criticism towards those who are sceptical of heat pumps, I've heard it and felt it myself, so people just keep their mouths shut instead and... don't buy heat pumps.
I'd need to be convinced it'd keep my family warm in Winter, and not disrupt my home, as well as save me money. Since I've never have that assurance, I haven't taken it any further.
Why would I do otherwise?
The response to heat pumps is just really weird, compared to the response to most other new technologies.
Greens are forever being accused of wanting to take people back to the stone age, but when they're enthusiastic about a new technology the same people insist on holding on to their old technology.
I know nothing about your house and I'm not going to advise you as to whether it's suitable for a heat pump. But it's an effective technology that can keep a lot of houses warm and you will be wasting a lot of money on gas if your house is so badly insulated that a heat pump wouldn't work.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
"Averagely decent" means a BER of C, as I said. Can you not read?
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
Well in the US a boxing title fight is usually $99 on the PPV, so that’s your starting point.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
Heh. It's the women's Ironman World Championship this evening, from Hawaii. I have a post about it ready to go when the broadcast starts, as there are some UK hopefuls. But the race will be around 8 and a half hours long, and the highlights about half an hour...
I'm quite excited, as a couple of ladies I know are taking part as age-groupers. I'm really tempted to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them finish. But probably not...
If I was a farm family 20% IHT would be very annoying. But could 50% work better?
Land is expensive because it carries tax advantages.
If my core skill is to extract the profit from managing land effectively for the long term, I’d probably prefer to get my land cheapish.
It's sharp transitions between tax regimes which piss of those concerned most, as much as their longer term merits or demerits.
Hear hear. Sharp transitions and/or revising the taxation of something you've already made a long term commitment to, e.g. family farm run for decades, pension pot funded for decades...
On pensions, in the interests of balance, the original sin was Osborne giving far too generous tax treatment as well as huge flexibility in the 2015 changes to drawdown and death benefits. Higher tax on death was bound to come back in, it's just that HMT screwed it up by dragging schemes into IHT rather than tweaking pension-specific income tax charges.
Something had to be done to ease pension drawdown because annuity payments had become a lottery based on interest rates on your 65th birthday.
Something had already been done. Drawdown, even beyond age 75, was in the tax simplification rules that came in in 2006. All that was needed was to finesse those rules a bit, rather than blow the whole thing open. Most sensible industry insiders, including yours truly, were telling HMT and HMRC contacts at the time that they were storing up trouble
As an insider, what was it that Rishi did that was criticised as a deferred pension raid? Something to do with gilt yields maybe? I could be completely misremembering but I think there was something about index-linked gilts and pensions.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
"Averagely decent" means a BER of C, as I said. Can you not read?
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
I have documented previously that new-build standards are not quite as one might hope. People see Grand Designs-style self-builds builds and think they're archetypical of the mass housebuilding. They're not, and local horror stories back that up. This is a problem that really needs dealing with, but I'm unsure how without adding much more cost onto new housing.
"A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost."
Again, I'd like to see that as a system cost for the sort of mass housebuilding they're doing around here. As a example, a builder told me that the cost of putting an electric car charger on each ew-build house added a grand onto the cost of that house.
What I'd love to see is the following: this house, built by Bovis/TW/Persimmon/whoever, is built with 'traditional' gas boiler and cost £x to sell. This equivalent house, built with heat pump, cost £y.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
Well in the US a boxing title fight is usually $99 on the PPV, so that’s your starting point.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
Heh. It's the women's Ironman World Championship this evening, from Hawaii. I have a post about it ready to go when the broadcast starts, as there are some UK hopefuls. But the race will be around 8 and a half hours long, and the highlights about half an hour...
I'm quite excited, as a couple of ladies I know are taking part as age-groupers. I'm really tempted to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them finish. But probably not...
A chap here has just completed 7 Iron Triathlons in 7 days (apparently a total of 16.8 miles sea swimming, 784 miles of cycling and 183.4 miles running) for charity. I find it tiring enough getting through seven days normally so well done him.
There are some amazing athletes out there, doing staggering feats. Every lady lining up for today's race qualified in the top few in their category in a previous Ironman race over the last year, so they are all near the top of their age group. Amazing people. And the age groupers are all people with everyday lives, everyday jobs. I know a few, and am utterly in awe of them.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
Well in the US a boxing title fight is usually $99 on the PPV, so that’s your starting point.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
Heh. It's the women's Ironman World Championship this evening, from Hawaii. I have a post about it ready to go when the broadcast starts, as there are some UK hopefuls. But the race will be around 8 and a half hours long, and the highlights about half an hour...
I'm quite excited, as a couple of ladies I know are taking part as age-groupers. I'm really tempted to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them finish. But probably not...
A chap here has just completed 7 Iron Triathlons in 7 days (apparently a total of 16.8 miles sea swimming, 784 miles of cycling and 183.4 miles running) for charity. I find it tiring enough getting through seven days normally so well done him.
That’s properly crazy, 99.9999% of the population can’t do one Ironman Triatlon, let alone doing one each day for a week.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
"Averagely decent" means a BER of C, as I said. Can you not read?
