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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity. Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.

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)

View on HN

> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.

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.

[0] https://ifs.org.uk/publications/electricity-prices

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> 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.

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.

Somehow you’ve missed the drastic intensification of street, parking and building lighting at night not to mention headlights. People also seem much less concerned with leaving lights on in unused spaces as well.

Street lighting already had very efficient bulbs so I think that's caused by other factors. And headlights seem like other factors too. Building lighting I'm not sure but that's more like a doubling.

It's tough to say the exact multiplier but I've walked around at night a lot for years, and there has been a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights, as well as a move away from motion sensors toward permanently on.

It's the same here in Germany, and I very much dislike this development. We used to get so much beautiful fireflies in the summer here. Now they're mostly gone, and that's probably only the most visible damage.

Very appropriate nickname!

The disappearance of fireflies is not related to lighting. That’s a global phenomena involving the mass collapse of insect populations.

True, but besides insecticides and habitat destruction it is possible that the strong nocturnal lighting, which disorients insects, has contributed to this. Wherever insects are abundant, a strong white lamp at night will accumulate quickly dead insects around it.

Where I live, in Europe, when I was a child there was a great abundance of insects of many different kinds. If I did a walk around my home I could see insects from perhaps at least 10 different orders.

Nowadays, the only insects that are still abundant are the true bugs (Hemiptera) why all others have mostly disappeared (a few, like mosquitoes, may still be seen from time to time). I do not know the reason, but I assume that the true bugs might be more resistant to insecticides.

And locally a lot of harm is done through leaf removal. Fireflies lay their eggs in leaf litter, if that gets raked up & removed those firefly eggs don't survive.

> Fireflies lay their eggs in leaf litter

Unfortunately, so do cockroaches.

> a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights

I think the number of lights is about the same at least where I live in the UK, the big change is the light is now bright white not the yellow of the older sodium vapour lights.

I kinda miss that but mostly because it wasn't as bright and is what I grew up with, you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.

> you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.

IN fact white light is MUCH MUCH less effective. Red light doesn't affect your night vision, and yellow isn't much behind. White light means you can see very well where the light it, but you can't see beyond that radius and so more light is needed. I don't need to see colors at night (where white it good), I just need to see the dangers in time to avoid them, and so white is much worse for the goal.

Just to make it worse, it takes nearly an hour for your eyes to fully adjust to dark after leaving white light. So if the lights go off or you have to leave the place where they are shining you can't see as well.

White light is only good when you have enough of it that everything you want to see for the next hour is fully illuminated. If there is any exception to that, then you shouldn't have white lite.

> drastic intensification of street, parking and building lighting

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.

roenxi: ...people using more electricity...

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.

> That looks like rationing.

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.

What is obsession with the light, that's like lowest consumer of electricity, also telly doesn't use much unless it's a really big one. Heating, cooking and appliances use the most, and people are definitely careful when using those, especially heating during the winter. Seems like you don't live in the UK.

> What is obsession with the light

Because the comment triggering this branch suggested improvements in efficiency must imply wanting to consume more. Light is one of those things, where the rule doesn't automatically apply. It's not the only thing I mentioned, you just chose to skip the others to make your job of arguing easier.

> Heating, cooking and appliances use the most

Even there you get more for less. Induction stoves are way more efficient than the old heating elements but do you want to spend more time in front of the stove because the electricity is cheaper? Some times, but not that common. Heat pumps are way more efficient than a boiler but it doesn't guarantee that you want hotter shower water or warmer room. But more importantly, most heating isn't electric. Natural gas, oil, or wood were always far more common. In the UK today almost 75% of heating is gas. Electricity is less than 10% [0] so it contributes little to the topic of the article.

Now let's get to the confounding factors which go down the pit of ignorance. Natural gas was always subsidized almost everywhere in the world whether you know it or not. District heating is more of the same. Where I live there are still "heating electricity" plans so people get a better price if they happen to use electrical heating because the provider knows that small number of people will suffer compared to others.

Another confounding factor, the push for extreme efficiency. Heat pumps have some big limitations that nobody wants but choose to live with for the sake of efficiency and self sufficiency. Because people also install solar panels on their roof and power their appliances without anyone ever reporting how much more heating or cooking was provided with 0 load on the grid.

In reality the biggest consumers which dwarf cooking appliances are industrial ones. And there the drop is real. Manufacturing moved abroad and electricity production moved with it. Maybe mass EV adoption can push the demand/production line back up.

> Seems like you don't live in the UK.

You are correct, I do not. This shouldn't prevent me from having an informed opinion though. Much like how I can write to you in English without living there.

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

Writing in English is one thing but the cultural divide between the US and the UK is enormous, so I think all the context counts for quite a lot.

I see things stated (and assumed as a norm) by people in this thread that are just miles off.

If you're working off data and not assumptions though, fair enough.

> What is obsession with the light, that's like lowest consumer of electricity

It used to not be!

> What is obsession with the light

It is historic, electric lighting was the first major application for electricity in households.

" Electric lighting is highly desirable. The light is much brighter than oil or gas lamps, and there is no soot. Although early electricity was very expensive compared to the 21st century, it was far cheaper and more convenient than oil or gas lighting. Electric lighting was so much safer than oil or gas that some companies were able to pay for the electricity with the insurance savings. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrification#Benefits_of_el...

> Do people overwhelmingly need or want more electricity and can't afford it?

Well, yes? That seems somewhat uncontroversial? There are a lot of people out there who need more electricity and can't afford it. Electricity is one of the most fungible forms of energy, with infinite electricity we could all live like kings. It'd be very comfortable. The limit on use is the supply-demand balance represented by prices and if price were low enough people would up their living standards.

That is also the explanation for a lot of the issues your post goes to. If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead. And the way the math shakes out is it'd normally be economically optimum to increase their access to a good standard of living by giving them more energy than you gave up. These effects are over the entire economy.

And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd. If I were relying on HN comment threads I'd believe households in the UK were composed of nothing but light-bulbs and consumed nothing but the same given how much of a focus they are of the energy policy.

I personally use as much electricity as I want without care for price. It going cheaper wont make me spend more.

Yeah, if electricity dropped in price by 50% I don't think my usage would change in any significant way. There's no way in hell I'd use over twice as much and trigger Jevon's paradox.

Thinking about what happens when prices approach zero makes it hard to make realistic predictions. Yeah infinite power would change everything, but for realistic price shifts there are very different price elasticities for different use cases.

And one person changing their power use doesn't do much to the price, and a large group gradually changing their power use doesn't do much to the price either. So the idea of "If you don't need to use the electricity, someone who is struggling can use it instead." is misguided. The person who's struggling is going to see basically the same price either way. If we want to help them, conserving power won't do the trick outside of specific supply emergencies, we need other measures.

Also roenxi I mentioned things other than lights, but lights happen to be a super clear example of Jevon's paradox not happening over a very significant amount of power usage so of course they'll get brought up.

Cheap electricity would change your usage in indirect way:

Cost of electricity is a significant part in aluminum production. Cheap electricity, cheap aluminum, more cars made from aluminum instead of currently cheap steel.

Cheap reliable electricity would enable cheap hydrogen production, which could replace many uses of fossil fuels. Cheap hydrogen, cheap ammonia production, cheaper nitrogen fertilizers.

> It going cheaper wont make me spend more.

Speak for yourself. The price of electricity immediately & directly effects the setup/operation of small business. I know home businesses (juicing plants) that became non-viable on the basis of electricity alone.

Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand. You just focused on arguing weaker interpretation of what I said, discussing infinities, and obsessing about why people bring up lights.

> And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd

I think you want to distract from not making your point. But easy, light used to consume a lot. By some statistics [0] just a few decades ago it was ~10TWh, close to 15% of household consumption, which in turn was higher than industrial consumption (1.1:1). So lights consumed ~8% of UK electricity. Is 15% in a household or 8% for the country so insignificant that mentioning it is ridiculous?

Personal anecdata, I can use more energy but I realistically (not in "infinite energy" world) want and need exactly as much as I use.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/81562463/Energy_consumption_in_UK_h...

> Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand.

Supply/demand and prices are rationing. Prices represent the limit on how much of a resource someone can use before there is reason to believe they should stop. It's happens to be best form of rationing we have, the other methods tend to lead to disincentives to improve the situation (consider, for example, how the market rations out limited supplies of RAM right now - prices go up and people who pay get the RAM and all the money going to RAM producers gives them resources and incentive to build new capacity to produce more RAM). There isn't a limit on demand for electricity other than the price, it does literally everything. At the extreme case, if it were somehow cheap enough, we'd be able to use it to fabricate new matter. But every step of the way there are population-level opportunities to use more energy to get more comfortable if there is enough of it.

You've been using the term "rationing" in a negative way, though. That implies more than the mere existence of supply and demand.

I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree; I don't see what is negative about the use of the word rationing. There are finite resources, some people won't have as much as they could use. There needs to be some system to work out who gets what; it isn't easy to get away from that. I recommend prices, but other methods have been tried. The alternatives tend to work badly and are not recommended.

