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. 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 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 in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?
I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).
But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants.
If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.
There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.
Literally everything but specifically air conditioners and electricity to run the air conditioners. Better if production is skewed to productive equipment rather than consumer end goods but it isnt strictly necessary. More productive capacity will always do better against change than less.
There's two things that are simultaneously true: 1) improving efficiency of electricity use is often the most cost effective use of a dollar. Better insulation, more efficient appliances, etc. are choices made purely on financial merits. 2) We're going to need to greatly increase electricity consumption in order to decarbonize.
People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a completely different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.
I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.
Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there are politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.
Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.
This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online? Because it's expensive? Or because we let oil companies and land owners make the rules?
Making peoples lives worse to save money is a capitalist mindset and I don't understand why so many left wing people believe in it. The promise of socialism was always higher living standards for the working class (99 percent) at the expense of millionaires.
Today's leftists seem to not have any coherent philosophy at all. It's not better on the other side. Everything seems to be about grievances and assigning blame rather than rationally discussing practical solutions.
There's a significant misanthropic sentiment on the left stemming from, among other things, the mid-century environmental movement. It creates for a maddening incoherency, but I guess that's typical of all politics at scale.
The misanthropy is infused in popular culture, and specifically in the way ecological sciences and history (for additional reasons) is taught in schools. I not infrequently have to discuss this with my kids when they recite something they've learned in school and I can hear the misanthropic cynicism in the framing and intonation.
It's quite eccentric to suggest the left is misanthropic when the right majors in racism, violence, short-sighted selfishness, and contempt for the weak, poor, and unusual - none of which are particularly humanitarian.
Making your own planet less ecologically stable is certainly an interesting choice, but probably not the best long-term bet for anyone's kids.
That's whataboutism. I never said anything about conservative sentiments, explicitly or implicitly. Though I'd argue that the misanthropic dimension to the environmental movement has been internalized by conservatives as well. Like others, they assume that human progress and growth in well-being is intrinsically at odds with environmental protection. So they either fatalistically reject attempts to mitigate environmental harm, or discount or outright disbelieve any evidence of environmental harm.
Y’all are equally incomprehensible to us. Drastically reduced immigration, ineffective policies for incentivizing pregnancy, and no cash incentives for having multiple children (the one intervention that has been found to have a real, albeit modest impact on TFR). Degrowth under those conditions is all but certain.
> Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online?
I'd argue there's more ecologically sound ways to supply the desired energy demand in combination with shifting some of the load away from peak times. I don't think that strictly correlates to "a lower standard of living" so much as "there's minor behavioral changes that would more efficiently use existing resources."
> Making peoples lives worse to save money
This is exactly the mentality that I'm surprised by: I suggest shifting high energy use slightly and your reaction is "that will make my life worse." Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight for your towels/sheets/whatever if it meant 50% cheaper power?
You seem to be missing the human element in your calculation. It's not just power plants and the machines that use the electricity from them. The machines are built for humans, who want their clothes washed today so they can be folded today and ready for tomorrow. They want the dishes washed today so they can be put back on the shelves before tomorrow's breakfast.
And, by the way, grime on dishes gets more difficult to remove once it has sat drying, waiting for the machine to start.
We also want everything in single use plastic containers and to drive big cars a mile down the road to buy groceries, but there's better solutions for those things that people are buying into more and more.
I'm not saying human convenience should entirely take a backseat to machine efficiency; to your point, the very existence of these things is to make human life easier. My frustration is that Western approaches to these problems seem uniquely resistant to ever altering behavior for the sake of reducing ecological impact.
(Dishwashers were a poor example for me to use anyway, they're remarkably efficient; a better one might be water usage: it's best to water plants in either the early morning or late evening, so the water doesn't evaporate as much, but people often prefer to do so during the day, which coincides with high household water usage for showers/laundry/whatever. though, I routinely run my dishwasher overnight and have never had issues with grime, so long as I prime the hot water feed.)
Then they can pay the higher rate for energy during the day, and if enough people want this it will be practical to build infrastructure to support them. This issue is they want it and they don't want to pay for it.
Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences. It's how we progress from 0 climate control and lacking clean drinking water to how we live today. Here's a good article on the subject: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-roy...
It turns out that small minor improvements compound long term, and there are relatively few examples of massive step-changes that were centrally planned. Here's a good book on the topic that you may enjoy: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency
> Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences.
That's a uniquely American perspective.
Japanese homes often don't have space heating. The Swiss often keep their homes at 20°C in the winter.
Most of the globe doesn't travel everywhere by car. Arguably it's the intention to remove pain as much as possible which resulted in the opioid epidemic.
There's a point at which trying to get rid of inconveniences becomes harmful.
20C in wintertime is quite cool for North America, in my opinion. I think 23C is commonly considered "comfortable," but obviously that will vary significantly by individual.
Wow. Obviously there are humidity differences during different seasons, but 23°C is probably the limit of "this is uncomfortably warm" for me if I set my thermostat above that.
> "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house"
The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and most
likely in the world. [0]
Roughly 30% of the stock is single-skin, without a cavity. While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons. The same goes for the roofs of these houses; although you will find many companies willing to spray your roof with foam or other forms of thermal sealing, those roofs were never designed to be insulated, causing other potentially catastrophic problems once it's been done.
Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses, but no matter; the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps, despite them being incompatible with the existing pipework and radiators.
How exactly would a heatpump be incompatible with existing pipework and radiators? I see them installed into all kinds of houses, summer cottages and whatever no problem.
Having 8mm pipework (microbore, which was fairly commonly used when central heating was being retrofitted) connected to standard sized radiators with a flow temp of 35 degrees is unlikely to actually heat a building.