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
That's about right (imo, in case someone disagrees!). A was selected as the "best practical cost-effective balancing cost of retrofit vs savings in bills" level that could be reached by the general UK housing stock, which is older than general European stock (we like them).
C is what you get if you do the basic things to a decent level of competence. Current goals in England are 2028 or 2030. C compared to E/F is perhaps a halving of energy required for heating.
There is a difference in that the English regs went for making rentals do it, and Scotland went for Owner Occupied as well.
Boris (obviously) pfaffed about with dates and timescales, as some landlord bodies (and others I do not follow) moaned.
I'd say that the pressure to increase standards since Ed Davey set the process off around 2013 has been a notable success. IMO there's far too much flapping; it's just what we need to do:
The percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing, with a significant rise to 60% of homes sold, let, or built in the year up to February 2025. This is an improvement from previous years, with 48% of homes in England meeting the 'C' or higher rating in 2022, up from 12% in 2010. (AI summary)
Ground Source heat pumps have been a niche technology for about 15-20 years. The issue is that to install them you have to dig hundreds of metres of trench for the pipes, then pay for the fluid to fill the pipes. ASHP and A2A heat pumps comparatively benefit from Occam's razor.
The application for a GSHP would be for eg a listed building, where gubbins is restricted in the curtiledge. 9 times out of 10 if it just appears no one notices, including the Conservation Officer. But it needs to be a reversible install.
Though I'd probably do an ASHP and grow some bushes round it, or an A2A HP on an internally facing roof that would only be seen from a helicopter. My parents had a Calor gas cylinder outside their kitchen window for 35 years 1m from the pathway to the front door, and no one ever noticed.
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
Well in the US a boxing title fight is usually $99 on the PPV, so that’s your starting point.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
Heh. It's the women's Ironman World Championship this evening, from Hawaii. I have a post about it ready to go when the broadcast starts, as there are some UK hopefuls. But the race will be around 8 and a half hours long, and the highlights about half an hour...
I'm quite excited, as a couple of ladies I know are taking part as age-groupers. I'm really tempted to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them finish. But probably not...
A chap here has just completed 7 Iron Triathlons in 7 days (apparently a total of 16.8 miles sea swimming, 784 miles of cycling and 183.4 miles running) for charity. I find it tiring enough getting through seven days normally so well done him.
That’s properly crazy, 99.9999% of the population can’t do one Ironman Triatlon, let alone doing one each day for a week.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
"Averagely decent" means a BER of C, as I said. Can you not read?
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
That's about right (imo, in case someone disagrees!). A was selected as the "best practical cost-effective balancing cost of retrofit vs savings in bills" level that could be reached by the general UK housing stock, which is older than general European stock (we like them).
C is what you get if you do the basic things to a decent level of competence. Current goals in England are 2028 or 2030. C compared to E/F is perhaps a halving of energy required for heating.
There is a difference in that the English regs went for making rentals do it, and Scotland went for Owner Occupied as well.
Boris (obviously) pfaffed about with dates and timescales, as some landlord bodies (and others I do not follow) moaned.
I'd say that the pressure to increase standards since Ed Davey set the process off around 2013 has been a notable success. IMO there's far too much flapping; it's just what we need to do:
The percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing, with a significant rise to 60% of homes sold, let, or built in the year up to February 2025. This is an improvement from previous years, with 48% of homes in England meeting the 'C' or higher rating in 2022, up from 12% in 2010. (AI summary)
Ground Source heat pumps have been a niche technology for about 15-20 years. The issue is that to install them you have to dig hundreds of metres of trench for the pipes, then pay for the fluid to fill the pipes. ASHP and A2A heat pumps comparatively benefit from Occam's razor.
The application for a GSHP would be for eg a listed building, where gubbins is restricted in the curtiledge. 9 times out of 10 if it just appears no one notices, including the Conservation Officer. But it needs to be a reversible install.
Though I'd probably do an ASHP and grow some bushes round it, or an A2A HP on an internally facing roof that would only be seen from a helicopter. My parents had a Calor gas cylinder outside their kitchen window for 35 years 1m from the pathway to the front door, and no one ever noticed.
A question, if I may: when they say: "the percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing,", does that mean they have been independently tested as meeting that standard, or that it is self-certified by builders or their pet inspectors?
I think it was last Saturday we were discussing American football. Just been watching the highlights of the Eagles/Giants game and it’s as good a spectacle of sport as any similar length highlight package I’ve seen of a test rugby match.
Huge variety of play and scores, some very rugbyesque play.
If they can work out how to cut out a lot of the dead time around games the NFL might just take off and make some money.
I used to love playing the NFL game on the old sega bank in the day, and the Warhammer interpretation as a board game with Elves and Orcs. Once every three years or so I think it might be fun to watch the Super Bowl and, even with knitting in my hands, I get bored rigid with the stop-start nature of the game, which is kinda weird given how much I enjoy Test cricket (though it's normally less than 60 seconds between successive balls, so the gaps aren't so long).