But when prices go up 100-200%, that suggests the market is rationing pretty hard.

Yes absolutely more electricity is kind of the cornerstone of industrial production and comfortable living. If you make it cheaper you have more goodness

There are diminishing returns on more. My life wouldn't be better if I was using more electric for the things I already do. Sure I could leave my lights on all day, but by turning the lights off I save more than enough money which I can use for something else as to be worth the effort to flipping the switch when I leave the room.

All the things I see that would allow me to use more electric are not worth it - I'd rather spend my money on something else. My life would be better for an electric animated sculpture in my front year - but not by nearly enough that it would be worth building and so I don't have it.

I don't think the OP means it would be great because we can leave our heating on all day and just wear bathing costumes in the house.

It's more what it enables in terms of industrial production, and transportation and the knock-on effects from that.

Again though, diminishing returns. My life would be better if Bolivia puts in better transit to in their mountain villages - but not by much since I currently believe I will never go there and so it is a just in case. Even for the people who live in those places the population may be so small as to not be worth the investment even if energy was free.

You said: "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."

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.

I mean, sure. They might use more electricity for lighting or less. How much electricity gets used for lighting isn't really the point here. More electricity gets used.

Seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox has a pretty good explanation. This isn't a new effect, it's been an established consideration related to energy efficiency since the 1850s.

If light bulbs get more efficient, and someone uses more electricity on something else, that's not Jevon's paradox, that's a coincidence because there's a million things using electricity and some go up and some go down. There's no significant causal relationship between the two. (Mostly little fluctuations in electric prices that even out over the years as supply is built to match demand.)

Jevon's paradox is when a specific use case gets more efficient, so you do more of that use case, so much so that the extra use overwhelms the efficiency. It happens in many situations but definitely not all. You have a curve between how much you use and how much value you get, and the steepness of that curve decides Jevon's. For lighting in the past few decades, there's no Jevon's. The changes in light bulbs have caused a big reduction in electricity use. If we were stuck on incandescents we'd be using a lot more electricity total.

And then the article discusses that even if Jevons paradox doesn't hold, we'd reasonably expect more efficient energy use to lead to more energy consumption. Energy is an absolutely classic field where it improvements in efficiency isn't a likely cause for dropping use. There isn't any reason to use less energy; if there are efficiency improvements then all else equal it makes the most sense to produce the same amount of energy and trade the excess into higher real living standards. Economies are good at sniffing that equilibrium out.

The UK doesn't look like it is experiencing an efficiency utopia; it looks like it has a relatively poor population among the developed countries (per capita) and they're suffering from an advanced energy shortage. The costs appear to be going crazy, they're deindustrialising. That isn't efficiency. It looks like they ran out of coal and are suffering from an energy squeeze.

> And then the article discusses that even if Jevons paradox doesn't hold, we'd reasonably expect more efficient energy use to lead to more energy consumption.

That's still the Jevons paradox.

> There isn't any reason to use less energy; if there are efficiency improvements then all else equal it makes the most sense to produce the same amount of energy and trade the excess into higher real living standards. Economies are good at sniffing that equilibrium out.

Massively wrong. Using more energy gives you sub-linear returns in value; you already got the lowest hanging fruit. For many uses you ramp up and use more power than before, but many uses you let your power bill drop.

To put it differently, read your own article. Right at the top it says "if demand is sufficiently price elastic".

Demand is often not sufficiently price elastic.

And then as you get through the article you get down to the section on the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate where start getting observations out of the academy that energy use goes up on efficiency increases even if Jevons' paradox doesn't trigger, and the section on energy conservation policy where the situation gets muddy but there isn't any reason to believe that improving energy efficiency would lead to lower energy use.

There is no way that the dropping per capita energy efficiency in the UK is being driven by efficiency gains, there is no theoretical reason to expect the two to pair up in the first place and it is clearly an energy squeeze when you look at the situation in context of the political and other real economic indicators. If the UK could drop 33% of its electricity use while maintaining a healthy economy that'd be a miracle on par if not exceeding what China managed in the last 50 years. That is simply not the situation, nobody seems to be talking about the vast improvements to QoL being driven by their vast surplus that has theoretically developed in the efficiency scenario [0]. Any industry that needs electricity is considering leaving. As I learned in this comments section the UKians are literally rioting in the streets which is, sadly, not a surprise given their energy statistics and the head-in-sand strategy that seems to go hand in hand.

[0] I also feel great temptation to allege that people in the UK have been forced into straits so dire that they subsist on a diet of lightbulbs, but my will is strong.

Khazzoom–Brookes is basically the idea that Jevons is more true than not, on average, in the electricity market. And it's not even settled.

> There is no way that the dropping per capita energy efficiency in the UK is being driven by efficiency gains

I don't want to get too far into that analysis. I just really dislike how you came in here talking about Jevons like it's a guarantee in every situation. And dressing it up as "mathematically speaking". That math only applies for specific shapes of demand curve. Whether or not the UK is seeing a squeeze, your original argument and a lot of the followups were deeply flawed.

My original argument is mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity 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. And I don't see any reason to budge from that point; I'm still confident it is true and if you've pointed out a flaw I didn't see it. The evidence coming out of the UK case makes it quite obvious that they're being squeezed and the influence of the squeeze is what is causing drops in use.

If there is evidence that the country has freed up a third of its electricity for other uses and just run out of things to do with it then that is going to, without doubt, be one for the history books and would be a level of success that would be well worth talking about. The signalling out of the UK isn't "we're swimming in electricity, what do we do with all this power now that more efficiencies have been found? Lets go bitcoins and aluminium to find a use for these power plants!", it'd a pretty clear "we can't produce as much electricity as we once did, we don't have the resources, usage has to drop, heavy industry please leave".

If the cost of stuff goes down, people will consume more stuff.

But let's say the cost of Y (in electricity or money) drops 25%. If that makes people consume 60% more Y, then spending rises. But if it only makes people consume 15% more Y, then spending drops. Both results are plausible.

There's no mathematical reason to assume the demand increase is bigger than the price drop.

If I could suddenly make each gallon of household water use go 10x as far, I'd do somewhere between 1-2x as much stuff with water as before. This would mean I'm only consuming 10-20% as much water as before. Would you be different? Again just household use, don't try to stretch the premise too far.

Indeed. Jevons's paradox does not apply to everything.

On the other hand more stoves are electric now rather than gas, new builds frequently have air source heating where they would've had gas or oil boilers, more cars are electric; all of which are huge percentages of a household's total energy consumption compared to something like lighting.

Not necessarily. In the bad old days folks would draw a continuous kW or more in the evenings just for lighting. 8kWh for an evening of lighting, or 1kWh for dinner, and 1kWh for lighting.

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.

But that's a very modern perspective:

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...

[3] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=99&t=3

> And air conditioners have had pretty stable efficiency;

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.

> Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.

But they do just leave their lights on more[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

They're not leaving them on 6x as much.

People absolutely do use much more light than they used to.

Actually even 8x as efficient.

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.

What I don't get though is that with increased household efficiency and presumably an increase in population (i.e, density which usually lowers cost), and the benefits of efficiency improvements to generation and distribution... why is household energy spending is UP, even accounting for inflation?

My bet would be in part more A/C units.

Households use about 20% less electricity today than in 1985; per person kwh is also down. But household expenditure is up by 20% in real terms and cost per kwh is up by 50%

40 years of technological progress and prices went up :(

In 1970 the UK domestic electricity grid and generating plants had been state owned since 1948, and was basically run by civil servants. This lasted until 1990-91 when it was all privatised by the Thatcher and Major governments (both Conservative).

Now in 2026 the main generators are EDF (French state owned), RWE (German), and Scottish Power (Spanish owned). These companies tend not to publish executive pay, but back in 2012 the CEO of EDF in the UK was being paid £1.2 million a year.

I would submit that all this has some bearing on why the prices have gone up.

In the US, it's due to the cost of the grid, the part of the utility bill that PUCs allow utilities to charge a fixed rate of profit. So if utilities take 20% on that grid "maintenance" project, the utility drives up the price as high as possible.

This is why distributed solar is actually cheaper than utility scale solar all-in: you need less of that very very expensive grid, even if you pay 3x on the initial install costs.

I think 100 W incandescent are too bright; I use 5 W incandescent lights (usually only one at a time, sometimes two if one is insufficient). I also find LED lighting (and flurescent) to be irritating (and they actually use a bit more power, the LED lighting that they installed (but I removed) uses 8 W instead of the 5 W that the incandescent light uses), so I don't use them.

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).

>Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux

Lightbulb in your home is 100% in your control. I prefer strong light, I have strong light and I dont need it stronger.

Even air conditioners have improved as we've moved away from having multiple leaky window air conditioners to mini-splits and central (though I would still think that's an increase in overall energy use).

we never had window AC in the UK, if we did it was only a handful of installations.

> Light bulbs got 6x as efficient and roughly nobody wants 6x as much light.