That said, most properties in the UK don't have this problem. They _do_ likely need bigger radiators which comes with a cost, but a lot of these houses would benefit from just upgrading from their single panel rad with no fins.
Many old-style radiators only work with high water temperatures. Uninsulated pipework can "waste" a lot of water temperature before you even reach the radiator
I'm not sure any of that makes heatpumps technically impossible, but it makes them more expensive and less efficient
> Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses,
Reasonable point, but I feel my case still stands: the population able to make these changes could do so, enabling existing infra (and housing stock) to "go further" before requiring expensive and disruptive overhaul.
> the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps
I agree this is shortsighted, and it's better to incentivize more efficient systems rather than applying punitive strategies to less efficient ones.
Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers. What is happening is that new builds will have to be built with heat pumps from (if memory serves) 2035. Please don't scaremonger.
Further, it is possible to run a heat pump at high temperatures: some use refrigerants specifically designed to do this relatively efficiently.
> Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers.
Several energy suppliers websites have pages dedicated to this very topic.
The current 2035 target originates in the Heat and building strategy policy paper (2020):
"Our ambition is to phase out the installation of natural gas boilers beyond 2035."
In the Annex:
Aiming to phase out the installation of new and replacement natural gas boilers from 2035, once costs of low-carbon alternatives have fallen, in line with the natural replacement cycle, including any hydrogen-ready boilers in areas not converting to hydrogen, to ensure that all heating systems used in 2050 are compatible with Net Zero.
Given the energy policy of the UK, which to many engineers makes absolutely no sense at all, it's impossible to predict what will actually come out of the policy sausage factory next.
>This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me.
I assume you're in good health, not poor, in a stable living arrangement, etc. The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer. Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
> Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
Most of us don't. But smart meters are free in the UK, and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat. Same for my dishwasher. Heating is a bigger issue.
You probably want your washing machine to finish when you'll be ready to take the clothes out, rather than leave them sitting damp in the machine.
There should be plenty of opportunity to load shift with other things though, a dishwasher as you mentioned, or a fridge or a storage heater or a charger for your electric car. All can be done with minimal inconvenience to the user.
> The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer.
Excellent point, and I agree, though the vast, vast majority of the pushback I feel I get when advocating for these kinds of shifts are from wealthy/healthy individuals.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario: existing resources should be able to support our current level of creature comforts with minor conservation, even if a segment of the population is less able to support the conservation efforts, but the extremes people demand in turn place extreme load on our infrastructure.
Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward. If you have cavity walls that are uninsulated, it needs to be done right. If you have single skim walls you either do external cladding (and change the outside of your building), or build an internal stud wall and insulate that, which is very effective but costs a decent amount, reduces internal floor space, and requires a full redecoration after.
When fertility rates fall below replacement rate, some amount of degrowth is all but inevitable. Probably multiple generations’ worth, assuming things remain at least nominally normal.
That few in government are readying for that and are rearranging deck chairs instead is not particularly reassuring.
The electricity generation in the article is shown per capita.
Now I'm not saying we should generate as much as humanly possible, because even with renewables that has a cost.
And some things have gotten genuinely more efficient (compare modern heat pumps to heating available in 1968).
But why shouldn't we maintain the levels our parents enjoyed? And use the extra capacity if anything for EVs, grid stabilization, medical research, etc.
So population degrowth is a pretty separate issue.
Given that the alternative is trying to communicate with someone who thinks that the physical-goods aspects of our economy can grow exponentially forever...
I'm going to go with the degrowth, or the steady-state economics guys, they are more likely to be closer to the mark of what is actually achievable in the real world.
Here in the UK the debate around energy is really unbelievably stupid.
It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production.
Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues.
It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad".
Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.
I sympatize with degrowth. But the measures are wrong.
Take the idea of not being able to wash your cloths when you want. What a step back! But instead get rid of your heated pool or turn down heating by two degrees.
Hah, only an alien species would be of the idea that infinite growth in a finite planet is a bad idea. No, surely we can keep pressing the gas pedal forever, never slowing down sounds like a sound and reasonable plan.
"progressive circles" ? The whole reactionary movement is essentially just one big self-own exercise in degrowth, just phrased in terms of being macho - like drunks thumping their chests before getting into a fight with a bouncer.
But yes I do agree about the impossibility of communication.
there is some irony in the growth ideology, which is barely more than a century old, to claim that every other species on the planet, ecological thinking and most human life is somehow alien to existence here, when they are more fanatic than just about any religious cult
the logical terminus of the growth fanatics is to literally want to leave the planet so I think we ought to reserve the label 'alien' for them
> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I've seen proposals that are less intermittent availability and more incentivized pushing of consumption towards periods of lower demand. We already have all these computers in our appliances, might as well let them do reasonable things ... your freezer probably does a self-defrost cycle triggered by a timer and/or a door open counter, but why not wait up to X hours for off-peak pricing to do it. Or push the set points down a degree or two during off-peak pricing, to reduce energy use during on-peak. Also works for HVAC subject to user comfort, and water heaters if you're careful and avoid high temperatures that cause injury or low temperatures that allow microorganism growth.
Of course, that's science fiction... all the communication in appliances is designed to collect data and serve targeted ads. :( So very few appliances know if current pricing is peak/off peak or when it will change.
You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries.
Firstly, that doesn't sound like a particularly hard thing to accept if it genuinely helps. "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
However, regardless of that, this isn't new. There have been time-of-day based electricity tariffs for decades that are aimed at incentivising people to do more demanding things at particular times e.g. when industry isn't using the power. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
It already has made them poorer and miserable. The Draghi report was all about how they were poorer due to these things. Of course they decided not to follow the recommendations.
