The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
I also wonder what the contribution of domestic solar and on-site industrial generation is? I'm a dev in a large manufacturing business and two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells which power a lot of our operations. Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too. Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?
(Edit: added "being posted", "welcome" and "(neutral?)" for clarity)
If I search for "retail electricity price trends uk" I'm starting to see reports coming out of the UK like "UK electricity prices are now among the highest in the developed world." and "Household electricity prices have risen by almost 150% since 2010, and business electricity prices by nearly 175%" [0]. And now we see things like they've dropped below their 1970s per capita consumption.
That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much. It doesn't sound like an efficiency gain. Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff. It looks like they don't have enough energy and people are getting squeezed. I'd expect to see political instability in such an environment but the last time I checked only one of the major parties seemed to be in the process of collapsing (down from 2 in April) so they are doing better than expected on that front; I would expect riots in the streets with these sort of trends.
Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
Most appliances don't see much increased use from efficiency. And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency; other factors drive use changes there.
1950: Lighting was 30% of total electrical demand [1] 1993-1997: 112 TWh, 9% of demand [2] 2020: 81 TWh, 6% of demand [3]
Couldn't find total used in 1950 but the point remains: Lighting used to be a major source of consumption and now it's pretty minor, and at least the trends in the last 30 years have been driven by efficiency gains, particularly following the energy crisis in the 70s.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222531686_Exergy_po...
[2] https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl-40...
As for gas or oil boilers - oil is uncommon except in rural areas - gas is far more common but not as ubiquitous in the past as you’d think - many folks heated their homes with resistive electric radiators or IR heaters - so a heat pump is a huge efficiency win.
An old 100 W incandescent bulb produced about 1500 lumens, and now a LED bulb of 12 or 13 W can produce slightly more than that.
In the now distant past, I used only 100 W incandescent bulbs, all of which had been replaced more than a decade ago with 13 W LED bulbs, so I have benefited from this 8x reduction in energy consumption.
The other significant reduction in electrical energy consumption happened when I replaced a many-decades-old refrigerator with a modern high-efficiency refrigerator.
Compared with a half century ago when I was a child, now I consume additional electrical energy with some computers, one or two of which are almost always on, and with a microwave oven used for cooking, but the additional energy consumption is normally less than what is saved by modern lighting and refrigeration technologies.
However, I think that often you should not need to be overly reliant on electric power. If you have enough windows then you should not need electric light in the day time, if the incandescent light in the winter time also provides heat, if you have candles when needed, moon light (depending on the phase of the moon), etc, and I can write by hand and many things can be done without a computer (including, walk to where you need to go; I do not have a car so I walk if it is close enough or car pooling with someone else if far away), there is sweater and blankets and candles (which also provide light) in case you are cold in the winter time, etc. If you learn to work things without electric power too then it avoids some of the overly reliance on it.
Getting rid of the roads for cars (and the cars) would also have some advantages (it would need more walking and others but those things can help, anyways).
We got an increase in lighting whether we like it or not but for lower overall consumption.
> not to mention headlights
40 years ago the highest powered headlight halogen bulbs consumed 80-100W per bulb. so you were looking at 150-200W for low/high beams. A pair of modern laser headlights now gives you 5 times more light for a fifth of the electricity. The limit is safety in traffic. A misadjusted 200W laser headlight will leave you short of 2 retinas.
> People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.
They consume so little that even wasting is still cheaper lower consumption than in the days of incandescent lights.
I mean not really.
Old aircon was off/on which mean that at temperatures near the target efficiency drops. (as in turning on for a few minutes, it takes a while to move the settle heat around)
Moving from fixed speed ac motors to "inverter driven" (brushless motors) means that AC can be run at a speed other than 100% or 0%. Yes, CoP hasn't increased 6x, but newer aircons have higher CoP over a wider range of temperatures.
moving from Plasma TVs to LED/oled is about a 2-3x improvement in efficiency.
Laptops are anywhere between 2 and 10x less power than desktop (caveats apply)
then double glazing has a large effect on heat rejection/storage. Non-coated glass lets in something like 1kw/m2 of heat, coated glass can reject anywhere up to 70% of that.
I want more than 6x as much light as I had in the incandescent bulb era. Indoor lighting is usually very dim compared to outdoor lighting, and that makes it harder to see things. As I get older and my eyes degrade I expect I'll want even more light. People running offices understand this and provide more lighting than typical for homes. See:
But they do just leave their lights on more[0].
Yes, that means we can use the energy we would have used on light for other things.
Dylan16807: Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.
We're saying the same thing, but my spider senses are detecting we aren't on the same wavelength. Maybe if I point at the key words, that will help?
And while I'm thinking about it, let me recommend those heating bathroom lights. They are divine.
You concluded rationing before having evidence of real demand in the sense of need or even desire from the people. The less data you have, the more potential answers fit in the gaps.
Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it? Or do they already get more but with less electricity? I get twice the light I had 20+ years ago with a third of the electricity consumption. I get way more computing power with less electricity too. Same with my TV, my fridge, etc. Excluding the switch from gas powered kitchen appliances which drove my electricity consumption up, everything else went down in consumption while giving me more.
Do I mathematically want or need more? Am limited by the price of electricity, or by the price of the bigger/better product? Maybe I'd want a walk in fridge or a 3m tall TV but the electricity isn't the limiting factor. I need an extra room and taller ceilings first. Do I want more light? No. Do I need any of the things I mentioned? Also no.