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
It’s almost a game designed for American television, where the primary requirement is to get 20 minutes of adverts per hour.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
An ad-free version, that started broadcasting 2.5 hours after kickoff, and then synchronized with the live broadcast for the final five minutes would be attractive - but I wonder what the ad-revenue would be per viewer, that you'd have to replace with a charge to the viewer?
Well in the US a boxing title fight is usually $99 on the PPV, so that’s your starting point.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
Heh. It's the women's Ironman World Championship this evening, from Hawaii. I have a post about it ready to go when the broadcast starts, as there are some UK hopefuls. But the race will be around 8 and a half hours long, and the highlights about half an hour...
I'm quite excited, as a couple of ladies I know are taking part as age-groupers. I'm really tempted to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them finish. But probably not...
A chap here has just completed 7 Iron Triathlons in 7 days (apparently a total of 16.8 miles sea swimming, 784 miles of cycling and 183.4 miles running) for charity. I find it tiring enough getting through seven days normally so well done him.
That’s properly crazy, 99.9999% of the population can’t do one Ironman Triatlon, let alone doing one each day for a week.
That’s the one. He’s quite a machine, rowed across the Atlantic as a pair in 53 days a couple of years ago. Makes me think my hour a day exercise is a bit slack.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
High temperate heat pumps are absolutely viable replacements for gas boilers in pretty well any house. They're still a bit expensive, but likely to be affordable long before hydrogen is a viable domestic supply (if it ever is).
And electricity is entirely agnostic of how it's generated.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
"Averagely decent" means a BER of C, as I said. Can you not read?
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
I have documented previously that new-build standards are not quite as one might hope. People see Grand Designs-style self-builds builds and think they're archetypical of the mass housebuilding. They're not, and local horror stories back that up. This is a problem that really needs dealing with, but I'm unsure how without adding much more cost onto new housing.
"A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost."
Again, I'd like to see that as a system cost for the sort of mass housebuilding they're doing around here. As a example, a builder told me that the cost of putting an electric car charger on each ew-build house added a grand onto the cost of that house.
What I'd love to see is the following: this house, built by Bovis/TW/Persimmon/whoever, is built with 'traditional' gas boiler and cost £x to sell. This equivalent house, built with heat pump, cost £y.
The premium for building a passive house over a "normal" house is in the low single-figure percentage points. @Benpointer may have up to date numbers. I'll have a lookout for mass building numbers this weekend.
But ideally you need life-cycle costing for that, as the savings for the "low energy" (whether by using a heat pump or a better quality build, or by free energy eg solar), are over 10-50 years, whilst the "cheaper heating systems" (eg Gas Boiler) benefits are in year one.
That drives a wedge between the interests of the developer and the customer, unless the customer is intentional about using long term cost.
The way we persuade them to invest in good insulation on Buildhub is to point out that they pay for insulation, good 2G etc, once, whilst they will pay the higher energy bill every year they live in the house. Self-builds are usually forever homes, so that long-term occupancy is on our side. For more detailed thinking we have a thermal model ss available.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
"Averagely decent" means a BER of C, as I said. Can you not read?
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
That's about right (imo, in case someone disagrees!). A was selected as the "best practical cost-effective balancing cost of retrofit vs savings in bills" level that could be reached by the general UK housing stock, which is older than general European stock (we like them).
C is what you get if you do the basic things to a decent level of competence. Current goals in England are 2028 or 2030. C compared to E/F is perhaps a halving of energy required for heating.
There is a difference in that the English regs went for making rentals do it, and Scotland went for Owner Occupied as well.
Boris (obviously) pfaffed about with dates and timescales, as some landlord bodies (and others I do not follow) moaned.
I'd say that the pressure to increase standards since Ed Davey set the process off around 2013 has been a notable success. IMO there's far too much flapping; it's just what we need to do:
The percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing, with a significant rise to 60% of homes sold, let, or built in the year up to February 2025. This is an improvement from previous years, with 48% of homes in England meeting the 'C' or higher rating in 2022, up from 12% in 2010. (AI summary)
Ground Source heat pumps have been a niche technology for about 15-20 years. The issue is that to install them you have to dig hundreds of metres of trench for the pipes, then pay for the fluid to fill the pipes. ASHP and A2A heat pumps comparatively benefit from Occam's razor.
The application for a GSHP would be for eg a listed building, where gubbins is restricted in the curtiledge. 9 times out of 10 if it just appears no one notices, including the Conservation Officer. But it needs to be a reversible install.
Though I'd probably do an ASHP and grow some bushes round it, or an A2A HP on an internally facing roof that would only be seen from a helicopter. My parents had a Calor gas cylinder outside their kitchen window for 35 years 1m from the pathway to the front door, and no one ever noticed.
A question, if I may: when they say: "the percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing,", does that mean they have been independently tested as meeting that standard, or that it is self-certified by builders or their pet inspectors?
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
"Averagely decent" means a BER of C, as I said. Can you not read?
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
That's about right (imo, in case someone disagrees!). A was selected as the "best practical cost-effective balancing cost of retrofit vs savings in bills" level that could be reached by the general UK housing stock, which is older than general European stock (we like them).