You'd have a point if those countries had followed Europe in replacing coal with imported gas, but few countries outside of Europe have done that. Without imported gas, electricity is generally cheap.
China burns coal and has still had time-of-use pricing since 1999.
The price of electricity is a function of demand with respect to supply. Even if the fuel is cheap, heavy demand will cost more to supply than low demand.
> "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
What the heck? Where is your evidence that using washing machines at inconvenient times is going to destroy the environment?
If your argument is that any use of electricity from fossil fuels is destroying the environment, then nobody should even be charging their phones at night. Time-shifting washing machines isn't going to fix carbon emissions since they're going to be emissions at any time of the day.
I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development. A lot of these moral arguments do not make sense. You said it yourself -- industry is incentivized to convince the public to use less electricity during peak hours so they can pay less. It's pretty much a psyop by capitalists. And for some reason you're shilling for them even though presumably you're paid exactly zero buckaroos
Why is it inevitability? Couldn't we just use our tech advancements to move to cleaner energy, move heavy industry to the moon, and clean up the planet?
> "I was at a conference ... these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease"
For a long time (several decades) electricity demand has been decreasing in the UK, largely due to efficiency improvements. But now days pretty much everyone agrees that electricity demand will increase significantly in the future due to electrification. The UK has been planning for this for some time so if this guy was really from National Grid, he sounds like a bit of a rogue!
> "their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like"
No, nobody is suggesting that the grid will ever cut off power to anybody - certainly not domestic customers. The idea is that in a smart grid, big industrial customers often have the ability to temporarily reduce demand for heat or cooling or whatever. So if there is a signal from the grid that demand needs to be cut, automated industrial systems can (and already do) do that. The same goes for your car charging, water heating, etc. These things can automatically slow down during demand peaks in response to a signal from the grid, and you probably won't notice or care. You'll still be able to wash your dishes any time you want!
This is all definitely a good thing. A huge part of the cost of running the grid is in handling the biggest demand peaks, which might only occur for an hour or two per day a few times per year. If the peaks can be reduced and demand becomes smoother, then energy becomes cheaper.
And domestic providers like Octopus are also incentivising voluntary reduction (e.g. during saving sessions, which were National Grid experiments), or consumption when there is a glut of renewables with free energy, so if people want to save money they CAN load shift.
And with more and more houses installing solar and battery, opting into shoring up the grid for a decent uplift in standard export rates would be of interest to many.
Yup. Heating and cooling are 2 things that can be delayed in most cases with little negative effects. A hot water tank set at 60C isn't going to be harmed if it's allowed to cool to 55C due to high power demand it also doesn't instantly empty out with usage.
The same is true about climate control. 1 or 2C from the desired temperature is still pretty comfortable but can make a huge difference in power savings, particularly if it's coordinated.
That said, I suspect that the even better route for power companies to go down is installing more grid batteries. Those can directly address and smooth out high demand. Put them at the various substations and you can shut off the main grid to the substation temporarily under high load.
The Tories sold off the national grid, it’s a public listed company now. They don’t want to build infrastructure, they want to maximise shareholder value.
Privatization might be an avoidable disaster, but nationalization is virtually guaranteed to make things worse. See: every time anything has ever been nationalized. There was a reason these things were sold of in the first place.
I'm making the assumption that by National Grid, you mean the UK's electricity system operator, with National Grid (private company) being replaced by a NESO (public company).
> had in mind that electricity demand should decrease
Does this mean the speaker wanted demand to decrease? The UK forecasts from the Future Energy Scenarios [1] show demand increasing (see page 21).
> intermittent availability of power.
I'm assuming this was related to demand side response. Page 37 of the Future Energy Scenarios pdf contains an overview of this.
I worked at an EV smart charging start up (Kaluza) between 2019-2022 and my experience doesn't line up with a couple of your points:
> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like
During my time at Kaluza the customer could charge their EV whenever they wanted.
> you will have to adapt to when there is spare power,
The customer set their minimum state-of-charge (0-100%) and we would always have it charged to that amount by a specified time, irrespective of demand. We aimed to charge the customer's EV when demand was low (there are UK markets we can sell this ability to - these markets may have changed since I was there), which would save them money, but meeting the minimum SoC was the most important thing.
> This is just a regression in technological progress
Reducing peak demand reduces the amount of infrastructure you need and makes better use of what you have. IMO it's a good upgrade that makes much better use of the assets on the grid.
Vehicle-to-Grid (or Home) charging takes this up a level by feeding power back to the grid. This "What’s next for
Vehicle-to-Everything?" PDF [2] is 4 years old now, but has some good data on V2G and the benefits it brings.
The decline in energy from 2003-present lines up nicely with the phase out of incandescent lights in favour of CFLs and of CFLs in favour of LEDs.
Lets say a house typically had 5 60W bulbs on for 8hrs a day, now replaced with an 8W bulb. That would be a 2 kWH reduction, which roughly corresponds to the drop shown in the data.
EDIT: actually now that I think about it, 2kWh per-household is probably less than 1kWh per-capita. It's still a good chunk though!
There is also a substantial saving in household appliances from all the EU laws as well that have pretty substantially cut power consumption, including a lot of computers and devices at idle.
The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.
There has been a decline heavy industry and the article says industrial consumption has declined a quarter since 2005. Deindustrialisation is the major driver.
Recently installed a bunch of incandescent bulbs because I had them at the bottom of a drawer.
I was surprised how the small amount of infrared from them makes rooms feel more pleasant to be in. It's a warmth on the skin, rather like having a fireplace going.
If I weren't paying the electricity bill, I would totally fit them everywhere.