The increase in price could equally be the providers extracting the maximum value from the consumers. Current consumption could be exactly as much as the consumers want or need to consume, and the providers sell for as high as they can before that demand drops. We need more data to answer this and we don't have it now. So your answer is your bias put in words, not the certainty you want to make it sound like.
The biggest consumers which dwarf the stove are industrial ones. And there the drop is real. Manufacturing moved abroad and electricity production moved with it. This is what the numbers of the article shows and it's hard for consumer demand to compensate, except maybe with mass EV adoption.
And that doesn't happen at all with light bulbs. The cheapness caused a mild increase in lighting, but people are using way less electricity on lights now.
You've drawn the wrong premise from the data you've looked at. There is no rationing.
UK electricity prices operate in a broken market where the price is fixed to the most expensive on-stream generator in that moment, so in the auction of wholesale prices that happens dozens of times a day, if a single gas generator is online, everyone is setting the price around gas generation even if most of the supply is much cheaper wind.
Last week the PM announced that this broken market should get fixed in the next parliamentary session, because he - and his party - know that reducing energy prices has material impact on how people feel about the economy.
You should also understand that demand has changed shape considerably in the last 50 years.
There's been a pretty devastating deindustrialisation in the UK since the 1970s - there's only one steel forge left operating, and that required nationalisation this year, for example. As the UK moved to a knowledge economy, we found that most of the workforce moved to needing nothing more than a laptop to add to GDP.
But the home has also changed shape: you can't buy an old fashioned light bulb any more, so dreary wet winters are illuminated exclusively by LED lighting at ~10% the power consumption used in the 1970s. Heatpumps have replaced storage heaters, and while electric cars are popular even they do not use as much energy as the factories and ship yards used to.
There is literally just less demand. And the pricing is pegged to gas, unfairly. If that market breaks, I doubt consumption would go up, but maybe new industrial opportunities would open up - if we end up with cheap, abundant energy as a result, we might attract more energy-intensive industry to the UK, but I don't think it's fair to define current state as "rationing"
Nationalised because high energy prices made it unsustainable commercially.
I would like to think that National Government is considering choices which would still be marginal pricing but change other elements to better suit our present reality. Two examples:
1. Regionalize. Today the price for 1MWh of electricity in Portsmouth is exactly the same as for 1MWh of electricity in Dundee but if the UK is making so much electricity in the far North on a windy January night that's not the real price to deliver the electricity, getting it to Dundee would be far cheaper. Prices can reflect that, and if they do that new energy-hungry factory makes more sense in Dundee than in Portsmouth even if it would be slightly more convenient to build it in Portsmouth.
2. Retail pricing can have a significant social policy element distinct from "What the market says this costs". Technically an old lady living alone who uses 50kWh per month and a wealthy family with two EVs and a swimming pool chewing almost 10MWh per month are both "connected to the grid" but maybe the 40p per day "standing charge" to cover that connectivity could be 10p per day for that old lady and 80p for the wealthy family. Again, the market says that's wrong because the connection doesn't cost more money if you use it - but it's a social policy decision.
Edited to Add:
By the way I assume regional pricing is a reason sometimes the UK is both buying Electricity from France and selling Electricity to France, over different links. Presumably the prices are different and so we are effectively arbitraging their electricity.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of...
https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/65515/decoupling-...
It is very strange to see how many nations gave up energy independence and basically exchanged a temporarily lower price of energy coupled with deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation. Money seems politically easy to spend raising defense expenditures by a few more percent of GDP but energy independence through decentralized renewables would be a much higher defense value imho. And it would actually propel more economic activity.
They are only deep geopolitical dependencies because our politicians are too stupid to actually let us drill for it in the North Sea or frack for it on the mainland.
We import very little Al from China; it turns out mostly to come from the UAE, which will have absolutely terrible CO2 emissions, as well as greener countries like Iceland and Norway.
It looks like we need to invest in local recycling (which, yes, needs cheap energy, but not as much as primary Al) in order to make more of a circular economy rather than just exporting vast volumes of scrap.
https://alvancebritishaluminium.com/
Which has it's own hydroelectric scheme:
Cost of electricity is a very significant part of production costs of aluminum, around 30% on average.
Consumption of final products, and exports are what make more sense to look at to see if lives are better today than the 1970's, which the article implies it isn't.
There are still electric arc furnaces in the UK and more are being built
Low margin industries probably contribute a lot and are more likely to change electricity usage patterns (by moving to a different country or being outcompeted).
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/13/lawyers-to-...
Water, too, because our water infrastructure is dire. I imagine we have some of the most expensive water in the world too
> How do the airline companies make any money?
Addons and cargo I believe (and cutting every single cost you can imagine, then more).
A lot of people have the perception nobody buys addons but the airlines make a tonne of money from them
Almost every British person I've ever known has kept up with and has an opinion on American politics, but when I try to talk to Americans about British politics, they don't even know the names of the parties.
Which is to say, the UK is far more obsessed with America then America is with the UK. This has been true since WW2, where Britain was 'obsessed' with getting America to come save them from losing the war.
What a way to characterize supply and demand variation.
Our elites are pretty bad at running the country but actually quite crafty when it comes to managing dissent and channeling it into things that don't threaten their hold on power.
So the regime can get away with a lot, there is no organised violent resistance
> the regime
The 'regime'. Also known as the democratically elected government.