Yes, that means we can use the energy we would have used on light for other things.

Just aluminum smelting all moving to China probably reduced UK energy consumption by a few percent.

which is why i think looking at raw electricity usage doesnt make much sense in a globalized world.

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.

It makes sense to look at electricity usage. It tells the full story of the UK’s deindustrialisation policy starting under Thatcher and continuing under all governments, and recently under Theresa May’s net zero policies (also supported by all governments). There’s no reason aluminium smelting can’t come back to the UK with a proper energy policy of expanded nuclear power, more fracking, more renewables etc

Still one aluminium smelter in Scotland:

https://alvancebritishaluminium.com/

Which has it's own hydroelectric scheme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochaber_hydroelectric_scheme

Aluminum smelters have so high electric consumption that you usually build then near the cheapest reliable sources of electricity.

Cost of electricity is a very significant part of production costs of aluminum, around 30% on average.

https://www.aluminium.fr/en/energie

This and the loss of steel smelters in the 1980s is the real answer here.

Steel smelters used coking coal not electricity

There are still electric arc furnaces in the UK and more are being built

Rabbit hole on this subject: https://aluminiumtoday.com/features/recognising-uk-aluminium...

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.

That was an interesting and corrective rabbit whole!

I've been shown a fair few riots in the streets in the UK recently, just not regarding the price of electricity.

Racism and immigration are the main topics which have recently generated violent protests.

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).

I would make the hypothesis that racism outbursts are tied to worsening life conditions.

I would make the hypothesis that racism outbursts are driven by Farage, Tommy Ten-Names, Putin and the right wing engagement mill that is Twitter.

Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization. And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.

It's just an immense right wing noise machine which makes it impossible to actually focus on finding solutions. We're back to people who want to improve electricity per capita by decapitating people.

People hate electricity prices, but they hate electricity infrastructure as well. They hate pylons, they hate renewables, they hate nuclear. People hate pollution and hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity). Every solution will encounter angry blockers, often angry about things that aren't even real (anti-5G lunatics). And they want to blame everything on foreigners. Absolutely childish behavior of our """elite""", the dead hand of which sits on our media and most of our parties.

I think everything that needs to be said in this thread probably already has been by someone. Re-litigating the same issues.

> hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity)

Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.

And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.

Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.

Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.

Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!

This is, of course, not what happened. It's not even all that unpopular. Only about half of Londoners even have a car in the first place.

When I say radicalized, I mean this guy: https://www.cps.gov.uk/national-news/news/updated-sentence-m...

There's also this:

    > "The ULEZ camera had already been cut down"

The camera was already useless. Detonating an IED served no purposeful protest, and endangered property and lives.

There's also a huge racial undertone to the whole London anti-ULEZ 'debate' as Sadiq Khan is a muslim

Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic

Despite anti-ULEZ folk claiming it's hugely unpopular Kahn convincing won the next mayoral election including some boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ zone expansion

> huge

I think you overstate this. While there are wingnuts on Twitter who hate Khan for who he is, massively more people hate him - any politician, not just him - for dipping into their pocket and taking their money. "For the greater good".

Even the most beloved politican on the planet will become the most hated as soon as the propose increasing taxes, or increasing household costs. Which is why they're always looking for the sneakiest way to do it.

> Those opposing ULEZ conveniently ignore the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson (ex mayor of London) made ULEZ implementation a key requirement for supporting TfL funding during the pandemic

Alternatively, the central authority with all the money (Johnson's government) tells the devolved authority (Mayor of London) it doesn't like handing out free money, so what if our lockdown has decimated your cashbox income... so in exchange for money now to keep the lights on during this pandemic, I demand you make more of your own money in future, by fining people and by driving up public transport usage in your area. Also, I know how unpopular it is, which is why I delayed it when I was Mayor of London, so good luck at the polls ha ha!

> some

"some" indeed.

> “some” indeed

Well he flipped one of them from Conservative and didn’t lose any of the ones that had previously voted for him and his vote was up overall

On the other hand, the Uxbridge and Ruislip by-election. Should've been a shoo-in for Labour, given it was disgraced Partygate BoJo stepping down. Labour won another by-election on the same day. But not this one. Reason? Most likely local anger over ULEZ expansion, even though that's the responsibility of the (Labour) Mayor, not the Labour Party generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Uxbridge_and_South_Ruisli...

> Both Labour's leader, Keir Starmer, and deputy leader, Angela Rayner, blamed opposition to ULEZ, with Starmer suggesting the Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan should rethink the policy. Khan defended the policy and Starmer soon sought to heal the rift. The defeated Labour candidate, Beales, also criticised the ULEZ policy.

So someone paid the electoral price for Khan's policy, it just wasn't him.

Labour increased their vote in the 2023 Uxbridge and South Ruislip by election but not by enough to win… they then won it a year later

Yes, in 2023 ULEZ was a campaign issue but so was it when Khan was reelected mayor and Labour won a general election

ULEZ is fundamentally a good thing whether you like it or not

What kind of car/van was it? Since you said car/van and not car or van, I assume there's more than one?

They're referring to LEZ (Low Emission Zone) legislation where a fee is charged for vehicles which exceed a defined emission threshold.

In general, diesel vehicles are more likely to exceed the emission threshold.

Diesel cars/vans. In 2001, the government cut yearly road tax to £20 for cars/vans emitting less than 110g/km of CO2. Many car/van diesel engines can meet this but few petrol engines can. The road tax normally costs £180-£300, so a £160+ saving every year.

So a lot of people moved to diesel cars/vans from 2001 onward.

Then in 2019, the Ultra Low Emission Zone was set around central London, which issued daily fines to:

- petrol cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 4 standards (most vehicles pre-2006)

- diesel cars/vans that didn't meet Euro 6 standards (most vehicles pre-2015)

This didn't bother that many people, because central London already has a daily congestion charge, so anyone taking a vehicle in there already had business to justify it. Most people get around central London by train/tube/bus/taxi, it's the best served city in the UK for public transport. There was also a scrappage scheme offering up to £9500 for replacing the vehicle.

What bothered a LOT of people, though, is the widening of the ULEZ area, first to the inner London orbital in 2021 and then to the whole of Greater London (9 million people) in 2023, regardless of whether they went to central London or not. The outer boroughs, aren't as well served by public transport as central London is, and car/van ownership and use is much higher than central London. And of course, the scrappage scheme was cut down to a maximum of £2000, which is not a lot.

You can perhaps see why there was so much opprobrium.

There wasn't 'much opprobrium', there were a bunch of radicalised mainly white men opposing it who made a lot of noise backed by right wing newspapers who want to criticise Kahn for Tory government policy

Kahn won the next election including outer boroughs that were affected by the ULEZ expansion

https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/04/map-reveals-london-mayor-elec...

I don't know why you want to bring race into this. The split is along car ownership/non-ownership, or city-oriented vs countryside-oriented. The outer boroughs more often need to use cars, and work/visit outside the M25, than the people in inner boroughs. Uxbridge is 85% white, so you can expect an issue facing everyone there to be "mainly white".

What the election map on your article shows is a bunch of outer boroughs ("some"?) choosing the Tory candidate over the Labour one, there just weren't enough of them overall. Elections aren't usually single-issue, and there's probably enough value in reelecting Kahn (or his opponents are odious enough), that forcing a large number of people to set their money on fire didn't entirely wreck his chances.

But you'll note that lessons have been learned. Back in 2019, the IEA were demanding the complete ban of gas boilers by 2026. The government never adopted such a policy, it's only too well aware at how much needless cost and effort it'd put the entire country through by making 80% of households throw out their heating system and buy another one, for the sake of the planet. So that's why the closest the government got to that was proposing in 2020/2021 maybe banning them by 2035. And now? The government is reassuring people that it won't ban gas boilers; not in 2026, not in 2035, not in 2050, not ever. It saw what banning cars in London kicked off. It doesn't want that for itself.

I didn’t bring race into it… all the right wingers who’ve talked about Kahn being a Muslim and his heritage did!

Reduced fuel duty for diesel came in in 2001 (25yrs ago) and was removed following the scandal of manufacturers cheating the emissions tests in 2015 (11 yrs ago)

We've known diesel emissions are bad for health for a long time and ULEZ schemes improve people's health, particularly children https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1l1r1zne1ro

But some selfish people still think it's their right to drive highly polluting vehicles and let everyone else bear the cost

ULEZ / LEZ zones are a good thing

Social media is a catalyst that only works because material conditions are bad. If everyone is happy, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they just laugh it off. If everyone is angry, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they burn down a mosque.

It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.

Considering the number of people involved in the hotel arson attacks who have "previous", including domestic violence convictions, I think you can say that they themselves are unhappy, but that's not quite the same thing.

> fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves

I think we can agree on this. It's not that the UK is in any way a poor country in total, but it is an unequal one. And open to the negative effects of inequality from the outside - see the involvement of UAE oligarchs in Man City fraud, for example.

Meh, economic excuse is jist that - excuse so that the perpetrators sound better.

> Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization.

It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.

> And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.

If they are "fairly obviously traceable" then surely you can name some and provide reasonable evidence?

Very true.

The establishment view is that riots and racism are right wing agitators and foreign power influenced. The people look to rival immigrants and conspiracies, united by anxiety and fear.

They are both looking for scapegoats. This has unfortunately lead to so many atrocities in history.

I question to what degree people are riled up over economic difficulty being scapegoated onto immigrants like the comment chains below seem to claim.

This explanation seems to ignore much more obvious motivations. Most of the recent violent protests were triggered by concerns about immigrants committing violent crime and sexual offenses or harassment, often following concrete incidents.

Public safety seems like the clear primary motivation here.

One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.

However, I think that glossing over the primary concern to claim that the outrage is essentially engineered or purely driven by economic factors and living standard, will not convince the public. At least that's my opinion.

> One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.

Which elites, possibly? The anti-immigrant views are represented by fringe parties (albeit ones that are getting more votes than many would be comfortable with) and all sorts of mainstream political leaders are constantly condemning them. Social media is the only reason the stories spread, practically speaking; international news barely even cares about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ceuta_migrant_crisis (where the number of people involved approximately matched the population of Ceuta itself).

At any rate, I can't say I particularly hear these protesters, or their representatives, talking about economic factors all that much. Certainly it comes up, but only with explicit reference to biased government policy and not as just some natural pie-sharing effect.

I'm also not sure, but I heard arguments that politicians and eg. Musk are trying to use immigration to distract the public from wealth inequality for example.

Or that politicians are not trying to solve immigration issues in order to stay in power.

Really I've heard all kinds of theories used to discount the actual issues or the motivations of those who make politics about immigration.

Most of them are likely nonsense with maybe a kernel of truth here and there, but that's just how politics are, right?

Because some of the worsening life conditions are caused by migration. On other fronts it may provide a benefit but people need to get their head out of their ass if they don't think some qualms are legitimate.

To what degree? I'm sure migration is statistically responsible for some percentage of worsening life conditions, but I doubt it's the biggest cause for anything specific getting worse. The far bigger cause is the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent extraction by the powerful.

If migration is responsible for 5% of an issue, and other causes are responsible for 95%, it's far too easy to make the population imagine the numbers are swapped.

Migrants are always an issue when the pie shrinks. You bring them in when the pie is growing but during contraction it goes the other way.

Since migrants aren't a major cause of the shrinking pie, this doesn't really help. It can actually hurt, since the pie can start shrinking faster.

20% of the whole population are immigrants. In the big cities, where problems are worst, it is far higher than that.

I can't respond to your point about problems in big cities, since you don't specify what they are, but rural areas have a whole host of problems that cities don't face, so I'm gonna need more than a vague assertion.

Though it still won't help your argument, because 1) correlation != causation, and 2) there are literally thousands of comparable correlations, so why is it immigrants, and not any of the others?

Because there is a VERY clear causal relationship between population increase and increased competition for housing and jobs. You'd have to be blind and deaf not to see that.

"Inequality" cannot reasonably be blamed for Rotherham or any other similar situations; it cannot be blamed for the findings of Lowe's report; it cannot be blamed for any of the video evidence recently surfacing of clear two-tier policing.

Rounding things off to "migration" is ignoring the state's role in all of this, deliberately, in order to present complainants as racist.

But you can be reasonably blamed for relentlessly bringing up anecdotes, without engaging with the words of others.

If you feel attacked by the word "migration", take it up with modo_mario.

Over here in Belgium the majority of our prison population, ludicrous unemployment/innactivity statistics, rising land/house prices (non linear), etc, etc

Except that most evidence points against that. The people who don't live next to immigrants are generally much more angry then those that do. And the general places where people are angry about living conditions are former industrial economic heartland that have de-industrialized for reasons that have literally zero to do immigration.

Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.

>> The people who don't live next to immigrants are generally much more angry then those that do.

Lol. Ask people in Crowborough and Piddington if that's true.

Using individual example instead of overall statistics is an indication that you are not actually seriously engaging with the topic.

Individual examples are results of specific circumstances and not indication of a universal trend.

They very much are.

There are literally millions of examples against your position.

Yes, that's why Reform, Restore, Conservatives are surging in popularity.

It's funny how you can jump around between ideas, without ever letting the same standards be applied by anyone else. What are you trying to gain out of these discussions?

Because to me, it sure looks like you're only here to spread your agenda, and not to have any meaningful conversations.

It's not "an agenda", it's a policy position.

I'm not sure why you think I'm jumping around between ideas.

Because as soon as someone applies your standards equally, you don't engage with their response, and instead jump to another idea. I don't know how you don't see this, maybe spend some time reading your own comments?

> It's not "an agenda", it's a policy position.

No, it's not a policy position, it's an agenda you push. And it's one I've been seeing you push for months, if not years. You never really engage with critical responses, you just keep jumping to the next idea so you can keep pushing your agenda.

>>Because as soon as someone applies your standards equally, you don't engage with their response, and instead jump to another idea. I don't know how you don't see this, maybe spend some time reading your own comments?

Yeah, ok bro.

>>No, it's not a policy position, it's an agenda you push.

I'm not sure how you define the difference. Is it an agenda if you disagree with it?

It is an agenda when you show zero interest in actually discussing the arguments for your policy position. You just jump to the next argument, because you're here to advertise your policy position.

Doubly so when every argument you regurgitate boils down to the exact same talking points being disseminated through far-right media outlets. What can anyone learn from your comments, that they couldn't get by e.g. opening Breitbart?

Just so you don't feel shouting into the void: I completely agree with your assessment.

It's also notable that there are several accounts in this thread doing the exact same thing.

Thank you! :)

Through fear and little actual contact with "the others" though.

> Lol. Ask people in Crowborough and Piddington

Awww, you guys have stopped citing Luton then?

‘I feel perfectly safe’: white Lutonians on the town’s supposed no-go zones - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/oct/08/luton-white-...

that's the way, just move onto another UK backwater and claim that as the new hotbed of brown people plotting against the King.

>>Through fear and little actual contact with "the others" though.

I have a rape gang enquiry report you should read.

>>Awww, you guys have stopped citing Luton then?

Not sure what "guys" you are referring to. I'm referring to the fact that dropping 1,250 male asylum seekers from countries with a completely different culture (such that need to be given brochures saying women need to consent to sex) next to a village with a population of 350 is one of the most appalling ideas ever.

How come you get to argue by assertion but your opponents don't?

Because its a well known pattern that anybody who spends 5min looking at the data knows. Most immigrants live in cities that mostly vote left. The places that vote right are rural places that barley have immigrants.

Hence you have places like Fox news run coverage about cities all the time, telling you how they are lawless places full of crime. Scaring rural people about what all these immigrants will do once they final start to move to bum-fuck nowhere.

You seem the same pattern in most democracies.

There is no correlation between contact with immigrants and anti-immigrant voting.

This gets pointed at here in Belgium as well....except the share that is a migrant, has it as a background, in a relationship with, etc more than accounts for difference in opposition to more endless migration. It's also like people are not mobile nowadays. I've worked and lived in Brussels and the like where I'm now a small minority.

It turns out if they have mind boggling unemployment and inactivity numbers (majroity non eu working age women are housewives), make up the majority of prisoners, cost a load of money and put pressure on certain groups of wages, housing/land prices, alongside a host of other issues then what's the point?

Contrary to that hypothesis racists are just as racist when the going's good.

True. But they aren't as rioty.

Riled up about all the wrong things. How convenient !

And we ration busy trains with pricing. We have some of the most expensive trains in the world (and an inability to build any new tracks at a sensible price)

Water, too, because our water infrastructure is dire. I imagine we have some of the most expensive water in the world too

I was once taking a trip from Canterbury to Glasgow. The train ride to Stansted airport cost more than twice the flight to Glasgow. Also, it's crazy just how cheap the flights are in Europe. How do the airline companies make any money?

Yeah the airport trains can be pricey!

> 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

People can indeed change their consumption patterns. You don’t hear about it with electricity as often, but with natural gas spike after the Ukraine war, it was all over the news that many couldn’t afford heating and were leaving their houses cold in the winter. But it’s not just poor people.

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).

A lot of it could probably be brought back to consumption patterns or present day issues with war and outsourcing.. but.. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ is worth a (re-)read since I gather this is more of a more macro-structural outcome as opposed to a sudden thing.

It's the shift from the economy serving everyone to the economy serving rich people.

I think you miss the point that power is a global market. In the UK we pay international prices because otherwise our state/corporations/establishment would sell it overseas. Yes, electricity is linked to natural gas, just because they can.

The UK population is generally docile, we don't really riot even when things are bad (unlike the French who barely need an excuse).

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

There at the end of your post, your agenda peeps out.

> the regime

The 'regime'. Also known as the democratically elected government.

I don't have an agenda, I just don't really believe in democracy.

There's very little evidence to support the idea that ordinary people vote for what they want and therefore control the direction of the state, in the UK or any other "democratic" country.