C is what you get if you do the basic things to a decent level of competence. Current goals in England are 2028 or 2030. C compared to E/F is perhaps a halving of energy required for heating.
There is a difference in that the English regs went for making rentals do it, and Scotland went for Owner Occupied as well.
Boris (obviously) pfaffed about with dates and timescales, as some landlord bodies (and others I do not follow) moaned.
I'd say that the pressure to increase standards since Ed Davey set the process off around 2013 has been a notable success. IMO there's far too much flapping; it's just what we need to do:
The percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing, with a significant rise to 60% of homes sold, let, or built in the year up to February 2025. This is an improvement from previous years, with 48% of homes in England meeting the 'C' or higher rating in 2022, up from 12% in 2010. (AI summary)
Ground Source heat pumps have been a niche technology for about 15-20 years. The issue is that to install them you have to dig hundreds of metres of trench for the pipes, then pay for the fluid to fill the pipes. ASHP and A2A heat pumps comparatively benefit from Occam's razor.
The application for a GSHP would be for eg a listed building, where gubbins is restricted in the curtiledge. 9 times out of 10 if it just appears no one notices, including the Conservation Officer. But it needs to be a reversible install.
Though I'd probably do an ASHP and grow some bushes round it, or an A2A HP on an internally facing roof that would only be seen from a helicopter. My parents had a Calor gas cylinder outside their kitchen window for 35 years 1m from the pathway to the front door, and no one ever noticed.
Wow, that's a very impressive change in 15 years. Appreciate housing stock != houses sold, but it does demonstrate that the kind of change needed is possible.
And we talk about this as if it's a cost rather than an investment. Improving energy efficiency is a good thing heat pump or not.
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
High temperate heat pumps are absolutely viable replacements for gas boilers in pretty well any house. They're still a bit expensive, but likely to be affordable long before hydrogen is a viable domestic supply (if it ever is).
And electricity is entirely agnostic of how it's generated.
The issue is more that, ignoring the capex spend, with domestic electricity ~4x the price of domestic gas per Kwh, the running costs of most heat pumps are more expensive than equivalent gas heating. This will only get worse as Miliband is on an extraordinary one man mission to make our electricity supply even more expensive with the prices locked in for 20-30 years via index linked CfDs.
A lot of people will tell you that they have made massive savings from installing a heat pump - almost invariably the massive savings are from the insulation installed at the same time, and they would have achieved similar or greater savings just installing the insulation and leaving the existing gas boiler in place.
Every time I leave this site for a while, like half a day or more, when I come back I find that you are discussing heat pumps
At first I thought it was just coincidence, now I realise that I am literally the only thing preventing PB from becoming an eternal and limitless debate about heat pumps
Something to think about there, in between heat-pump chats
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
I am not 'suggesting' anything. I am asking a question. But having seen building standards around here, I might indeed suggest that your question would depend on what 'averagely decent' means...
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
"Averagely decent" means a BER of C, as I said. Can you not read?
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
That's about right (imo, in case someone disagrees!). A was selected as the "best practical cost-effective balancing cost of retrofit vs savings in bills" level that could be reached by the general UK housing stock, which is older than general European stock (we like them).
C is what you get if you do the basic things to a decent level of competence. Current goals in England are 2028 or 2030. C compared to E/F is perhaps a halving of energy required for heating.
There is a difference in that the English regs went for making rentals do it, and Scotland went for Owner Occupied as well.
Boris (obviously) pfaffed about with dates and timescales, as some landlord bodies (and others I do not follow) moaned.
I'd say that the pressure to increase standards since Ed Davey set the process off around 2013 has been a notable success. IMO there's far too much flapping; it's just what we need to do:
The percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing, with a significant rise to 60% of homes sold, let, or built in the year up to February 2025. This is an improvement from previous years, with 48% of homes in England meeting the 'C' or higher rating in 2022, up from 12% in 2010. (AI summary)
Ground Source heat pumps have been a niche technology for about 15-20 years. The issue is that to install them you have to dig hundreds of metres of trench for the pipes, then pay for the fluid to fill the pipes. ASHP and A2A heat pumps comparatively benefit from Occam's razor.
The application for a GSHP would be for eg a listed building, where gubbins is restricted in the curtiledge. 9 times out of 10 if it just appears no one notices, including the Conservation Officer. But it needs to be a reversible install.
Though I'd probably do an ASHP and grow some bushes round it, or an A2A HP on an internally facing roof that would only be seen from a helicopter. My parents had a Calor gas cylinder outside their kitchen window for 35 years 1m from the pathway to the front door, and no one ever noticed.
A question, if I may: when they say: "the percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing,", does that mean they have been independently tested as meeting that standard, or that it is self-certified by builders or their pet inspectors?
EPC's are produced by accredited energy assessors
They can be found by using GOV.UK EPC Register
That's all good and well. But here's the issue:
The place we used to rent a dozen years ago was about five years old. It had a flying lounge (a single-storey part of the house above some parking places). After my landlady moved in, she reported the flying lounge getting really cold in winter. After two winters, she got a friend in who was a builder, who discovered there was no insulation in the walls of the flying lounge, and that it in no way met the standards. My landlady called in the builders, who fixed it at much disruption. And part of the legal agreement about fixing it was a 'no publicity' clause (*).