This sensation of warmth while being in a nominally cold room can also be created with microwaves. A couple of such systems were designed when microwaves were the new hotness. Turns out it might cause cataracts, though.
the heat rises out of your baseboard just the same. If you’re heating your house resistive electric, you can just leave everything powered on all winter.
Street Lighting. Sodium lamps used 250-500W and LEDs are 50-150W. Councils have been replacing the former with the latter ever since it was possible, as the savings were apparent after only a few years (and, the early investors could sell the old bulbs to authorities who did not have the funds to invest)
You’re leaving out the part where the sodium lights wasted a lot of their lumens by tossing them into the sky. LEDs can be dimmer because they can be directionally controlled.
You’re right a lot of this will be domestic lighting changing.
That said, UK manufacturing decline also correlates with this as that’s very energy intensive. Also don’t rule out fridges, old 90s fridges were very energy intensive compared to today.
> Improved efficiency is also supporting reduced use in the industrial sector – as has a general decline in GB industry and associated intensive electricity use
> This is part of a larger trend. Demand has been falling by 5 TWh per year since 2005. Improving efficiency (lighting, televisions, fridges, etc.), fewer homes using electric heating, and deindustrialisation all play a part
The linked iea data shows that the reduction is roughly 50/50 industrial and residential. So the deindustrialisation narrative is part of the story but improved efficiency at home is also a significant factor.
Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off.
Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.
One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
Solar is great. I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense.
In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?
There are other reasons to do this, but purely on the financial side, I'd want to see the numbers on this one. Again, this isn't about solar, the claim was about battery + inverter + time-of-use paying for itself.
Grid scale BESS (battery energy storage system) in the UK is growing fast, because it makes financial sense. There's one that just expanded from 100MWh/100Mw to 475MWh/350MW: https://www.pacificgreen.com/energy-parks/energy-park-case-s... . It's easy to run the numbers, easier to make a payback calculator with AI. Take a look at the Anker E5000 / Ecoflow Stream 5000, and run the numbers yourself, I'd be interested to see what the payback would be for you.
True, but if you get cheap power from solar for the rest of the year, and charge the battery from the grid off peak when there's no solar to charge, you should end up paying less than just the standard rate.
I import more than I export in December and January, but for every other month of the year it’s the reverse by some margin. My annual electricity bill is net negative, and the installation cost will be paid off in 7 years. The numbers would be even better in, say, Spain, but they are perfectly adequate here, despite suboptimal latitude.
Incidentally, the grid only knows about my exports. Self-consumption manifests as demand reduction, so UK solar production and electricity consumption is probably higher than aggregate figures suggest.
There are lots of factors that feed into this: lots of solar, batteries, more efficiency, improved insulation.
Some others: increase of heat pumps, energy poverty, reduction in industrial energy (both due to good and bad reasons)
Ultimately though, its not about how much energy per capita, its about the sources of energy, and how effectively they are used... my heat pump uses infinity more electricity than my boiler, but far more effectively uses the underlying energy source.
Seems generally like a good thing? I know the biggest difference I can think of in my lifetime is just how much better insulated houses are. Not on a par with Scandinavia, but still massively improved from even the peak electricity consumption period in the charts of 2005. I wonder how much that contributes to the overall reduction in demand.
Just an observation, but my first thought was how energy demand strongly correlates with economic growth and wondered if the article could be cast in that light. Might be fun to overlay that graph with UK gilt rates
No? It would be pretty remarkable if the majority of all UK housing was built in a single decade. If you meant to say 'from before the 1970s' then that might be a more defensible claim. But old houses can be upgraded with double glazing, insulation, etc.
Which industries? If you're going to make that claim be specific. The UK has deindustrialised since the 70s which was nothing to do with electricity costs or availability. Any recent industries leaving are not covered by the stats here so would be pretty irrelevant, which means you're not talking about those, you're talking about something else for it to cover the period between the 70s and now.
We have expensive, potentially unreliable (if an interconnect fails we are completely fucked so certainly fragile), energy.
Energy is what allows modernity to function, we have made it so expensive that no one can make anything in Britain just in time for hard power and manufacturing to be really important again.
Chemicals, metals, pottery, glass,fertiliser etc are all basically impossible to do competitively in Britain.
Energy has only been expensive recently, and there has been zero issue with power supply beyond silly tabloid fear mongering. So between the 70s and lets say 10 years ago, the argument for expensive power really does not hold true.
That's fine for residential customers. But if there isn't cheap, reliable excess capacity then that inhibits industrial growth. Low economic growth rates cause everyone to go without.
If you import 12 million people in 20 years, your energy generation, water provision, and housing affordability are all going to fall off a cliff vs demand.
> From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Services deemed essential (e.g. hospitals, telephone switchboards, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses) were exempt. Television companies were required to cease broadcasting at 22:30 to conserve electricity [...] The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974.
Year Avg consumer price in today's money
1975 13p/kWh
1985 15p/kWh
1995 n/a
2005 11p/kWh
2015 17p/kWh
2025 26p/kWh
We're currently paying a lot more than usual because:
1) we have to pay off operators for the billions of foreign investment they put into new wind and solar farms and grid storage batteries. If we didn't tempt them with a good RoI, they'd invest elsewhere, and we'd still be burning coal. The cost of this is going down year on year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
2) we're paying for new transmission capacity and replacing worn out transmission route. The fact we don't already have it, which we could've had by charging more for electricity in the 2000s and building it out decades ago, is why today we face enormous curtailment costs today, as we can't get all this wind power from where it's generated to where it's consumed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottlene...
3) our market arrangement is based on everyone bidding to supply power, and we pay everyone who generates the same rate as the highest necessary bidder. Thus the moment that there isn't enough wind power, or there is but it can't get to the region it's needed (see point 2), in come the gas turbines and given that Russia's trying to destroy Ukraine, gas is astronomically expensive. The sooner we solve our bottlenecks and decommission all the gas turbines, the better.