With the massive extra "pro" of plausible deniability so all those who's interests are served by it can lie up down and sideways about how it's a good thing.
A lot of things are like this. It's really hard to overstate the cost of laying unpopular things bare.
Climate change and oil use have generated predominantly non-violent protests.
Palestinian rights have generated direct action protests but not riots.
Energy hasn't really been on the radar (except in the context of climate-change protests).
- CRTs got replaced by LCDs, and LCDs even 25 years ago were maybe around half the wattage
- CFLs and then LED Light bulbs replacing older filament bulbs.
- The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.
With the smaller thought of:
- Set-top appliances like rice cookers and air-fryers that tend to be better for smaller everyday cooking than a full-on oven or stovetop.
And it's fun to think about, e.x. I remember when I had to move back in 15-ish years ago my parents (very politely!) complained about the power bill increase until I went ahead and did the one-time cost of switching all the bulbs I could to LED. That change alone managed to cover the PC, monitors, and TV I had at the time.
Realistically, your average citizen is using less power than they were even 40 years ago, even with all the additional technology they have.
That also goes for people watching things on their smartphones instead of a 65" television.
Even people who have laptops, the shift to smartphones and tablets for much (maybe most? IDK I'm still a laptop person at minimum when I write this so it's hard to say) of their computing/communication is another order of magnitude change for sure.
As another side note/anecdata, I still remember the amazement where the aftermath of a nasty (mostly wind) storm in 2017 caused major outages in my region. I had just moved into an apartment and due to the lagging maintenance around makeready/treetrim it took the better part of a week to get power back. Thankfully however, I had a fully charged, fancy-ish APS Backup unit [0] that was able to keep my Surface Pro 3 and 4G Hotspot charged enough to at least not feel totally in the dark. It was crazy to see how even with both charging the 'time remaining' indicator said I could have used both way more than I even needed to.
[0] - Some variant of an APS 1500VA
It costs 6 euro. I'm _fairly_ sure that incandescent 100Ws didn't cost six cents. I bought a few of these (actually a cheaper non-dimmable model which is no longer on Ikea's confusing website, from a cursory search) in 2016, when I moved. They're still working fine.
Whereas incandescents failed _all the time_.
Haven't burnt out a single bulb yet.
I understand that this has caused some challenges for the Philips Hue division. They had extremely satisfied customers but not many repeat buys.
The total electricity consumption for computers is much higher then in the past. You just don't see it, because the consumption moved to data centers.
To me the difference is that we moved to more efficient ways to generate heat, more specifically from electric resistive heating to heat pumps. Both in home heating but also appliances (e.g. cloth driers).
And of course there is climate change, not only we generate heat more efficiently (an heat pump uses at least 1/3 to the power to generate the same amount of heat) but also the climate is less cold, thus less heat required. That is the big difference, not bulbs or computers.
Of course for nations that are more hot in the summer (e.g. my, Italy) the reverse applies, that is more power used because of air conditioning, that 30 years ago nobody had and now it's required since last summer was 25/38C outside for 2 months straight.
Germany saw a massive drop too. The only big European country that keeps growing their electricity production is France.
Air conditioning is a weird one, because it’s only been necessary in residential properties for a couple of years, and really still only necessary for a couple of days a year, so a fixed installation isn’t cost effective. Portable units are becoming more popular.
AC has been a requirement in most commercial premises for years. Decades, perhaps.
The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.
> decarbonizing heating
What does this mean? More renewables? If efficiency reduces energy demands then it directly results in less carbon.
> electric vehicles
Aren't people already adopting electric vehicles? Do you think that the government should introduce a scheme to persuade people to buy electric vehicles? Does the availability of charging for electric vehicles need improving?
> Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first
Efficiency means saving money. In what circumstance could efficiency be bad? The grid responds to demand, unused electricity means higher prices for consumers. One of biggest issues right now in the UK is cost of living crisis, so raising electricity prices would be universally hated. How does making the grid less efficient increase growth?
The UK is definitely doing all three of these things. Though arguably not fast enough, for some of them.
* https://rac.co.uk/drive/news/electric-vehicles-news/1-in-3-n...
BEV is 28% of new car sales HEV is 13%
I’m thinking about it, but there’s a lot of other things I could spend the capital on.
ROTFL.
Yes, true, many economies like US, UK, Germany are becoming more "energy efficient". By outsourcing energy hungry industries and steps to China.
Probably _mostly_ as reduced demand, though if you net feed back into the grid then that may be counted as generation.
https://www.neso.energy/energy-101/electricity-explained/how...
And sure, if steelworks and chemistry is moved abroad, the country will use less energy on the whole. But then you have to calculate the indirect usage through imported products as well to have an honest "energy requirement" value for a region or country.
Not saying you can skip efficient light bulbs, but we need to stay realistic about future energy requirements.
"Electricity oh that's the thing the runs the telly and kettle"
There is something very concerning about this complacent attitude towards the stagnant QoL of citizens. Demand only reflects current prices and conditions, if we saw a 100x increase in usage (in the UK or America) since the 70s rather than a flatline conditions would be much better.
And increasingly, batteries are also coming to such sites. Would be very interested in learning more about the study's analysis/impact regarding this trend.
So I'm almost certain they are being counted
The quote is:
"Deindustrialization has reduced demand,"
Leaving out 'Deindustrialization' is leaving out most of the story.
That is the gaph of industrial decline.