And yes, that's historic now, and an anecdote. But I've heard stories from two other people with similar insulation experiences more recently. These are from people who actually checked - there must be more who shiver thinking the builders got it right, because the documentation when they bought the house said so. And that's just insulation.
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
If anyone wants something a little different to watch tonight, the women's Ironman World Championship race is starting soon from Kona, Hawaii.
This involves a 3.8km swim; a 180km (112 mile) bike, followed by a marathon run. Depending on conditions, the winner should finish in around eight and a half hours. Kona is notoriously hot and windy, and favours experienced athletes. Everyone lining up at the start line, whether age-grouper or professional, with have placed highly in an Ironman race over the last year, and so will be phenomenal athletes.
There are some British hopefuls: Lucy Charles-Barclay, who won at Kona in 2023 and who holds the course record, is perhaps favourite. Kat Matthews is another Brit who stands a good chance of winning, although her track record at Kona is patchy.
Trying to spoil the Brit's sunshine will be athletes like Laura Philip from Germany, the defending champion from Nice last year, the US's Chesea Sodaro, who has not had a good year but may be peaking at the right time, and Taylor Knibb, a phenomenal athlete who may not quite have the run to win. Norwegian Solveig Løvseth will be hoping to match the men's world championship result from a few weeks back, where Norway dominated the podium, She has, however, only two Ironman races under her belt, both wins, but both in wet and cold conditions. Frenchwoman Marjolaine Pierre burst onto the scene with a fourth place at last year's championship, and certainly has the capability to win.
There are a couple of other Brits I should mention: the fantastic India Lee, who on a rare good day can beat anyone - and whose victory would light up the sky, and Holly Lawrence, who returned to triathlon this year after giving birth last year; though she is inexperienced at this distance. Good luck to other Brits as well, such as Stephanie Clutterbuck and Rebecca Anderbury.
The great thing about this competition is that it is so unpredictable. Mermaid Lucy Charles-Barclay should be first out of the water, and her bike should keep her, if not at the front, in the front pack. Her run is not quite as good as some of the other ladies, so she has to hope to reach T2 with enough of a lead. If Kat Matthews or Løvseth are with her, I'd expect one of them to grab the win.
And my dream podium? For the Brits to match the Norwegian men and dominate the podium. India Lee first, Kat Matthews second, and Lucy Charles-Barclay third. Hey, I can dream, can't I?
A more realistic one would be from Lucy Chales-Barclay, Kat Matthews, Laura Philip, Taylor Knibb and Chelsea Sodaro. Pick any three...
Every time I leave this site for a while, like half a day or more, when I come back I find that you are discussing heat pumps
At first I thought it was just coincidence, now I realise that I am literally the only thing preventing PB from becoming an eternal and limitless debate about heat pumps
Something to think about there, in between heat-pump chats
Or alternatively, it's a sign that every time you return to the site the amount of hot air being generated rises appreciably?
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount. If anybody wants to actually know, rather than guess, about the Civil Service, this is invaluable:
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
That was kind of my point… @Mexicanpete wqs claiming that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police
Read my posts. I said no such thing.
I used the police as an example of a cohort on the Government payroll having numbers cut and there being a negative impact.
Others have used perhaps a better example of immigration staff cuts leading to longer asylum claim lead times and thus the need for asylum hotels and the associated expense of that.
Tell me I'm talking bollocks by all means but please don't make the false accusation that "@Mexicanpete was claiming that it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police".
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?
The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.
The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)
Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.
There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.
And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,
No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.
The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."
It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.
There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
There's what people say and what people do.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
High temperate heat pumps are absolutely viable replacements for gas boilers in pretty well any house. They're still a bit expensive, but likely to be affordable long before hydrogen is a viable domestic supply (if it ever is).
And electricity is entirely agnostic of how it's generated.
The issue is more that, ignoring the capex spend, with domestic electricity ~4x the price of domestic gas per Kwh, the running costs of most heat pumps are more expensive than equivalent gas heating. This will only get worse as Miliband is on an extraordinary one man mission to make our electricity supply even more expensive with the prices locked in for 20-30 years via index linked CfDs.
A lot of people will tell you that they have made massive savings from installing a heat pump - almost invariably the massive savings are from the insulation installed at the same time, and they would have achieved similar or greater savings just installing the insulation and leaving the existing gas boiler in place.
Absolutely. I'm talking about the future rather than the immediate present, though. For now I'm sticking with my gas boiler, too.
Every time I leave this site for a while, like half a day or more, when I come back I find that you are discussing heat pumps
At first I thought it was just coincidence, now I realise that I am literally the only thing preventing PB from becoming an eternal and limitless debate about heat pumps
Something to think about there, in between heat-pump chats
Or alternatively, it's a sign that every time you return to the site the amount of hot air being generated rises appreciably?