Over the 20th century, people switched from fuel based lighting, heating and cooking to electric, and acquired laundry machines, dishwashers, fridges, TVs, air conditioning etc etc. So electricity was a pretty good proxy for a certain aspect of quality of life. It might be a less useful measure in the developed world in the 21st century as we have kind of plateaued on energy-intensive appliances and are more focused on efficiency, and because other aspects of quality of life like pollution, work, mental health etc may be more salient.
I mean, what do you expect out of a resource poor island? The only reason the UK was on the map is because it has intelligent, well spoken people that could make deals and exploit the resources of their colonies. That’s not enough when you don’t have colonies. It’s reverting to the mean.
Seems like a bit of misconception given it has coal (more relevant historically), iron, North Sea gas, a temperate climate, fisheries and coastline, plenty of arable land and more recently massive potential for renewable energy.
We may genuinely have the worst energy market in the developed world. It's going to get cheaper and reliable any day soon - George monbiot told me so it must be true.
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. 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 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 in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?
I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).
But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants.
If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.
There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.
But, climate change!
Climate changeis a reason to produce more not less. Ac isnt energy free
Will ac fix all the other things that come along? Like, extreme weather, droughts, flooding?
"produce" what exactly?
Literally everything but specifically air conditioners and electricity to run the air conditioners. Better if production is skewed to productive equipment rather than consumer end goods but it isnt strictly necessary. More productive capacity will always do better against change than less.
There's two things that are simultaneously true: 1) improving efficiency of electricity use is often the most cost effective use of a dollar. Better insulation, more efficient appliances, etc. are choices made purely on financial merits. 2) We're going to need to greatly increase electricity consumption in order to decarbonize.
People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a completely different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.
I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.
Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there are politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.
Antivaxxers have always been heavily promoted by bot farms. [1]
Degrowthers, who have had some reasonable successes like the Passivhaus movement, are opposed by those same bot farms.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6137759/
> There's a weird "degrowth" mindset
Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.
This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online? Because it's expensive? Or because we let oil companies and land owners make the rules?
Making peoples lives worse to save money is a capitalist mindset and I don't understand why so many left wing people believe in it. The promise of socialism was always higher living standards for the working class (99 percent) at the expense of millionaires.
Today's leftists seem to not have any coherent philosophy at all. It's not better on the other side. Everything seems to be about grievances and assigning blame rather than rationally discussing practical solutions.
There's a significant misanthropic sentiment on the left stemming from, among other things, the mid-century environmental movement. It creates for a maddening incoherency, but I guess that's typical of all politics at scale.
The misanthropy is infused in popular culture, and specifically in the way ecological sciences and history (for additional reasons) is taught in schools. I not infrequently have to discuss this with my kids when they recite something they've learned in school and I can hear the misanthropic cynicism in the framing and intonation.
It's quite eccentric to suggest the left is misanthropic when the right majors in racism, violence, short-sighted selfishness, and contempt for the weak, poor, and unusual - none of which are particularly humanitarian.
Making your own planet less ecologically stable is certainly an interesting choice, but probably not the best long-term bet for anyone's kids.
That's whataboutism. I never said anything about conservative sentiments, explicitly or implicitly. Though I'd argue that the misanthropic dimension to the environmental movement has been internalized by conservatives as well. Like others, they assume that human progress and growth in well-being is intrinsically at odds with environmental protection. So they either fatalistically reject attempts to mitigate environmental harm, or discount or outright disbelieve any evidence of environmental harm.
Y’all are equally incomprehensible to us. Drastically reduced immigration, ineffective policies for incentivizing pregnancy, and no cash incentives for having multiple children (the one intervention that has been found to have a real, albeit modest impact on TFR). Degrowth under those conditions is all but certain.
That is definitely the impression one would get if one watched Fox News.
If one consumed nonfiction media one might get a different impression.
bro there are degrowth austerity leftists posting in this thread right now, it's not a Fox News caricature
> Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online?
I'd argue there's more ecologically sound ways to supply the desired energy demand in combination with shifting some of the load away from peak times. I don't think that strictly correlates to "a lower standard of living" so much as "there's minor behavioral changes that would more efficiently use existing resources."
> Making peoples lives worse to save money
This is exactly the mentality that I'm surprised by: I suggest shifting high energy use slightly and your reaction is "that will make my life worse." Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight for your towels/sheets/whatever if it meant 50% cheaper power?
> Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight
Absolutely. That thing is loud.
Fair enough
Finally a reasonable objection.
What if manufacturers developed quieter dryers?
>Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight
In a london flat we rented, the washer-dryer was in a cupboard in the bedroom. So yes. At least it had one.
Trump and doge once fired all the nuclear inspectors.
You seem to be missing the human element in your calculation. It's not just power plants and the machines that use the electricity from them. The machines are built for humans, who want their clothes washed today so they can be folded today and ready for tomorrow. They want the dishes washed today so they can be put back on the shelves before tomorrow's breakfast. And, by the way, grime on dishes gets more difficult to remove once it has sat drying, waiting for the machine to start.
We also want everything in single use plastic containers and to drive big cars a mile down the road to buy groceries, but there's better solutions for those things that people are buying into more and more.
I'm not saying human convenience should entirely take a backseat to machine efficiency; to your point, the very existence of these things is to make human life easier. My frustration is that Western approaches to these problems seem uniquely resistant to ever altering behavior for the sake of reducing ecological impact.