It's not that the 'dishwashers' are using less electricty so much as dishwashers are no longer designed and made in the UK. That is the story.
Probably less than 20% of that curve is 'green good news' - 80% of it is deindustrialization which is a primary economic malaise.
That deindustrialization is now starting to hit 'core' industry like auto - and a fundamental driver of the far right.
Industrial use of electricy is about where it was in the 1980s because industry ha moved elsewhere, like China.
AfD cannot get enough votes without that curve - Mercedes is closing down while China expands. That's the story.
I would call this a basic misrepresentation, but you just pulled that number out of thin air. Or somewhere worse?
50% of the decline is from industry, 50% from residential[1]. During that timeframe, industrial output increased.
1. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...
This is so hilariously Daily Mirror.
The price of electricity is driving deindustrialisation.
Right – those things aren't great. What's so amusing or outrageous about pointing that out?
> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.
Did the link say they were? Maybe I missed it.
By "here" I meant posts on this thread, not in the content of the article.
In the past 10 years.
The supply margin (declared capacity - demand) has reduced by half.
Electricity prices have increased 250%(edit: from 0.11 to 0.25).
And the 9-fold relative increase in imports (1% to 9%) definitely contributes to that increase.
Before you say it's all inflation, I believe inflation is not that high over the same period, and consider the role that electricity price hikes have played on inflation.
Which, in turn, is due to the war.
The main policy failure was the conservative government banning onshore wind for five years. There's less critical issues with pylons and planning that I would actually blame the public for rather than the government.
Other than that, not a lot of other options. People mentioning nuclear will be referred to the build time of Hinkley C.
Don't be so sure.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/10/great-brita...
https://spectator.org/germanys-electricity-rationing-is-no-l...
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/german-electricity-to-...
And you don't even have to do it through law, with high enough prices you get the subjects to do them themselves:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/oct/01/britons-prepar...
The US has a lot of wiggle room wrt energy consumption because it has ceded the role of being the world's factory to China. At the same time, the US is the world's data center and software development hub, and the world's finance hub, and the world's bank. What does the UK have in comparison?
Yest it is. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.1855
"a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades" Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Same with AI. It is becoming much more efficient and cheaper. This will result in a much, much higher demand. Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.
That the energy demand is sinking is based on the fact that most industries got outsourced to China.
To take the stupidest version of the argument (not going to sugarcoat it, I think it was embarrassingly stupid) there was Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto where he called for a 1000x increase in energy production from nuclear fission and fusion. I quote directly:
"We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well."
But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants.
If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.
For a long time (several decades) electricity demand has been decreasing in the UK, largely due to efficiency improvements. But now days pretty much everyone agrees that electricity demand will increase significantly in the future due to electrification. The UK has been planning for this for some time so if this guy was really from National Grid, he sounds like a bit of a rogue!
> "their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like"
No, nobody is suggesting that the grid will ever cut off power to anybody - certainly not domestic customers. The idea is that in a smart grid, big industrial customers often have the ability to temporarily reduce demand for heat or cooling or whatever. So if there is a signal from the grid that demand needs to be cut, automated industrial systems can (and already do) do that. The same goes for your car charging, water heating, etc. These things can automatically slow down during demand peaks in response to a signal from the grid, and you probably won't notice or care. You'll still be able to wash your dishes any time you want!
This is all definitely a good thing. A huge part of the cost of running the grid is in handling the biggest demand peaks, which might only occur for an hour or two per day a few times per year. If the peaks can be reduced and demand becomes smoother, then energy becomes cheaper.
The same is true about climate control. 1 or 2C from the desired temperature is still pretty comfortable but can make a huge difference in power savings, particularly if it's coordinated.
That said, I suspect that the even better route for power companies to go down is installing more grid batteries. Those can directly address and smooth out high demand. Put them at the various substations and you can shut off the main grid to the substation temporarily under high load.
Once silicon is in control (which is where responding grid requests to delay consumption is more or less necessarily heading) you could even achieve better (worst-case) safety margins at reduced (total) power consumption. Because the machinery no longer needs to be designed around two "dumb" thermo switches and do a little extra in case layers of varying temperature manifest after two or more spaced periods of consumption. With continuous monitoring in software, you can integrate the worst-case bacterial growth based on time elapsed outside the "practically safe" temperature ranges. Then the tank always knows what is needed, and can both operate on tighter margins and reliably know when reducing or delaying power draw is ok.
And with more and more houses installing solar and battery, opting into shoring up the grid for a decent uplift in standard export rates would be of interest to many.
Nearly 20 years ago I had such a wonderful debugging experience when the power grid where I lived sent a "switch to backup" message and then milliseconds later a cancellation. The colo's power system got jammed between generator and mains electricity and everything rapidly ran out of UPS backup power and died. I found so many dependency loops between servers that day, took me hours to get things back up and running.
I have been expanding solar thermal because it’s free of both of these constraints.
https://www.iberkshires.com/story/83932/Williamstown-s-Gas-S...
H
Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.
This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
That few in government are readying for that and are rearranging deck chairs instead is not particularly reassuring.
For some on the left, they view humans as parasites. It starts as self-hate internally and expands outwards to encompass humanity more generally ('I love animals, I hate people'). Humans have to modify their environment to exist (shelter, farming, hunting, et al.), so the people that hold that ideology, you will find, they comprehensively hate any modification of the environment by humans, ie they want humans to cease to exist, rooted first in their own desire to not exist (they hate their own existence first and foremost).
