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Comment by ZeroConcerns | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this whole "let's sell off state-owned infrastructure on the Free Market" hasn't worked out so well: not only in the UK, but also elsewhere in Europe, the handsome profits of those moves have pretty much evaporated, investments in upgrades have been severely lacking, and now everyone is pointing fingers due to the inevitable capacity meltdowns.

(Note that I'm not opposed to privatization in general, and it has worked out very well in other sectors, noticeably Telecoms, but I'm not aware of it bringing long-term happiness anywhere when it comes to Energy)

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I'm all for free market with some subsidiaries for backup generation for electricity generation. But transfer should be only publicly owned companies. Be it national for national grid and regional owned by suitable entity say municipality or group of them.

Same goes for water and sewer. Maybe garbage could be mixed model. In big enough towns having multiple competing companies for removal is not unreasonable competition. Same could be said for part of bus networks.

> Same could be said for part of bus networks

The only part of municipal/ regional bus network that is suitable for privatisation in a high labour cost country is contracting out operations. Ticketing, route planning andscheduling all should be under a central governmental authority. There is a reason that, outside of London, England has some of the worst bus services in the developed world

For things where there is not a natural path for competition, state owned, or how it is done in the US state of Nebraska a separate political subdivision, makes more sense. You are not going to have multiple power lines and connections coming into your home to enable natural competition

> the inevitable capacity meltdowns

Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth. Just like water and housing. Money available is lowered by state-enforced price caps. Purchase prices are raised by state-mandated net zero rules that subsidise green sources.

> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth.

What population growth?

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...

The UK has experienced the 2 largest annual growth on record in the last 5 years, with +755k mid-23 to mid-2024 alone [1]. Even your link shows about 11% growth since 2010 and higher growth rates since ~2004.

So we can argue about what "very large" means, but population growth is significant.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

> about 11% growth since 2010

So much less than 1% a year.

> we can argue about what "very large" means

Yeah, you can argue that less than 1% a year is "very large". I'm not sure anyone else will be convinced.

The UK does have record population growth, the rest is semantics as mentioned. That certainly does not help with all the infrastructure issues the country has. That's it. Please refrain from flamebaits and political assumptions, and let's have a substantive discussion instead.

No, it's not semantic it's numeric. It's less than 1%.

And I didn't make any political assumptions. Didn't even mention them. Might want to tighten the cord there, looks like a mask is slipping.

> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth.

Is this really true in the UK? Electricity production in the UK peaked in 2005. It's down 20% on that today. The issue here is that in 2005 electricity was primarily produced in large power stations reasonably close to where it was consumed, while in 2025 it's increasingly produced in locations far from population centres. The actual ability of the grid to deliver power to the last mile isn't really a problem. The problem is that most of the houses are in the South, and increasingly large amounts of generation are in the North.

Texas solved this with the CREZ

> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth

Europe has not been 'hit by a very large population growth' by any stretch of the imagination in recent years. Capacity issues are mostly due to deprecating natural gas, which has lead to an increase in solar, but that's just a minor issue when you look at industry migrating from furnaces to heat pumps.

> Just like water and housing

Water is squarely an agriculture thing and housing has been a shitshow forever. But thanks for bringing those up as well -- it's like a dogwhistle trifecta!

> state-enforced price caps, state-mandated net zero rules

Most parts of Europe lack those entirely. There are (less and less) 'green subsidies', sure, but funnily enough, the increasing cost of fossil fuels is doing most of the work here.

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