(Dishwashers were a poor example for me to use anyway, they're remarkably efficient; a better one might be water usage: it's best to water plants in either the early morning or late evening, so the water doesn't evaporate as much, but people often prefer to do so during the day, which coincides with high household water usage for showers/laundry/whatever. though, I routinely run my dishwasher overnight and have never had issues with grime, so long as I prime the hot water feed.)
Then they can pay the higher rate for energy during the day, and if enough people want this it will be practical to build infrastructure to support them. This issue is they want it and they don't want to pay for it.
Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences. It's how we progress from 0 climate control and lacking clean drinking water to how we live today. Here's a good article on the subject: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-roy...
Smart human development is about thinking long term, not trading minor conveniences now for avoidable catastrophic consequences later.
It turns out that small minor improvements compound long term, and there are relatively few examples of massive step-changes that were centrally planned. Here's a good book on the topic that you may enjoy: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency
> Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences.
That's a uniquely American perspective.
Japanese homes often don't have space heating. The Swiss often keep their homes at 20°C in the winter.
Most of the globe doesn't travel everywhere by car. Arguably it's the intention to remove pain as much as possible which resulted in the opioid epidemic.
There's a point at which trying to get rid of inconveniences becomes harmful.
Is 20°C supposed to be austere? Is that a typo? I keep my American home at 67-68°F in the winter...
20C in wintertime is quite cool for North America, in my opinion. I think 23C is commonly considered "comfortable," but obviously that will vary significantly by individual.
Chicago building codes require 68F as a minimum for residential in winter conditions, so I think that's reasonable as a "habitable minimum yet not necessarily ideal" benchmark: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bldgs/supp_info/chicag...
Wow. Obviously there are humidity differences during different seasons, but 23°C is probably the limit of "this is uncomfortably warm" for me if I set my thermostat above that.
> "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house"
The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and most likely in the world. [0]
Roughly 30% of the stock is single-skin, without a cavity. While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons. The same goes for the roofs of these houses; although you will find many companies willing to spray your roof with foam or other forms of thermal sealing, those roofs were never designed to be insulated, causing other potentially catastrophic problems once it's been done.
Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses, but no matter; the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps, despite them being incompatible with the existing pipework and radiators.
0: https://files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the...
How exactly would a heatpump be incompatible with existing pipework and radiators? I see them installed into all kinds of houses, summer cottages and whatever no problem.
Having 8mm pipework (microbore, which was fairly commonly used when central heating was being retrofitted) connected to standard sized radiators with a flow temp of 35 degrees is unlikely to actually heat a building.
That said, most properties in the UK don't have this problem. They _do_ likely need bigger radiators which comes with a cost, but a lot of these houses would benefit from just upgrading from their single panel rad with no fins.
Many old-style radiators only work with high water temperatures. Uninsulated pipework can "waste" a lot of water temperature before you even reach the radiator
I'm not sure any of that makes heatpumps technically impossible, but it makes them more expensive and less efficient
[delayed]
> Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses,
Reasonable point, but I feel my case still stands: the population able to make these changes could do so, enabling existing infra (and housing stock) to "go further" before requiring expensive and disruptive overhaul.
> the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps
I agree this is shortsighted, and it's better to incentivize more efficient systems rather than applying punitive strategies to less efficient ones.
Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers. What is happening is that new builds will have to be built with heat pumps from (if memory serves) 2035. Please don't scaremonger.
Further, it is possible to run a heat pump at high temperatures: some use refrigerants specifically designed to do this relatively efficiently.
> Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers.
Several energy suppliers websites have pages dedicated to this very topic.
The current 2035 target originates in the Heat and building strategy policy paper (2020):
"Our ambition is to phase out the installation of natural gas boilers beyond 2035."
In the Annex:
Aiming to phase out the installation of new and replacement natural gas boilers from 2035, once costs of low-carbon alternatives have fallen, in line with the natural replacement cycle, including any hydrogen-ready boilers in areas not converting to hydrogen, to ensure that all heating systems used in 2050 are compatible with Net Zero.
Given the energy policy of the UK, which to many engineers makes absolutely no sense at all, it's impossible to predict what will actually come out of the policy sausage factory next.
>This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me.
I assume you're in good health, not poor, in a stable living arrangement, etc. The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer. Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
> Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
Most of us don't. But smart meters are free in the UK, and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat. Same for my dishwasher. Heating is a bigger issue.
You probably want your washing machine to finish when you'll be ready to take the clothes out, rather than leave them sitting damp in the machine.
There should be plenty of opportunity to load shift with other things though, a dishwasher as you mentioned, or a fridge or a storage heater or a charger for your electric car. All can be done with minimal inconvenience to the user.
> The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer.
Excellent point, and I agree, though the vast, vast majority of the pushback I feel I get when advocating for these kinds of shifts are from wealthy/healthy individuals.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario: existing resources should be able to support our current level of creature comforts with minor conservation, even if a segment of the population is less able to support the conservation efforts, but the extremes people demand in turn place extreme load on our infrastructure.
What is the point in being wealthy if it is not to avoid tedious inconveniences?
The rational approach is to both bring that new green / nuclear energy capacity online AND simultaneously reduce waste.
Yes, but that waste reduction mindset is the 'degrowth' was being derided in the original comment I replied to :-)
> add some insulation to your house,
Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward. If you have cavity walls that are uninsulated, it needs to be done right. If you have single skim walls you either do external cladding (and change the outside of your building), or build an internal stud wall and insulate that, which is very effective but costs a decent amount, reduces internal floor space, and requires a full redecoration after.
Building more power plants seems like a pretty sane approach to me.
When fertility rates fall below replacement rate, some amount of degrowth is all but inevitable. Probably multiple generations’ worth, assuming things remain at least nominally normal.