The world is at all times overflowing with people that hate existing. They're miserable sad sacks and they desperately want everyone to drown in it with them. Sometimes that gets formalized into projected ideology used as a weapon against the rest of humanity.
People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a completely different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.
I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.
Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there are politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.
I'm going to go with the degrowth, or the steady-state economics guys, they are more likely to be closer to the mark of what is actually achievable in the real world.
Everything must grow all the time because all we care about is compounding interest, and that can only exist with continuous growth.
Finite resources and time be dammed.
Human production and consumption (in a broad sense) is generating/leading to ecological catastrophes. Some people believe technology will solve the problem, some people believe the easier solution is to stop producing as much.
Unfortunately, that means letting go of some privileges and not everybody will agree on what to let go.
- climate change is having real measurable negative impacts already
- 90% of the shit we create is useless low quality junk and e-waste with a two years life expectancy
- green washing doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of industries are not compatible with long term sustainability
What are your argument for infinite growth at all cost?
the logical terminus of the growth fanatics is to literally want to leave the planet so I think we ought to reserve the label 'alien' for them
Which is a fair gamble to be frank, I don't blame them.
Take the idea of not being able to wash your cloths when you want. What a step back! But instead get rid of your heated pool or turn down heating by two degrees.
But yes I do agree about the impossibility of communication.
It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production.
Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues.
It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad".
Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.
I've seen proposals that are less intermittent availability and more incentivized pushing of consumption towards periods of lower demand. We already have all these computers in our appliances, might as well let them do reasonable things ... your freezer probably does a self-defrost cycle triggered by a timer and/or a door open counter, but why not wait up to X hours for off-peak pricing to do it. Or push the set points down a degree or two during off-peak pricing, to reduce energy use during on-peak. Also works for HVAC subject to user comfort, and water heaters if you're careful and avoid high temperatures that cause injury or low temperatures that allow microorganism growth.
Of course, that's science fiction... all the communication in appliances is designed to collect data and serve targeted ads. :( So very few appliances know if current pricing is peak/off peak or when it will change.
People in my area HATE it. They hate giving up control (even though you can still manually lower your thermostat if you get too warm), and feel like the power company is doing some sort of scam even though it's a win/win/win (you make money, electric company saves money, homes are precooled with solar instead of burning fossil fuels).
Personally I’m happy to. Charge my car at night when it’s 1/3 the price and use the h used capacity rather than pay higher bills to build more nuclear plants.
This is nothing new in the U.K., “economy seven” was a thing 50 years ago.
> had in mind that electricity demand should decrease
Does this mean the speaker wanted demand to decrease? The UK forecasts from the Future Energy Scenarios [1] show demand increasing (see page 21).
> intermittent availability of power.
I'm assuming this was related to demand side response. Page 37 of the Future Energy Scenarios pdf contains an overview of this.
I worked at an EV smart charging start up (Kaluza) between 2019-2022 and my experience doesn't line up with a couple of your points:
> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like
During my time at Kaluza the customer could charge their EV whenever they wanted.
> you will have to adapt to when there is spare power,
The customer set their minimum state-of-charge (0-100%) and we would always have it charged to that amount by a specified time, irrespective of demand. We aimed to charge the customer's EV when demand was low (there are UK markets we can sell this ability to - these markets may have changed since I was there), which would save them money, but meeting the minimum SoC was the most important thing.
> This is just a regression in technological progress
Reducing peak demand reduces the amount of infrastructure you need and makes better use of what you have. IMO it's a good upgrade that makes much better use of the assets on the grid.
Vehicle-to-Grid (or Home) charging takes this up a level by feeding power back to the grid. This "What’s next for Vehicle-to-Everything?" PDF [2] is 4 years old now, but has some good data on V2G and the benefits it brings.
1. https://www.neso.energy/document/364541/download
2. https://info.kaluza.com/hubfs/What%E2%80%99s%20next%20for%20....
In nearly every case, this is actually "we'll take 35% of your bill if you agree to let us sometimes turn off your A/C and clothes dryer between 5pm-8pm". It doesn't require everyone to take the deal, just enough people who want to save money. You can take the discount and use your own battery if you want, or you can pay full price so the power company can. And some will live with the mild inconvenience in exchange for money (which most of us are forced to do in so many different ways).
This is just charging people the costs of their decisions. That's capitalism at its best.
The UK introduced cheaper nighttime electricity (and storage heaters that could use it) - economy7 at the end of the 70’s
On the surface it sounds like a good thing to worry about the enviroment, but in reality government policy is insane and stupid. As one example, the UK in it's wisdom don't allow North Sea oil extraction, the Norweigans do. And guess who we are buying electricity from? On top of that, the UK's overall contribution to carbon emissions are insignificant compared to China. We just pay more money for electricity for no good reason. Obviously we use less electricity, we can't afford it. And Labour enviromentalists see that as a win.
France, mostly.
Firstly, that doesn't sound like a particularly hard thing to accept if it genuinely helps. "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
However, regardless of that, this isn't new. There have been time-of-day based electricity tariffs for decades that are aimed at incentivising people to do more demanding things at particular times e.g. when industry isn't using the power. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
What the heck? Where is your evidence that using washing machines at inconvenient times is going to destroy the environment?
If your argument is that any use of electricity from fossil fuels is destroying the environment, then nobody should even be charging their phones at night. Time-shifting washing machines isn't going to fix carbon emissions since they're going to be emissions at any time of the day.