If that were the case then why are policies consistently implemented that go against the expressed desires of the majority of the population?

Every government in every state ever is more accurately described as a regime, for me it's a morally neutral term.

The only question is whether the regime is good or not

There is a lot of anger in the UK because their (our) environment and life conditions are measurably worse than in the past (even 10 years ago). This anger is masterfully directed (by political orgs but not the actual government) against immigrants, drug addicts, and other groups whose ousting is positioned as an "easy fix" to these problems. So there's not much meaningful action taken against the actual perpetrators.

The UK population and total GDP has gone up, whereas GDP per person has gone down or stayed flat.

The Boris Wave has been the biggest adverse event to the UK since OPEC Oil crisis.

There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.

Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.

>> There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.

It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up. Good luck proving your Brexit counterfactual.

>>Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.

When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true. Also, given that you can get a "skilled worker" visa for working in a kebab shop or a corner store [1], "skilled" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjdg4nvz5mro

> When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true

An immigrant cannot bring an extended family - only a spouse and children (younger 18). And they are not eligible for benefits so have no impact on the budget. Skilled visa is abused (to bring relatively low skilled workers) but that's not too common and they still pay taxes, just less than someone working at Google.

I recommend to listed to this podcast (or read transcript) it's not trying to defend immigration at all but di-spells lots of myths about economical impact of immigration: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/how-does-immigration-affect-publ...

Yeah, but then their children are encouraged/forced to marry cousins.

The major point, though, is that countries are not economic units, and are closer to families than they are companies.

Whose "their" children, and in what sense is cousin marriage connected to your (entirely false) claim about extended families?

LOL. Yes, let's pretend we can't parse English sentences. OK.

No, let's just spell out directly what you're saying (and your incorrect assumptions) instead of dog-whistling.

There's a minimum salary attached to that visa, which the article failed to mention. I very much doubt a kebab shop will hire someone for £45k+.

45 is not far from an average chef salary in London.

That article is largely not about London and not about average chefs though.

> It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up

1. I did check graphs and see low correlation - GDP pp dipped after GFC (2008 crisis) then again around Brexit referendum and started to recover 2021 - around the start of the Boris wave. 2. Even if we had a correlation it doesn't imply causation especially given multiple factors battered the economy around the same time - Brexit, COVID (which had delayed and lasting impact) and Russian-Ukrainian war.

Immigration is one of the primary factors in the decrease of life quality in the UK. The only mistake here is that being angry with the immigrants isn't going to change immigration policy.

So we're talking "government rationing" vs "economic rationing". Are they the standard terms used?

>That looks like rationing. Economies ration by raising prices until poor people can't consume as much.

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.

The social media content about the UK in America must be "wild". You guys are obsessed.

Actually, I always found it so weird how often America is talked about on not only British social media, but on your state propaganda channels such as BBC and Channel 4 as well, who are taxpayer funded.

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.

To be fair a lot of parties in the UK have appeared or changed names since around Brexit. I think "labour and tories" might have been simpler for American audiences than Reform vs Restore vs Rehab or whoever is up now

Yeah OK, this comment proves my point if it ever needed to be. We are all sick to death of American "politics" I gaurentee that.

> That looks like rationing.

What a way to characterize supply and demand variation.

It is in large part because the UK made infrastructure decisions that essentially couple their electricity prices to the price of natural gas.

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.

>>deep geopolitical dependencies outside the nation.

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.

The article claims that gas prices are set by international markets that are willing to bid up prices and the small added contribution from the North sea is not going to swing prices significantly. The US is going through a similar delusion that they produce enough domestically to protect is Diesel prices - they don't and the oil companies are not going to forgo international markets

>> The article claims that gas prices are set by international markets that are willing to bid up prices and the small added contribution from the North sea is not going to swing prices significantly.

Argue what you like, but it's hard to think that increasing the supply of a commodity won't make the prices go down. Will it be major? Probably not compared to the massive amount of tax on fuel, but I'd still take it.

> That looks like rationing.

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"

Someone doesn't understand marginal pricing

Well, there's a difference between "This is just marginal pricing" and "This very specific market with marginal pricing is the only one possible"

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.

Yep, line congestion is a pretty big problem - lots of wind generated in Scotland - industry down south have large demand so we end up curtailing wind and spinning up "peakers" to support regional demand. This is a bigger problem in Germany.

Regional pricing is something being looked into - comes with it's own problems - but more solve-able with modern data processing pipelines.

IMO stick a battery in every house, and you have a nation-wide buffer for smoothing out renewables is a good idea. Large battery bank projects are being rolled out which can help with this too.

In terms of social pricing - that would still need to be anchored to "something" - which currently is the price derived from the merit order.

There are also a lot of projects around improving transmission infrastructure. It's a very interesting time.

The UK doesn't have basically any "peakers" (Open Cycle Gas Turbines) and I'm surprised to hear they're a thing in Germany,

Combined Cycle costs more to build but is far more efficient. So OCGT is basically a bet that fuel is cheap forever, or at least for so long you've made your money. I know that bet doesn't work in the UK and I would not expect it to pay off in Germany either.

https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type

shows 130MW of OCGT usage at today 18:00

> I'm surprised to hear they're a thing in Germany

I was referring to grid congestion. (lots of generation in the north, lots of demand in the south)

> 130MW of OCGT usage at today 18:00

So, basically none. At that point there's over 30 GW of electricity production so OCGT was about 0.4% of the country's electricity. About a third of the electricity was gas, so almost 100x as much Combined Cycle as Open Cycle.

Sure.. but my original point stands.. we spin up peakers - cost of electricity goes very high.

>>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

Nationalised because high energy prices made it unsustainable commercially.

All of this, plus it seems like every other roof is plastered with solar panels.

As the price of a good goes up, demand goes down! Hardly a surprise. It doesn't mean the economy wouldn't use a lot more energy if it was affordable.

Increasing market prices aren't rationing. They should encourage more people and companies to consume less and produce more electricity. Of course if regulation is too complex that might not happen easily (I'm thinking of German solar power regulations right now).

We also have whistle blowers coming forward saying that the UK is struggling to manage the electricity supply:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/13/lawyers-to-...

Most of the increase in the UK has come since the Russian invasion of Ukraine spiked gas prices

I can't speak for the UK, but A big thing is that in the last 20-25ish years at least in a US home the big ones for me as far as efficiency improvements are

- 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.

In terms of computing efficiency the big gain is that people use their smartphones drastically more than they do a personal computer at home, on average. And smartphones are hyper efficient compared to personal computers or laptops. An average use laptop will use ~30-60 times more energy than a once-daily charged smartphone across a year.

That also goes for people watching things on their smartphones instead of a 65" television.

Yeah, I forgot about the smartphone shift in that comment.

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's absolutely amazing that I can light my entire house for the same power draw as like one 100W lightbulb.

But the bulbs cost 10x what incandescents did, and in practice don't last much longer. That normally isn't included in the calculations.

In the 90s I’d change bulbs all the time - about once a month. I don’t remember the last time I changed a bulb. I don’t think my teenager has ever had the opportunity to.

I have a bunch of third generation Philips Hue bulbs, from around 2016. They weren't cheap. But I've had them all this time, and I brought them along when I moved house.

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.

Here's a 100W-equivalent bulb: https://www.ikea.com/ie/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e27-1521-lume...

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_.

A tenth of 6 euros is 60 cents, not 6 :)

I used to buy incandescent bulbs 4 for a dollar shortly before they were banned.

Throughout the house, I need to replace a regular screw-in LED bulb probably every other month or so. I don't know what brand they are, they are light bulbs I picked off the shelf at Target or Walmart. Life is too short to worry about light bulb brands. Until now.

> 4 for a dollar shortly before they were banned.

Well, yeah, because they were trying to get rid of them.

> Life is too short to worry about light bulb brands

Just get the Ikea ones, they're fine.

My experience is completely different. I've only had to replace two LED bulbs in the past six years. At the last place I lived, I swapped the CFLs in some of the fixtures (overhead lamps mostly) for LEDs and then swapped them back, taking the LEDs with me, when I moved. I've got a desk lamp in my laundry room that's been on nearly continuously for six years and that came from my last place as well.

Depending on the quality you can get a LED bulb ranging from 1 euro to 5 for the best one. The incandescent bulbs did not cost much lower, and adjusted for inflation, did cost almost the same, but you had to replace them much more often.

Industry got oursourced to China....

> - The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.

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 computers doesn't really have an effect on the data (for how much a computer costs, and how little time in the past it was used, considering the internet was dial-up and was the real cost of using it that made sure you weren't always online).

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.

Even in Italy, though, peak generation was in 2008.

Germany saw a massive drop too. The only big European country that keeps growing their electricity production is France.

It's not a good look that the UK seemingly isn't installing air conditioning, decarbonizing heating, or adopting electric vehicles. Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first.

What makes you think that the U.K. isn't adopting electric vehicles? I can tell you from direct visual observation that people are. The little green numberplate rectangles are fairly common, now.