No, it's just a sign he didn't read @MoonRabbit 's excellent header.
Comments
Truly objective facts are very few and far between. People wanting others to accept their subjective opinion as a fact is not appropriate.
Philosophically everything is subjective.
I think we will see gas use drop considerably over the next decade but how quickly will depend a lot on battery storage, its safety and effectiveness. My concern over offshore wind is for the sheer volume of turbines going up related to the environmental damage predicted, as seen with Berwick Bank and bird losses.
Important point raised re the congestion of the North Sea with turbines, shipping etc now being an issue for extraction.
The problem we have is the middle ground in politics is not very well populated at the minute
eg The distributionists I mentioned the other week, who draw on GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc:
More generally they developed a policy agenda distinct from any of the main three parties during this time, including promoting guilds and the nuclear family, introducing primary elections and referendums, antitrust action, tax reform to favour small businesses, and transparency regarding party funding and the Honours Lists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
Civil Service number went up because of ( pretend I didn't write it) Brexit.
Norway have it perfect, just under 80% of their generation is hydro. If we had a similar landscape, it could be used more here. From speaking to someone in the industry, I think cost to implement is holding back tidal power, there is plenty of resource there
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1976974166248374550
That’s a really bad smoking problem the Russians have got.
The great thing about some of these fires is that they don't all need to be a result of Ukrainian actions: as sanctions bite, trained men are sent to the front, equipment ages without replacement, and management start incurring greater losses, there will be more fires and accidents.
see https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jul/10/uk-government-abandons-energy-zonal-pricing-plan
The conspiracy structure is
1) The high council
2) who tell The Illuminati what to do
3) who tell the Zeta Reticulans what to do
4) who tell the Lizard Men in People Suits what to do.
The Trans Gay Illegal Immigrant Alien AIs are more like zero hours contractors, filling in where required.
As a result, even a simple crop circle takes 10 years and 49,000 pages of meeting minutes to arrange.
What is most disappointing is that the parties put their own political base above the country. This is the same with both Labour and the Tories and up here the SNP.
It's a Grade 1 listed building.
It's getting quite funny how the extreme right are getting triggered, Ten Jail Terms Tommy is on it now.
I don’t have the numbers to know it.
There’s a couple of them about in the permanent structure of government.
One claimed that each tidal one would use a significant percentage of the countries concrete production. Because someone decided to claim that it would be built like a concrete dam. Except that no-one has ever proposed such as design.
What has been proposed - and a few smaller structures built as - is rock, sand and soil structures. They would look like a section of beach, more than anything, from the water, rather than a wall. Imagine a beach that created a closed pond, in a loop.
It’s often the case that a departmental policy becomes permanent. See the eternal love for ID cards in the Home Office.
Storage heaters won't do anything to help with those conditions, they are only helpful to shift loads from daytime to nighttime - but we can do that with batteries now.
A lot of russian industry has already gone to four-day weeks, and it’s not difficult to imagine that maintenance is either deferred or done by people not properly trained.
(I can change a plug, but I’m not an electrician, changing that motor that runs the conveyor belt is just like changing a plug really, wires off, wires on, what could go wrong…?)
Fires could be accidents, equipment failures, kids playing with matches, more organised “partisan” anarchists working with Ukraine, or direct Ukranian action.
But however the fires start, they all help screw the russian economy and make winning the war more difficult. Sorry about the carbon footprint, and to anyone downwind of a large pile of plastics with a smoking problem.
My parents have a hot water cylinder with immersion heating in their new build - they use it as a load dump for their solar PV before they start exporting it.
There are lots of ways round that, depending.
Local water heater at the bathroom, as we get for eg electric showers.
Local water storage (small tank).
Hot water circulation system (large houses).
Narrower pipes (so less water volume to run off), or even separate point to point for each hot tap.
And plenty more ...
(10mm 15mm and 22mm runs use water in the volume ratios 1 : 2.2 : 4.8.)
Here's a Buildhub thread about it from 2017:
https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/2681-10mm-15mm-and-22mm-pipe-use/
(nerd OFF)
The overriding assumption should be the price of electricity, which more that almost any other factor has a direct impact on economic growth. If you have, to be very crude, a green-cheap axis, then it needs to be moved back towards cheap.
You also want to keep a mix of types, such that disruption of one type can’t affect prices too much, but also want to keep a minimum of excess capacity as that simply raises prices. Government also needs to get out of the way of subsidising things beyond experimental technology (Rolls-Royce SMR waves hello!), as that’s just wasting money.
If you’re going to have a lot of intermittent renewables, then they have to be developed alongside storage, the UK’s highest demand is on dark and still winter’s days. As others have posted, tidal is very regular and can generate huge amounts of power.
Government also needs to revisit nuclear regulations, and why other countries build their reactors for a fraction of the price of UK nuclear. France and Korea especially are not third-world countries inviting serious accidents, nuclear is a victim of the usual CS gold-plating of everything.
(PS Good article @MoonRabbit . I enjoyed it but was surprised it came from a Conservative. People are always surprising. )
My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).
Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG
Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.
They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.