I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development. A lot of these moral arguments do not make sense. You said it yourself -- industry is incentivized to convince the public to use less electricity during peak hours so they can pay less. It's pretty much a psyop by capitalists. And for some reason you're shilling for them even though presumably you're paid exactly zero buckaroos
The environment is going to be destroyed anyway, since the rest of the world will continue to use their washing machine whenever they want. [1]
The current European approach to climate change is completely bonkers and will only make Europeans poorer and miserable.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
One of the key challenges is electricity distribution, with a number of key transmission bottlenecks: a notable one is Scotland/England, where Scotland renewables generate more power than necessary, but not all of it can be exported to England as their isn't enough capacity across that transmission section.
Transmission capacity growth is now the key priority for the grid, with policies and plans optimised to address the bottlenecks in distribution.
Demand on the national grid probably should; as home solar (yes, even in stereotypically dark and cloudy UK), wind etc becomes more and more viable I think a mix of on-site and grid electricity will be increasingly common.
The grid operators are definitely not saying that in France, in fact they are spending hundreds of billion (€100B each for both RTE and Enedis) to accommodate for a growth in electricity consumption due to electrification, and are lamenting that the policies don't encourage electrification fast enough.
Curious what was actually said. I can imagine some smarter pricing incentives being put in place to move demand around. If so, you should know that versions of that have been happening for decades.
His growth would go to him and then he would graceful give some 'alms' to the 'deserving poor' meaning only 'good white christens who do not advocate for anything he doesn't like'.
Peter Thiel is literally human scum of the worst kind. He literally has his hand in all destruction of modern western society, and is trying to go back to 11th century emperor aligned with a compliant pope, but extend this over the whole world.
Degrowrh is a mathematical and physical inevitability, the only choice you have is to prepare for it or not
Lets say a house typically had 5 60W bulbs on for 8hrs a day, now replaced with an 8W bulb. That would be a 2 kWH reduction, which roughly corresponds to the drop shown in the data.
EDIT: actually now that I think about it, 2kWh per-household is probably less than 1kWh per-capita. It's still a good chunk though!
The main energy saver is simply that the newer LED lights are dimmer!
The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.
That said, UK manufacturing decline also correlates with this as that’s very energy intensive. Also don’t rule out fridges, old 90s fridges were very energy intensive compared to today.
> Improved efficiency is also supporting reduced use in the industrial sector – as has a general decline in GB industry and associated intensive electricity use
https://energy.drax.com/intelligence/2024-the-year-electrici...
> This is part of a larger trend. Demand has been falling by 5 TWh per year since 2005. Improving efficiency (lighting, televisions, fridges, etc.), fewer homes using electric heating, and deindustrialisation all play a part
Computer fleets across a country do not upgrade immediately so the lag may contribute.
And ACPI was just one energy saving initiative of that era.
I was surprised how the small amount of infrared from them makes rooms feel more pleasant to be in. It's a warmth on the skin, rather like having a fireplace going.
If I weren't paying the electricity bill, I would totally fit them everywhere.
It's nothing at all like having a fireplace going - unless they're on fire, in which case both of you have a problem.
This has disastrous consequences for businesses and the economy. It is the number one biggest problem facing the UK economy after the huge government debt and crippling taxes... although there are a number of other problems I could mention.
A shift to EVs and heat pumps and possibly datacentres should increase demand and lower unit prices. Even more so to the degree that those can respond to price signals and shift demand away from peaks.
Peaks are expensive for the same reason, you need to build capacity that is rarely used and so can't spread the cost.
Separately, smart charging or water heating can use the cheapest available generation from renewables as they vary with time.
On the other hand, this generates a "doom loop" for methane gas as it also has network costs. Ensuring entire areas shift to electric heating at the same time helps with this e.g. banning new build areas from connecting to gas networks.
That's exactly why we convert things to money - so we don't use arbitrary measurements. An energy use is not "wasteful", it can only be expensive. Which is worth or not, depending on particular conditions.
The weather in the UK can be very humid, and if you don't have much of a garden, it can be impossible to dry your clothes at times. We've had times where our living room was full of clothes for more than a few days, and it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't really dry anyway.
So we've invested in dehumidifiers and a dryer, and it made our life a lot more comfortable.
If you have a family of four, the clothes dryer is an ENORMOUS time-saver. I'll never voluntarily live in an apartment that doesn't have one. No way I'm sacrificing my quality of life.
What it does save is space that you need to hang clothes.
During winter I also like that it provides some moisture so the air won't get too dry.
edit: so basically we only use our dryer if there's a ton of laundry to hang, plus sometimes for towels or bed sheets/blankets.
> I don't really mind hanging clothes, it doesn't take that long.
I mean sure, but i still would rather not do it. I could wash my dishes by hand too, its not reallly that big of a deal, but i dont because we have technology. We have solutions to all these things, and your politicians have somehow convinced you that its fine that you cant use them. Bizzaro.
The tumble dryer I had in the US could do a full load dry in about 25-30 mins. Maybe it was significantly more wasteful in terms of energy.
I do think maybe the worst heat pump driers are worse than the worst condensers and vented dryers. General rule seems to be, Miele best (but you'll pay for it), Bosch/Siemens/Neff are good (these are all the same company, and nothing much to do with the Siemens that makes turbines and medical equipment these days), Zanussi/Electrolux/AEG (same company) and LG and Samsung are fine, Hotpoint/Whirlpool/Indesit (also all the same company; appliance companies love doing this) are bloody awful.