* https://rac.co.uk/drive/news/electric-vehicles-news/1-in-3-n...

The "green flash" scheme is great.

EVs are almost at the supply issues point. I've had one on order since June, which I suppose is my fault for choosing Stellantis.

It's not just Stellantis though, VW supply is stretched as well.

EV adoption in the UK is huge right now, heat pump adoption is happening (though could be faster).

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 great thing about heat pumps is you can run them in reverse to become an AC, only requirement is a drain for the condensate.

I have one of those and it really isn't the same as AC.

I trust that you mean it doesn’t have the same effectiveness as other AC units you’ve used.

From a pedantic point of view, it is quite literally the exact same as an AC. Air conditioners are literally heat pumps.

Air conditioners are heat pumps. Not all heat pumps are air conditioners.

Common installations reuse the wet systems we have and are air to water, which was until recently the only thing the grants covered (and now it’s still lower for a2a).

And AFAIK the grants still don't cover something that can also be used as an AC, though maybe that's changed.

How is it not the same?

UK typically uses air-to-water heat pumps with convection radiators. The passive radiators are useless for cooling, and condensation on pipes in walls can be a problem.

Look, I know that actuuuualy and technically it's the same type of technology working on the same principle. The thing I have ( Daalderop 5G WPU) mainly works as floor heating (and great at that), but it's the size of a fridge and has it's own utility closet and a pipe underground for whatever thermal medium it uses and it's own separate meter (for reasons of regulatory kind). And it's a district wide deployment where I don't even own the thing.

Most importantly it's not the same in the way of me not feeling the chill. It's stupid, as I know the house is cooler than the outsides, but the actual split system delivers the cold air right to where I feel it and this thing just makes the ambient temperature down to 25c without me even noticing.

I don't want to know what it costs to install (I got it with the house), but split system costed lol nothing in eastern european dollars and took some guys less than half a day and zero permits to install too. For better or worse the heat pump doesn't live in the same locale I had that.

A water/water heat pump is absolutely not the same thing the other commenters are talking about. They're mostly talking about an air/air heat pump, where it's literally all the same parts but has a reversing valve so it can either be hot/cold or cold/hot among the coils with fans blowing through them.

This is more like what they're talking about, but they do come in a lot of shapes and sizes and can be more or less integrated into central systems.

https://senville.com/mini-split-heat-pumps/

It's almost like there is more than one thing called heatpump

I have one and it is? We keep our house very cool in the summer using it and it works just as well as an in window AC that we use in the bedroom. Maybe what you have is different somehow.

An AC is literally a heat pump

So is a refrigerator; all the other considerations make saying "I have a heat pump therefore I have AC" in this context a bit like a Mexican saying "I am American".

Like, sure, but the word has a specific and a general meaning, conventional use is only the specific meaning.

With a heat pump asked central heating system run in cooling mode condensate can form at your pipes in the wall and your radiators or floor when using under floor heating. So you have to limit its cooling power to prevent that.

With an AC the advantage is that the condensate is forming inside the AC when cooling the air.

I guess the issue is that American heat pumps use central air handlers. There is a coil inside and outside the house a fan that blows air across each coil. The inside fan pulls air from around the house and then blows hot or cold air through vents. It sounds like British heat pumps just push hot water through pipes. We use insulation over the refrigerant pipes to prevent condensation from forming in the walls. The length of the run is also kept as short as possible to reduce losses.

Most British homes haven't been built to support AC. Retro-fitting a heatpump for heating is relatively straightforward, as the heating delivery mechanism (pipes to transmit hot water to wall-mounted radiators) is already in place.

Although you could pipe cool water through the radiators, it's an ineffective form of cooling compared to blown-air systems, and retro-fitting a blown-air system is much more costly than a heating-only heat pump.

You can't just pump the cold water through the heating elements, because of condensation. The correct installation, requires special heating, cooling elements that include fans (it helps with the cooling) and drainage for the condensation.

I have "cooled floors", so basically heated floors but you can reverse the circuit in summer. Condensation really isn't an issue unless the temperature difference is massive, say room temperature being 28 degrees C and then kicking the system into high gear trying to get to 20 degrees C.

Once room and floor temperature match, condensation doesn't occur anymore as long as you keep it running.

You can't pipe cold water through radiators, all you'll get is a very wet floor. Think of an ice cold bottle of beer.

You need a radiator with a built-in electric fan, this will all but eliminate the condensation.

However it will not cool like an A/C unit, only something like 5°C reduction. This can be enough to get a decent night's sleep during a summer heatwave.

We're talking about retrofitting to existing typical UK radiators. If I was buying new radiators (and paying an electrician to run electricity to them!) then I would want a better return on investment than cooling from 35C to 30C.

I visited a building once that had "cold panels" covering about half of the drop ceiling. Supposedly they made a difference in summer but I suppose they needed the massive surface area.

I've had a cooling/heating heatpump fitted. Adding a couple of wall units bumped the price by about £1500, although the whole thing was softened by the grant for getting rid of an oil fired boiler.

While our house is relatibvely small and we kept the units (which also do heating as well) confined to the main living space, it wasn't especially burdensome. The bulk of the work was installing the behemoth of a hot water tank!

Did you consider going with instant hot water at the sink/basin/shower/bath? My house is also relatively small and has little room for a huge hot water tank.

That can’t practically be done electronically. Needs to be gas. The power demand is too high for electric water heating

Original comment mentioned £ so they are in the UK. It's possible and not super uncommon to have electric showers in the UK because the 230V provides enough power for water heating unlike the US.

I'm currently investigating options for kitchen sinks and such. It feels quite silly to have a long length of pipe leading from a central source for a small amount of warm water to wash my hands.

Boiling water taps like Quooker and similar are pretty good.

There's a limit: you can fill a medium saucepan with boiling water, but large/industrial-kitchen pans will exhaust the boiling water and you'll need to wait for the next batch.

It's fine for general household use.

Belatedly, no, but I think our installer may have (possibly as a result of the free money!) wildly overspecified the tank which I suspect we will never empty even if we actually tried.

Daikin (and presumably others, but they're the ones we went with) do have integrated tanks/heatpump internal units. It might be worth having a think about your actual needs and it may be that there is a solution.

My experience with electric hot water taps is that they've been universally awful and only a last resort, but equally the state of the art may have moved on since I last looked!

They can be, and in many places that get both too hot and too cold they're built that way as standard, but in places that are usually too hot or usually too cold, they're often built one way to save a bit of complexity.

> Portable units are becoming more popular.

This is only the beginning. Soon people will realize that a mini-split install isn't that much more expensive than a portable AC, but is a lot more convenient.

And mini-split is definitely way more efficient thermodynamically.

> air conditioning

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?

> decarbonizing heating

I believe this refers to switching to high-efficiency electric heaters like reverse-cycle AC units (also known as "heat pumps"), rather than oil heaters or ducted gas heating.

The majority of UK homes are heated by gas-powered boilers that pump hot water through radiators in each room. Often hot water is heated by the same system.

Decarbonisation usually means replacing that boiler with a heat pump which uses electricity to heat water.

Thanks. I didn't know about the UK specifically but replacing gas boilers with heat pumps makes a lot of sense.

> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning

I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid. Buildings are engineered to trap heat, so the heat doesn't dissipate at night and every day the indoor temperature rises, and rises...

At least they removed the need for planning permission recently. The problem is that the places that need AC the most (flats) will probably not be able to get it until the leasehold system has been abolished.

> > decarbonizing heating

> What does this mean?

Presumably it means heating using electric heat pumps rather than gas boilers. This also solves the AC problem. I don't think this is viable for most people. Heating was never the problem anyway, at least in the south winters are mild.

> I don't know where you live but UK summers were unbearable

well, i live in lincolnshire and used to live in london. i usually have a fan on for a few weeks over summer, but that's it. where in the UK did you live that the summers were so unbearable?

That's only a few weeks a year. The UK isn't Florida yet. And besides modern AC is incredibly efficient. The stuff that's cleared to sell in Europe has incredibly high standards.

Unbearable is a stretch. I live in Texas and don't use the AC every day in the summer. The human body can adapt if you dont constantly climate control

I for once feel better overall when it's 35c outsides airco or not, but people tend to think I'm being funny about that

It's fine if temperatures get lower during the night, but 25°C at night and 35°C during the day leaves little for cooling the infrastructure (roads, buildings), and constant warm temperatures are unbearable if you cannot even get in the shade when you want to cool off. Then, 35°C is also very hard to manage with high humidity.

I think you're right, and in addition to that there is also a lot we could do other than AC. Just having some shade from trees already helps a lot. Modern cities can be a man-made hellscape with regards to heat. But we did that to ourselves.

> UK summers were unbearable even when I was a kid.

Not to be that guy, in the last 20 years, 27 was considered a heatwave.

> Buildings are engineered to trap heat,

I mean Victorian buildings were engineered to let in light, and have good ventilation. Hence why each room has a huge sash window, an airbrick and a fireplace.