I like the game when it's in play, but something about how it's presented on TV really puts me off.
As with rugby, it’s a very good game to watch live, the size and speed of the players doesn’t really come across on TV.
Super Bowl is an exercise in making something that could take an hour and a half run to four hours. But you should see the advertising rates when there’s 100m people watching!
As a sort of quasi-baseline maybe. But solar and EVs are going to make all this stuff redundant anyway.
In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.
Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.
I’ve seen edits of NFL games showing every single play that run to less than half an hour, so you could really edit it tight if you just wanted to watch the action.
But the tradition is to make a party of it as much as watch the game, which as with the FA Cup Final is often not a classic. You’re with half a dozen mates, buckets of beer, and several pounds of chicken wings. It really doesn’t matter if it takes four hours. Even the adverts themselves make news, as companies spend big on their production.
@Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt
https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Almost like @Gardenwalker in fact…
Unless you're not very well off.
The livestream will probably be at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1n_QPYPtdU, starting in half an hour. But the race starts (I think!) at 17.00.
I'm quite excited, as a couple of ladies I know are taking part as age-groupers. I'm really tempted to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them finish. But probably not...
https://x.com/maks_nafo_fella/status/1976981440673071507
They’ve killed it, taking out the main AVT cracking tower, will take months to get back online.
Well done!
❗️At least 214 civilians were killed and nearly 1,000 wounded in September 2025."
https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1976988528543465661
To give some comparison, 40,000 civilians died in the Blitz between September 1940 and May 1941, and we did not lose the war. Russia really needs to understand that killing civilians does not win you the war.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-statistics-2025/statistical-bulletin-civil-service-statistics-2025#overview
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
There is still a big surge in renewable companies enquiring if properties are suitable for solar and heat pumps, so the subsidy is still there
A balance on power generation source is needed and I much prefer seeing solar panels on roofs, not fields
Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.
One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.
San Fran: 7 per 100,000 (murder rate)
St Louis: 88
New Orleans: 52
Memphis: 48
Chicago: 29
Portland: 13
Sadiq Khan's London: 1
"My First NHS A&E Experience as an American" *
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeZtZ3gGQ3E
* We need to train them that they are a country, not a continent ;-)
I'd need to be convinced it'd keep my family warm in Winter, and not disrupt my home, as well as save me money. Since I've never have that assurance, I haven't taken it any further.
Why would I do otherwise?
Even the murder rates are suspect in the US, with many being classified as overdoses, accidents, or suicides.
It’s the low-level crime that really defines a city though, the petty theft and muggings.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
From your post you evidently don't know how much this adds, cost-wise.
Greens are forever being accused of wanting to take people back to the stone age, but when they're enthusiastic about a new technology the same people insist on holding on to their old technology.
I know nothing about your house and I'm not going to advise you as to whether it's suitable for a heat pump. But it's an effective technology that can keep a lot of houses warm and you will be wasting a lot of money on gas if your house is so badly insulated that a heat pump wouldn't work.
I understand from MattW's posts on the subject that this is intended to become the minimum standard for privately rented properties in Britain. So the number of houses that don't meet that standard should be pretty low, and it would be shockingly bad if it included new builds.
A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost.
ie Gerontophiles.
Leon, Leon, wherefore art thou Leon?
"A heat pump itself doesn't cost any more than a gas boiler. So there's no additional cost."
Again, I'd like to see that as a system cost for the sort of mass housebuilding they're doing around here. As a example, a builder told me that the cost of putting an electric car charger on each ew-build house added a grand onto the cost of that house.
What I'd love to see is the following: this house, built by Bovis/TW/Persimmon/whoever, is built with 'traditional' gas boiler and cost £x to sell. This equivalent house, built with heat pump, cost £y.
Fair play to him. Link for his charity?
C is what you get if you do the basic things to a decent level of competence. Current goals in England are 2028 or 2030. C compared to E/F is perhaps a halving of energy required for heating.
There is a difference in that the English regs went for making rentals do it, and Scotland went for Owner Occupied as well.
Boris (obviously) pfaffed about with dates and timescales, as some landlord bodies (and others I do not follow) moaned.
I'd say that the pressure to increase standards since Ed Davey set the process off around 2013 has been a notable success. IMO there's far too much flapping; it's just what we need to do:
The percentage of UK houses meeting EPC 'C' or higher has been increasing, with a significant rise to 60% of homes sold, let, or built in the year up to February 2025. This is an improvement from previous years, with 48% of homes in England meeting the 'C' or higher rating in 2022, up from 12% in 2010.
(AI summary)
Ground Source heat pumps have been a niche technology for about 15-20 years. The issue is that to install them you have to dig hundreds of metres of trench for the pipes, then pay for the fluid to fill the pipes. ASHP and A2A heat pumps comparatively benefit from Occam's razor.
The application for a GSHP would be for eg a listed building, where gubbins is restricted in the curtiledge. 9 times out of 10 if it just appears no one notices, including the Conservation Officer. But it needs to be a reversible install.