That few in government are readying for that and are rearranging deck chairs instead is not particularly reassuring.
The electricity generation in the article is shown per capita.
Now I'm not saying we should generate as much as humanly possible, because even with renewables that has a cost.
And some things have gotten genuinely more efficient (compare modern heat pumps to heating available in 1968).
But why shouldn't we maintain the levels our parents enjoyed? And use the extra capacity if anything for EVs, grid stabilization, medical research, etc.
So population degrowth is a pretty separate issue.
Given that the alternative is trying to communicate with someone who thinks that the physical-goods aspects of our economy can grow exponentially forever...
I'm going to go with the degrowth, or the steady-state economics guys, they are more likely to be closer to the mark of what is actually achievable in the real world.
Here in the UK the debate around energy is really unbelievably stupid.
It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production.
Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues.
It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad".
Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.
I sympatize with degrowth. But the measures are wrong.
Take the idea of not being able to wash your cloths when you want. What a step back! But instead get rid of your heated pool or turn down heating by two degrees.
Right? Wear a f*cking sweater and socks in the winter, instead of shorts and a tank top, rather than not be able to do laundry.
Hah, only an alien species would be of the idea that infinite growth in a finite planet is a bad idea. No, surely we can keep pressing the gas pedal forever, never slowing down sounds like a sound and reasonable plan.
- global wildlife population declined by 70% since the 70s
- climate change is having real measurable negative impacts already
- 90% of the shit we create is useless low quality junk and e-waste with a two years life expectancy
- green washing doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of industries are not compatible with long term sustainability
What are your argument for infinite growth at all cost?
Surely you understand that infinite growth is impossible, and it will all come crashing down sooner or later.
"progressive circles" ? The whole reactionary movement is essentially just one big self-own exercise in degrowth, just phrased in terms of being macho - like drunks thumping their chests before getting into a fight with a bouncer.
But yes I do agree about the impossibility of communication.
there is some irony in the growth ideology, which is barely more than a century old, to claim that every other species on the planet, ecological thinking and most human life is somehow alien to existence here, when they are more fanatic than just about any religious cult
the logical terminus of the growth fanatics is to literally want to leave the planet so I think we ought to reserve the label 'alien' for them
> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I've seen proposals that are less intermittent availability and more incentivized pushing of consumption towards periods of lower demand. We already have all these computers in our appliances, might as well let them do reasonable things ... your freezer probably does a self-defrost cycle triggered by a timer and/or a door open counter, but why not wait up to X hours for off-peak pricing to do it. Or push the set points down a degree or two during off-peak pricing, to reduce energy use during on-peak. Also works for HVAC subject to user comfort, and water heaters if you're careful and avoid high temperatures that cause injury or low temperatures that allow microorganism growth.
Of course, that's science fiction... all the communication in appliances is designed to collect data and serve targeted ads. :( So very few appliances know if current pricing is peak/off peak or when it will change.
Can you provide a source for either of your claims?
Like a selfie of me at the conference?
That could work.
I've only heard similar claims repeated by Reform.
You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries.
Firstly, that doesn't sound like a particularly hard thing to accept if it genuinely helps. "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
However, regardless of that, this isn't new. There have been time-of-day based electricity tariffs for decades that are aimed at incentivising people to do more demanding things at particular times e.g. when industry isn't using the power. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
"I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment."
The environment is going to be destroyed anyway, since the rest of the world will continue to use their washing machine whenever they want. [1]
The current European approach to climate change is completely bonkers and will only make Europeans poorer and miserable.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
It already has made them poorer and miserable. The Draghi report was all about how they were poorer due to these things. Of course they decided not to follow the recommendations.
> since the rest of the world will continue to use their washing machine whenever they want
No they have even less money than Europe. They'll do the smart thing, which is using electricity when it's cheap.
You'd have a point if those countries had followed Europe in replacing coal with imported gas, but few countries outside of Europe have done that. Without imported gas, electricity is generally cheap.
China burns coal and has still had time-of-use pricing since 1999.
The price of electricity is a function of demand with respect to supply. Even if the fuel is cheap, heavy demand will cost more to supply than low demand.
https://www.climatescorecard.org/2019/02/time-of-use-electri...
> "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.
What the heck? Where is your evidence that using washing machines at inconvenient times is going to destroy the environment?
If your argument is that any use of electricity from fossil fuels is destroying the environment, then nobody should even be charging their phones at night. Time-shifting washing machines isn't going to fix carbon emissions since they're going to be emissions at any time of the day.
I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development. A lot of these moral arguments do not make sense. You said it yourself -- industry is incentivized to convince the public to use less electricity during peak hours so they can pay less. It's pretty much a psyop by capitalists. And for some reason you're shilling for them even though presumably you're paid exactly zero buckaroos
Thiel might have been right about the greens - the degrowth is so anti-human and destructive to society.
Thiel has never been right about anything, and never will be.
How do you become <100 richest people in the world without being right about anything?
Meanwhile we wiped out 70% of wildlife population in 50 years and are slowly rendering our paradise of a planet hostile to human life...
Degrowrh is a mathematical and physical inevitability, the only choice you have is to prepare for it or not
Why is it inevitability? Couldn't we just use our tech advancements to move to cleaner energy, move heavy industry to the moon, and clean up the planet?
> "I was at a conference ... these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease"
For a long time (several decades) electricity demand has been decreasing in the UK, largely due to efficiency improvements. But now days pretty much everyone agrees that electricity demand will increase significantly in the future due to electrification. The UK has been planning for this for some time so if this guy was really from National Grid, he sounds like a bit of a rogue!