> Buildings are engineered to trap heat, so the heat doesn't dissipate at night and every day the indoor temperature rises, and rises

This makes insulation sound like a bad thing. The more insulation you have the less the indoor temperature is affected by the outside temperature.

A common scenario is to have unshaded solid walls exposed to afternoon sun. Without insulation the inside of the house can be high all through the night. A good effect of insulation in summer is to prevent that effect. Important to note that it would be standard to allow cooling airflow in the morning.

> The more insulation you have the less the indoor temperature is affected by the outside temperature.

Insulation isn't magic, over many days of hot weather eventually the building will reach equilibrium with the average outside temperature. This means it will be cooler indoors than outdoors during the day, and hotter indoors than outdoors at night.

However, the nights are specifically when you want a residential building to be cooler, assuming the inhabitants are not at home during the day. So the insulation actually makes the building hotter from the perspective of the inhabitants.

Very few places "need" air conditioning but it doesn't take very days where it's 80+ outside and hotter inside to convince me that the per-day cost of AC is worth it. And that level of heat is nothing new.

> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning

Nobody "needs" air conditioning, but even a modest window unit provides a huge improvement in quality of life whenever it's 80+ outside.

80 plus in UK would be a bit of a stinky situation

> Nobody "needs" air conditioning

It can be considered a medical necessity for people with certain conditions like anhidrosis, asthma, COPD, kidneys disease, or cardiovascular issues. It's also a huge medical benefit for people with terrible allergies who wouldn't be able to open a window even when that'd normally help cool the house.

> 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.

We are? It’s becoming more common and we had a few bad summers and earlier this year too. The heat wave a few years back killed my dad.

Given there’s a push to swap heating systems for more efficient ones, air con units are being looked at a lot more.

> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it?

We had 6 heat waves this summer. Parents were booking hotels just to keep their kids cool

We also had heatwaves in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018. 2024 wasn't bad but was still the 4th hottest year on record.

You can absolutely bet the better-off middle classes are installing aircon. I know many. If more people could afford it they would get it

It's the humidity too not just the heat. And how after 3 or 4 days of high temps, our houses just do not cool down at night because they act like radiators. Humid 25c+ nights suck for us

See @dang there's still really funny comments on HN, this is the good stuff.

4 days this year I figured “ac would be nice

I’m thinking about it, but there’s a lot of other things I could spend the capital on.

> ”It's not a good look that the UK seemingly isn't installing air conditioning, decarbonizing heating, or adopting electric vehicles.”

The UK is definitely doing all three of these things. Though arguably not fast enough, for some of them.

People overestimate the energy usage of EVs. Average usage 2-3000 kWh/year, but there's about 1 car per 2 people in the UK, so EVs would not reverse the trend even at 100% adoption, and they're currently at about 20-25% of new cars sold and 5% of miles driven in the UK (in comparison, to say, the US, where it's 5%/1%).

Number of EVs on the road is growing

BEV is 28% of new car sales HEV is 13%

https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/

"welcome improvements in efficiency"

ROTFL.

Yes, true, many economies like US, UK, Germany are becoming more "energy efficient". By outsourcing energy hungry industries and steps to China.

> Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?

Probably _mostly_ as reduced demand, though if you net feed back into the grid then that may be counted as generation.

It's estimated that embedded generation - behind-the-meter solar and batteries, CHP, and diesel generators used for backup or to avoid peak pricing - was about 23% of the UK's total capacity in 2024, and almost certainly a little higher now.

https://www.neso.energy/energy-101/electricity-explained/how...

I would have expected that this can only be possible through economic downturn. Sure, the more efficient light bulbs can slightly flatten an ever rising graph, but we should not have any illusion that humanity will even use less energy than yesterday. That would only happen if a severe crisis of some form hits us.

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.

It is a wonder isn't it? The absolute determination to debase ones own country. It does, however, make complete sense when you consider the incentives at play (and that is where British governance is genuinely on the back foot).

The Australians call us "whinging poms" for a reason. It's one of the least attractive national characteristics.

That's even more outraging IMO. How could demand fall for the closet thing to the literal transport of physical work.

"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.

> [...] two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells [...] Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too.

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.

It's interesting to look at the all time demand at the bottom of https://grid.iamkate.com and see that demand has one dropped from 36GW to 30GW since 2012

Industrial sites are almost always connected to the grid with backfeed. And even if they can't push out their entire wattage, in accounting terms, that power is priced the same as you get from the grid.

So I'm almost certain they are being counted

Thats a basic misrepresentation though. And the condescending fear mongering out 'telegraph-esque' does not help.

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.

> Probably less than 20% of that curve is 'green good news'

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...

[1] gives different numbers. About 3x decrease in industrial energy consumption since 1970. Steel production decrease is about 3x ([2]). Chemical production has shifted from bulk production to pharmaceuticals.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/651422e03d371...

[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

That’s a different metric - “million tonnes of oil equivalent”. That’s not the same as electricity consumption - that’s the total amount of energy used in all kinds of industrial processes.

The data across the board supports the notion that reduction in electricity is an industrial phenomenon overall, there is no data to suggest this is a 'consumer green activity' phenom - not even the link you provided.

All of think links here, the person you are responding to, mine (above) and your own directly point towards reduction in industrial use.

Rather than post incessantly about the vague “across the board data” and “probably X and Y” you could always cite a source.

Just a thought.

Dont think this is the right way of looking at it.

Two things were happening at the same time: deindustrialization and electrification. Industries and the economy used to depend more on machines and oil. That was getting replaced by reliance on electricity. If electricity generation was cheap enough, we might have seen the total energy usage get transformed one for one into electricity usage. But that didn’t happen and energy usage overall went down. That’s deindustrialization.

Of course it could have other reasons like labour costs and so on.

No, literally the evidence you provided does not support the 50/50 thesis, moreover, the data does show that residential reduction is a marginal - and you're probably failing to take into consideration the UK has grown by more than 10M people during that period aka this is 'per capita' - not aggregate.

This government data is must more substantial than that link, and it puts the ratio at 70% reduction in electricity due to deindustrialization.

Moreover - the OP's comment was a blatant misrepresentation (lie) - by ignoring deindustrialization, the primary factor as stated in the article (and in reality) - plus a bit of a thrown slander aka the 'Telegaph-esque' nonsense.

This is not Twitter.

This is not even controversial.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6aba96e8997a4...

Industrial usage fell about 100k TJ, household fell ~110k TJ since the peak.

The linked numbers are not per-capita, they are absolute.

> There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here

This is so hilariously Daily Mirror.

>>due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity.

The price of electricity is driving deindustrialisation.

> There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and increased importing of electricity

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.

> Did the link say they were? That seems like a red herring.

By "here" I meant posts on this thread, not in the content of the article.

The Telegraph-esque outrage in the comments here is explicitly people complaining about the idea of rationing their electricity, which as you point out is not suggested by any part of the article.

There are comments here saying yes, rationing is planned.

I don't see any evidence for that. Just people saying it.

To be fair, the people who think it believe that smart meters are how it will happen, so their existence would be all the evidence they actually need that it will.

I have no view either way (or a smart meter)

Smart meters themselves aren't the problem. It's meters that can control HVAC.

There don't seem to be any comments on this thread referring to rationing.

And FYI energy rationing has been one policy consideration for decades.

UK gov energy rationing proposal [1] 'Personal carbon allowances [2]

There's always discussion about this sort of thing, it's not fear mongering to point out that fact.

[1] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmen... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00756-w

> There don't seem to be any comments on this thread referring to rationing.

Trivially falsifiable statement, just read the comments in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50076266

>> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power.

In other words: rationing.

One possible reference to rationing - that is actually not a reference to rationing - does not infer that the thread is loaded with Telegaph-esque rants about rationing.

You're doubling down on the misrepresentation.

There are zero references to rationing on this thread - and yet the top commenter calling this out as some kind of 'Telgraph-equ' nonsnes.

'Intermittent availability of power' - is absolutely not a reference to 'rationing' and if it were, it wouldn't be any kind of basis for hyperbole over 'rationing'.

I gave evidence of two examples of govenmental policies around rationing, and it's definitely not via 'power outages' - that's absurd - rolling blackouts only happen during emergency situations.

You've stated that the conversations has tilted to 'rationing' is 'trivially falsifiable' and at the same time haven't produced any evidence.

The outrage is real, because production is less than half the story.

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.

0.11 to 0.25 is not even a 150% increase

Yeah I meant the price level is about 250% of what it was.

This is mostly down to gas: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uk-natural-gas

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.

Europe in general has failed to adjust to the then obvious risks of natural gas and fossil fuels in general that have now come to pass.

The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014. The geopolitical risks were crystal clear back then.

As far as nuclear goes there is a western failure to innovate on design presumably due to ossified regulatory requirements and possible contractor malfeasance. In China new clear plants take 5 to 7 years.