Though I'd probably do an ASHP and grow some bushes round it, or an A2A HP on an internally facing roof that would only be seen from a helicopter. My parents had a Calor gas cylinder outside their kitchen window for 35 years 1m from the pathway to the front door, and no one ever noticed.
They're still a bit expensive, but likely to be affordable long before hydrogen is a viable domestic supply (if it ever is).
And electricity is entirely agnostic of how it's generated.
But ideally you need life-cycle costing for that, as the savings for the "low energy" (whether by using a heat pump or a better quality build, or by free energy eg solar), are over 10-50 years, whilst the "cheaper heating systems" (eg Gas Boiler) benefits are in year one.
That drives a wedge between the interests of the developer and the customer, unless the customer is intentional about using long term cost.
The way we persuade them to invest in good insulation on Buildhub is to point out that they pay for insulation, good 2G etc, once, whilst they will pay the higher energy bill every year they live in the house. Self-builds are usually forever homes, so that long-term occupancy is on our side. For more detailed thinking we have a thermal model ss available.
They can be found by using GOV.UK EPC Register
And we talk about this as if it's a cost rather than an investment. Improving energy efficiency is a good thing heat pump or not.
A lot of people will tell you that they have made massive savings from installing a heat pump - almost invariably the massive savings are from the insulation installed at the same time, and they would have achieved similar or greater savings just installing the insulation and leaving the existing gas boiler in place.
At first I thought it was just coincidence, now I realise that I am literally the only thing preventing PB from becoming an eternal and limitless debate about heat pumps
Something to think about there, in between heat-pump chats
The place we used to rent a dozen years ago was about five years old. It had a flying lounge (a single-storey part of the house above some parking places). After my landlady moved in, she reported the flying lounge getting really cold in winter. After two winters, she got a friend in who was a builder, who discovered there was no insulation in the walls of the flying lounge, and that it in no way met the standards. My landlady called in the builders, who fixed it at much disruption. And part of the legal agreement about fixing it was a 'no publicity' clause (*).
And yes, that's historic now, and an anecdote. But I've heard stories from two other people with similar insulation experiences more recently. These are from people who actually checked - there must be more who shiver thinking the builders got it right, because the documentation when they bought the house said so. And that's just insulation.
(*) I've no idea how legally binding these are.
This involves a 3.8km swim; a 180km (112 mile) bike, followed by a marathon run. Depending on conditions, the winner should finish in around eight and a half hours. Kona is notoriously hot and windy, and favours experienced athletes. Everyone lining up at the start line, whether age-grouper or professional, with have placed highly in an Ironman race over the last year, and so will be phenomenal athletes.
There are some British hopefuls: Lucy Charles-Barclay, who won at Kona in 2023 and who holds the course record, is perhaps favourite. Kat Matthews is another Brit who stands a good chance of winning, although her track record at Kona is patchy.
Trying to spoil the Brit's sunshine will be athletes like Laura Philip from Germany, the defending champion from Nice last year, the US's Chesea Sodaro, who has not had a good year but may be peaking at the right time, and Taylor Knibb, a phenomenal athlete who may not quite have the run to win. Norwegian Solveig Løvseth will be hoping to match the men's world championship result from a few weeks back, where Norway dominated the podium, She has, however, only two Ironman races under her belt, both wins, but both in wet and cold conditions. Frenchwoman Marjolaine Pierre burst onto the scene with a fourth place at last year's championship, and certainly has the capability to win.
There are a couple of other Brits I should mention: the fantastic India Lee, who on a rare good day can beat anyone - and whose victory would light up the sky, and Holly Lawrence, who returned to triathlon this year after giving birth last year; though she is inexperienced at this distance. Good luck to other Brits as well, such as Stephanie Clutterbuck and Rebecca Anderbury.
The great thing about this competition is that it is so unpredictable. Mermaid Lucy Charles-Barclay should be first out of the water, and her bike should keep her, if not at the front, in the front pack. Her run is not quite as good as some of the other ladies, so she has to hope to reach T2 with enough of a lead. If Kat Matthews or Løvseth are with her, I'd expect one of them to grab the win.
And my dream podium? For the Brits to match the Norwegian men and dominate the podium. India Lee first, Kat Matthews second, and Lucy Charles-Barclay third. Hey, I can dream, can't I?
A more realistic one would be from Lucy Chales-Barclay, Kat Matthews, Laura Philip, Taylor Knibb and Chelsea Sodaro. Pick any three...
You can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1n_QPYPtdU
Good luck to all the women, professional and age-grouper. You're all amazing.
I used the police as an example of a cohort on the Government payroll having numbers cut and there being a negative impact.
Others have used perhaps a better example of immigration staff cuts leading to longer asylum claim lead times and thus the need for asylum hotels and the associated expense of that.
Tell me I'm talking bollocks by all means but please don't make the false accusation that "@Mexicanpete was claiming that it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police".
I'm talking about the future rather than the immediate present, though. For now I'm sticking with my gas boiler, too.
We do not disagree in our views of Milliband.
Ukraine's small F-16 fleet now flies roughly 80% of all Ukrainian Air Force sorties despite limited pilot numbers and armament...
https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1976750972392108273