We do have electric tumble dryers, condenser dryers, washer dryers.
(Indeed, the progressive switch to condensers may be part of power consumption dropping.)
AFAIK The UK's climate is about equivalent to New York State.
If people are just going without, then that's generally bad.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
Hopefully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Green_Links will get built and start having an effect before the next election.
There are many companies that have folded or who are in reduced circumstances in the United States. Many of them were dominant after the war. And they were on top of their game, but despite being on the top, the management team wanted to set themselves up and just wanted to milk the proceeds and primarily stick them into their pockets.
US Steel, Xerox, Kodak, IBM, Intel Microsoft, Motorola Schaumburg, Illinois let’s be honest, most of these companies stagnated at the top, in many areas of modern technology, being on top isn’t the end it’s just the start. of an endless process on a treadmill for as long as you are in existence, as a company. Which is the main reason why Apple had better take the design and engineering of memory in house the treadmill never stops.
I see a lot of comments here see "per capita" and think "residential consumption" - but the decrease is more indicating of general deindustrialization
edit: helpful robot boyfriend plotted it https://i.imgur.com/Hp199vV.png
(The ground floor of my house, which is, to be fair, quite damp, was built 220 years ago; this is not all that remarkable and my neighbours' houses are fifty years older)
1970s houses are pretty energy-efficient by comparison.
But it's worth noting that a surviving 100 year old house in the UK is likely to be warmer than a surviving 100 year old house in the USA; it is not only brick-built but it is also likely to be in a terrace of several houses, so it has some of the heat retention advantage of an apartment.
The "newer" town in my area is a railway town — it is actually a very old settlement but it became a big important town when the railway arrived in the early 1840s. Much of the housing in that town dates back to the 1860s through to the Edwardian era at the latest and is small houses in brick terraces of ten or fifteen houses in a row (usually in staggered terraces of four or five).
These houses are all supplied with natural gas now, and they have increasingly well-insulated roofs (and loft conversion rooms), double and triple glazing, so they have become warmer and pretty energy efficient.
But in the early 1970s, many of them still would not have been on the town gas supply, they would have been burning a lot more coal, and therefore almost all their supplemental heating (cooking, much of their hot water) would have been electric.
(Edited: 1920 is the median)
The wealth of a nation is directly related to how much energy is available to it.
Currently paying 0.33 usd a unit.
So for example, for wind power the consumer effectively pays the CfD strike price, largely irrespective of the spot price.
Fwiw, I do agree we have a problem with power being too expensive, but it's more complex than just the consumer pays the most expensive source.
Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.
One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1x0tds4/4hour_b...
It might get you upvotes on social media but it's 180 degrees wrong.
You've only implied it's unique to the UK but many people will explicitly make that claim to help stoke everyone's anger at the wrong things. Actually it's the standard way to price things in many markets, even outside of electricity and the UK.
In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?
There are other reasons to do this, but purely on the financial side, I'd want to see the numbers on this one. Again, this isn't about solar, the claim was about battery + inverter + time-of-use paying for itself.
I guess it’s sort of a “I drive a large inefficient car and that’s a good thing” kind of situation? Excessive unnecessary production and consumption is a positive trait?
The fact is, the UK has undergone a nearly complete deindustrialization in that period. e.g 'cars made per capita' is about 1/3 what it was. Domestic white goods are gone. Commercial shipbuilding is gone. Consumer electronics is gone. Domestic textiles are gone. Steel smelting (and nearly recycling) and machine tools are gone. For centuries(decades) these things were quintessentially British.
https://x.com/a16z/status/2108950777440165999?
There are no low electricity, rich countries.
I sincerely hope the UK is able to muddle its way through its current host of challenges.
The rise of gas central heating means that less electricity is used for supplemental heating.
We've gone from 70% of houses using coal to heat in the 1970s, which meant a lot more electric supplemental heating, to 70% using "town gas" central heating, which means less.
Combined with that, those lethal electric bar fires are a thing of the past, and the ones that remain have been replaced by efficient oil-filled radiators and at least somewhat more efficient storage heaters. Also many fewer houses rely on electric immersion heaters for water.
Houses are better insulated. And it is a lot warmer (actually shockingly so — 1.5C more on the mean maximum daily temperature in winter) so there is much less supplemental electric heating needed.
Cooker hobs are not the horribly inefficient hot metal ring element things they used to be — halogen, induction and gas hobs have replaced them, more use of microwaves etc.
LED lighting.
Solar (assuming it is not included in the numbers).
Even things like electric kettle elements are modestly more efficient (more sealed-element kettles), an energy efficiency drive in the 90s persuaded people to only boil the water they needed.
And talking of kettles, we drink only a third as much tea per person as we did in the 1970s, and while we drink much more coffee, it has not closed the gap. That is a _massive_ amount of electricity consumption; the average person in the 1970s drank around 25 cups of tea per week, now the average is as low as eight (which is frankly weird)
I don't actually think the deindustrialisation of the UK is any sort of elephant in the room, as it goes. This is a small, tightly packed country and our physical quality of life has improved radically with the deindustrialisation of towns (and indeed, in this timeframe, the destruction of the last of the appalling housing that it forced on people).
Wouldn't it be more natural to say that the UK USES less electricity per person than in the 1970's ?
Now, where is all the wealth going? Perhaps a more pertinent question.