> The transition to decarbonization should have started after 2014

Hmm, I wonder what hugely expensive and distracting project the UK engaged in after that time instead? Ah yes, Brexit, which turns out to have been promoted in part by the Russians (with a lot of help from the UK press and local dodgily-funded actors).

Decarbonization should have started in 1973 witch is exactly when France started it and by 1990s they had mostly done it.

And nuclear had no chance what so ever in the post market liberalization world. Those sudo-market are not design for that kind of thing.

Nuclear made most sense in the area of centralized utilities, but most nations didn't use it well for various reasons.

We don't really need new technology in nuclear, I mean it would be nice but its not really needed.

France has made an absolutely amazing deal by investing in nuclear. If you calculated all the benefits is actually insane how beneficial it was.

> France has made an absolutely amazing deal by investing in nuclear. If you calculated all the benefits is actually insane how beneficial it was.

This is all true, and yet somehow, at the end of the day, the UK has a higher per capita GDP than France.

Part of the higher per capita GDP than France is the anglosphere dividend. There is a great deal of preference in all the english speaking world to do business with english speaking countries for obvious reasons.

That's a strange comment. Electricity provision is a small part of GDP. So of course doing something great in one part of your government doesn't magically mean you have the best overall economy.

That said, its also wrong to measure benefits only by capita GDP.

Onshore wind was effectively banned for about 10 years, not 5, in England.

The conservatives also appear to have intentionally sabotaged one of the auction rounds for offshore wind.

> Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.

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...

It comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use, a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades, even for fossil fuels. It's well established that the cheapest additional capacity is efficiency. One of the reasons I am not so concerned about the AI energy needs, especially because the US has a lot of wiggle room.

There's a lot of HN and YC-aligned people who don't believe this, despite the empirical evidence of the last few decades.

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."

Driving energy costs to near zero drives down the cost for literally every other process, manufacturing or extractive or services. A 1000x increase in energy practically lets you extract so much material for cheaper that the cost of materials, and the associated logistics, goes down.

That is self-evidently true but misses the point.

The point of using energy is not to use energy. What matters is the services that energy delivers, be it a hot shower, a drive to the grocery store, a new house, a squillion tokens of AI computation. If we can get the services we want more cheaply by energy more efficiently, this is a good thing, not a disaster for humanity.

For completeness, I acknowledge that there are people for whom energy usage is inherently bad, which is equally silly. What matters are the downside impacts of the energy use, not the energy use itself.

My point was that even if you drive costs to 1000x, you're not somehow magically going to reduce consumption. Human output will match those efficiency gains in other forms. Imagine things like synthetic diamond jewelry being the norm, thermal pyrolysis of methane and CO2 into plain carbon, mining deeper underground for precious minerals, etc. A person in the 1890s could not have envisioned the things that would happen just 30 years later, enabled by cheap electricity.

And my point is that life has gotten better for 30 years despite Energy Line Goes Sideways, and what we care about is the life getting better part, not which direction the line goes.

If you want to see true evidence of this, look at the rebates power companies offer.

In all the places I’ve lived there are generally large incentive programs to convert air conditioners and old heaters to heat pumps, and other efficient appliance replacements, install better insulation, etc. because that rebate dollar stretches a lot further than building new power plants, transmission lines, etc.

If you cannot understand how a huge increase in energy might be useful you should probably not go around calling other people stupid. We are not going to get carbon removal and desalination at scale to fix the already baked-in consequences of climate change by making our water heaters more efficient. Efficiency is good but there is more to life than the status quo.

I am aware of the need for carbon removal and (some) desalination, but 1000x-ing our energy production is ludicrous stuff. The waste heat from energy production on that scale would render Earth uninhabitable.

If you increase it 1000 fold it would still be less than 10% of the heat the sun provides.

That's incorrect. It's in the order of 25% of the heat reaching the Earth's surface, or maybe 35-40 watts of heat per square metre.

That's roughly ten times the warming effect of doubling CO2.

Now, I don't have a climate model handy to simulate this in detail but I would suggest "render the Earth uninhabitable" is a close enough approximation to the actual effects to suggest it's a terrible idea and anyone seriously proposing it should be laughed out of the room until they've done their homework.

Total energy use by mankind is about 200,000 TWh a year

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

Most of that is lost in waste heat.

Total energy arriving on earth from the sun is about 1,500,000,000 TWh

https://smartstep.blog/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth-per-...

7500 times higher

Well given that cheap energy follows Jevon's paradox, it makes complete sense. If each unit of energy becomes cheaper to produce (which renewables are driving today), then you should see more consumption of that cheap energy into economic activity. Economic progress is easily coupled with increased energy use.

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?

Cadbury's creme eggs.

They sold those to America 15 years ago.

The numbers today in the developed works don't back it up. It's Jevons Paradox btw, the person that came up with it was called Jevons, not Jevon.

The US has a lot of wiggle room because it uses almost 2x electricity per capita than e.g. Germany. People don't need electricity, they need light and cooling. If you do the math, that is hundreds of GW of free "new" capacity just by getting the same value for less energy. Obviously you can't do 1/1 comparisons, a lot of people in the US use AC whereas they don't in Europe. But overall the US could get more efficient in energy use. People buy new appliances all the time, make them be more energy efficient. Or don't and let the market sort it out. "The solution to high prices are high prices".

"It comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use"

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.

> Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.

Blech. I don't have wishes I want netflix to fulfill. I want to see the dreams of another human before me and be entranced/enchanted.

I wonder if this will become increasingly niche if people grow up with systems that can spoon feed tailored content and monitor feedback

No, it is not. For example, gasoline use per capita in the US peaked in 1978 and the economy went up around a gazillion percent since then. There are now millions of EVs in Europe and electricity use has declined in the last twenty years and this has nothing to do with the hand wavy "deindustrialization". Why would it not? The light bulbs I have today use 10x less electricity, the induction stove I have uses significantly less energy, I bought a fridge last year that uses 3x less electricity than the previous one, the TV died three years ago, the new one uses an estimated 50kwh per year of normal use, and the old one used 200. The EU has new standards where the devices on stand by are not allowed to draw more than 3kwh (I think) etc. And obviously manufacturers will not make efficient stand by devices for the EU and then make inefficient ones for the rest of the world in purpose. The same is true for other forms. My building replaced the gas boiler used for heating and warm water in general. The winter was tougher than the one before, I switched to working from home and heated a lot more. My gas use stayed flat.

When your logic collides with hard numbers I would stick to the numbers and reconsider the logic. Here is an idea: will I run my dishwasher 3x more often just because it is now 3x more efficient? Will I run my fridge more often because it is more efficient? Difficult, it already runs 24/7. Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?

So as you see although there is obviously some validity in the OBSERVATION that is Jevons Paradox, it is not a hard rule. There comes a point where it stops being true.

„Economic Growth Is Closely Tied to Energy Consumption“, Slide 3: “This rather strange situation arises because the standard calculation misses energy embodied in imported goods.”

https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/the-ap...

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/10/18/the-approaching-us-ene...

"Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?" Nope. But now you have a computer, maybe two, a cell phone, an ebook reader, a tablet, take international flights and use Bitcoin and AI.

Article title: A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account

Article link: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling?ref=ufuksno...

Your anegdotal evidence falls on its face as well: I have two TVs now instead of one, and my electricity consumption went down. This includes moving mid year from an office to work from home. So one laptop charging every day, and one monitor. I even bought a printer which I did not have previously. That's because the two TVs combined, made 2023 and 2025, use less electricity than the one I had before, made 2011. The addition of a laptop, monitor and printer were negligent compared to the savings I made with my new fridge.

I think you have 1. anecdotal evidence and 2. understood neither of my arguments.

Your argument was Jevons Paradox, that consumption goes up as use gets more efficient. My counter argument was that my fridge got more efficient, but it will be difficult to use it more often since it by design runs all the time. Your counter argument was that I will now have more computers and whatnot and will still use more electricity. I replied to you that even this anecdotal evidence falls on its face because I actually have the data and that my electricity use went down despite moving to full time work from home. I think this sums it up nicely.

I also stated previously that we have the data even on a large scale. Electricity use in the EU went down in the last 20 years and this even with millions of EVs now compared to then. Even Norway which now for years sells almost exclusively EVs has had just a mild bump in electricity use compared to a decade before. This implies that The efficiency savings made elsewhere held. My hypothesis would be it's because at a certain point it's impossible to use something more than you already are (see fridge, dishwasher, induction stove, computers, TVs etc) and thus efficiency gains there will hold. The same pattern is observed with American gasoline use -- as the gas guzzlers of the 70s died off during the oil crisis, per capita gas use fell and practically never recovered. This despite the fact that this use case is quite comparable to coal and you could easily argue that with better mileage people will drive more. And they probably do, but still the gasoline use fell.

You argued further that developed countries need to account for energy use of products they offshored, but I offered data that says otherwise. Additionally the argument can't be used for gasoline use which as stated did not follow Jevons Paradox.

So obviously, Jevons Paradox did not hold in these substantial cases and should not be viewed as law of nature. It's an interesting observation that makes sense, but obviously has its limits.

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