> more traffic, more pollution
More traffic, less pollution (see ULEZ controversy)
> worse healthcare
better healthcare, despite the terrible waiting list problems and the NHS dentistry issue, life expectancy continues to creep upwards.
There are lots of factors that feed into this: lots of solar, batteries, more efficiency, improved insulation.
Some others: increase of heat pumps, energy poverty, reduction in industrial energy (both due to good and bad reasons)
Ultimately though, its not about how much energy per capita, its about the sources of energy, and how effectively they are used... my heat pump uses infinity more electricity than my boiler, but far more effectively uses the underlying energy source.
If the Hinckley point C had been on schedule that would account for about one fifth of the gap between the peak and current level. Instead it'll come online in 5 years.
This is around the same time the UK is forecast to become a net exporter of electricity.
They will help reduce costs by reducing:
1. Wind generation being curtailed.
2. Gas generation used to replace the curtailed wind (referred to as turn-up).
Based on the GB Transmission Constraints site data the costs as of Oct 2026 curtailment costs 257.96 £m and turn-up is 1,378.91 £m.
The article "Transmission Network Unavailability – the Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain" [3] article provides a good analysis.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Green_Links
2. https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/curtailment
3. https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
And maybe even more importantly electricity paid for by the poor and industry.
What also matters to me is to how much hardship such as health issues does this production lead. Coal energy would for example cause health costs.
Generally its better to look at total energy, not electricity.
some people will talk about efficiency etc.
but one true metric more than easily fakeable GDP numbers is electricity production and electricity consumption per capita.
a growing economy simply uses more electricity / energy - to move people, goods, get more work done etc.
If you shut down a steel mill and replace it with ARM, GDP is up but energy consumption is down.
Demand was on a constant down trends. From PCs, servers over light bulbs to electric based heating (heat pumps and IR heat lamps instead of "direct" electric heating + better insulation) everything has got _way_ more efficient. But also a lot of high energy need industry has moved of from the UK (or most 1st world countries) for decades by now.
A short (not proper) lookup show that even if you where to replace _all_ cars in the UK with electric cars the total need for that would be 30TWh/y while the UK produces ~322TWh/y so less then a 10% increase (in relation to production, not consumption).
The only thing which has caused a mayor hickup more or less all countries long term plan for electricity production is AI.
But not because GPGPU compute is that inefficient, it has gotten way more efficient. But instead because of how insanely much compute AI needs.
Needs isn’t quite the right term as AI energy use is way higher than the market actually supports.
A large fraction of AI’s energy use is pure bubble me too redundancy. A long list of companies are doing essentially the same training with essentially the same data. When grok dies all that training goes away independent of any use of AI by consumers.
Similarly, by subsidizing usage with VC funds you get a lot of demand that goes away at market rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
> From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Services deemed essential (e.g. hospitals, telephone switchboards, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses) were exempt. Television companies were required to cease broadcasting at 22:30 to conserve electricity [...] The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974.
But nonetheless: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...
Year Avg consumer price in today's money
1975 13p/kWh
1985 15p/kWh
1995 n/a
2005 11p/kWh
2015 17p/kWh
2025 26p/kWh
1) we have to pay off operators for the billions of foreign investment they put into new wind and solar farms and grid storage batteries. If we didn't tempt them with a good RoI, they'd invest elsewhere, and we'd still be burning coal. The cost of this is going down year on year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
2) we're paying for new transmission capacity and replacing worn out transmission route. The fact we don't already have it, which we could've had by charging more for electricity in the 2000s and building it out decades ago, is why today we face enormous curtailment costs today, as we can't get all this wind power from where it's generated to where it's consumed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottlene...
3) our market arrangement is based on everyone bidding to supply power, and we pay everyone who generates the same rate as the highest necessary bidder. Thus the moment that there isn't enough wind power, or there is but it can't get to the region it's needed (see point 2), in come the gas turbines and given that Russia's trying to destroy Ukraine, gas is astronomically expensive. The sooner we solve our bottlenecks and decommission all the gas turbines, the better.
I don't think I can agree with this. CfDs are (typically) a 15 year contract. For each CfD the price actually increases, as a result of inflation adjustment, each year. Dudgeon wind farm got £161.71 per MWh when it began but today gets £220.95 per MWh because of inflation.
Strike prices came down from where they began, but have since bounced around. Hornsea Project 2 is selling today for £80.08 per MWh but CfDs signed this year for similar Wind Farms would be (in today's money) more like £90 per MWh. Much cheaper than Dudgeon, but they are not in fact just steadily reducing in price.
The big boon for CfDs is the certainty for both parties. In 2022 and to a lesser extent again now, fossil fuel prices went crazy and so the less dependent you are on those prices the better for you. If you'd locked in CCGT prices at 2024 levels for 15 years you'd be doing great... except your providers would be bankrupt because methane just isn't available at those prices.
Are those numbers already corrected for inflation?
Massive increases in efficiency across the board. It’s hard to find non condensing dryers nowadays, almost every boiler heats water in demand, and our very old housing stock is increasingly being triple glazed and insulated.
Very high energy costs due to energy privatization accelerated things. People cannot afford to waste energy in the UK.
The US is learning that lesson now for similar reasons. Trump is doing more to drive efficiency than any number of “green” candidates.
It also seems to be blessed with few natural disasters such as major earthquakes, volcanoes, larger tornadoes etc.