> "their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like"
No, nobody is suggesting that the grid will ever cut off power to anybody - certainly not domestic customers. The idea is that in a smart grid, big industrial customers often have the ability to temporarily reduce demand for heat or cooling or whatever. So if there is a signal from the grid that demand needs to be cut, automated industrial systems can (and already do) do that. The same goes for your car charging, water heating, etc. These things can automatically slow down during demand peaks in response to a signal from the grid, and you probably won't notice or care. You'll still be able to wash your dishes any time you want!
This is all definitely a good thing. A huge part of the cost of running the grid is in handling the biggest demand peaks, which might only occur for an hour or two per day a few times per year. If the peaks can be reduced and demand becomes smoother, then energy becomes cheaper.
And domestic providers like Octopus are also incentivising voluntary reduction (e.g. during saving sessions, which were National Grid experiments), or consumption when there is a glut of renewables with free energy, so if people want to save money they CAN load shift.
And with more and more houses installing solar and battery, opting into shoring up the grid for a decent uplift in standard export rates would be of interest to many.
Yup. Heating and cooling are 2 things that can be delayed in most cases with little negative effects. A hot water tank set at 60C isn't going to be harmed if it's allowed to cool to 55C due to high power demand it also doesn't instantly empty out with usage.
The same is true about climate control. 1 or 2C from the desired temperature is still pretty comfortable but can make a huge difference in power savings, particularly if it's coordinated.
That said, I suspect that the even better route for power companies to go down is installing more grid batteries. Those can directly address and smooth out high demand. Put them at the various substations and you can shut off the main grid to the substation temporarily under high load.
The Tories sold off the national grid, it’s a public listed company now. They don’t want to build infrastructure, they want to maximise shareholder value.
Privatization might be an avoidable disaster, but nationalization is virtually guaranteed to make things worse. See: every time anything has ever been nationalized. There was a reason these things were sold of in the first place.
I'm making the assumption that by National Grid, you mean the UK's electricity system operator, with National Grid (private company) being replaced by a NESO (public company).
> had in mind that electricity demand should decrease
Does this mean the speaker wanted demand to decrease? The UK forecasts from the Future Energy Scenarios [1] show demand increasing (see page 21).
> intermittent availability of power.
I'm assuming this was related to demand side response. Page 37 of the Future Energy Scenarios pdf contains an overview of this.
I worked at an EV smart charging start up (Kaluza) between 2019-2022 and my experience doesn't line up with a couple of your points:
> You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like
During my time at Kaluza the customer could charge their EV whenever they wanted.
> you will have to adapt to when there is spare power,
The customer set their minimum state-of-charge (0-100%) and we would always have it charged to that amount by a specified time, irrespective of demand. We aimed to charge the customer's EV when demand was low (there are UK markets we can sell this ability to - these markets may have changed since I was there), which would save them money, but meeting the minimum SoC was the most important thing.
> This is just a regression in technological progress
Reducing peak demand reduces the amount of infrastructure you need and makes better use of what you have. IMO it's a good upgrade that makes much better use of the assets on the grid.
Vehicle-to-Grid (or Home) charging takes this up a level by feeding power back to the grid. This "What’s next for Vehicle-to-Everything?" PDF [2] is 4 years old now, but has some good data on V2G and the benefits it brings.
1. https://www.neso.energy/document/364541/download
2. https://info.kaluza.com/hubfs/What%E2%80%99s%20next%20for%20....
The decline in energy from 2003-present lines up nicely with the phase out of incandescent lights in favour of CFLs and of CFLs in favour of LEDs.
Lets say a house typically had 5 60W bulbs on for 8hrs a day, now replaced with an 8W bulb. That would be a 2 kWH reduction, which roughly corresponds to the drop shown in the data.
EDIT: actually now that I think about it, 2kWh per-household is probably less than 1kWh per-capita. It's still a good chunk though!
Power management (ACPI) in desktop computers also arrived in the late 1990s. Power saving sleep modes have a big impact.
Computer fleets across a country do not upgrade immediately so the lag may contribute.
And ACPI was just one energy saving initiative of that era.
There is also a substantial saving in household appliances from all the EU laws as well that have pretty substantially cut power consumption, including a lot of computers and devices at idle.
The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.
There has been a decline heavy industry and the article says industrial consumption has declined a quarter since 2005. Deindustrialisation is the major driver.
In the summer. In the winter the heat from the bulbs would help heating the homes, offices, stores, etc.
Heating the ceiling with the light is an extremely inefficient approach to heating a room.
Recently installed a bunch of incandescent bulbs because I had them at the bottom of a drawer.
I was surprised how the small amount of infrared from them makes rooms feel more pleasant to be in. It's a warmth on the skin, rather like having a fireplace going.
If I weren't paying the electricity bill, I would totally fit them everywhere.
100W of heat is like having another person in the room.
It's nothing at all like having a fireplace going - unless they're on fire, in which case both of you have a problem.
This sensation of warmth while being in a nominally cold room can also be created with microwaves. A couple of such systems were designed when microwaves were the new hotness. Turns out it might cause cataracts, though.
the heat rises out of your baseboard just the same. If you’re heating your house resistive electric, you can just leave everything powered on all winter.
Or you could use all the saved energy to run a heat pump, which is even more efficient.
Street Lighting. Sodium lamps used 250-500W and LEDs are 50-150W. Councils have been replacing the former with the latter ever since it was possible, as the savings were apparent after only a few years (and, the early investors could sell the old bulbs to authorities who did not have the funds to invest)
Notably low pressure sodium is more lumens per watt than a typical LED.
The main energy saver is simply that the newer LED lights are dimmer!
You’re leaving out the part where the sodium lights wasted a lot of their lumens by tossing them into the sky. LEDs can be dimmer because they can be directionally controlled.
That's trivially solved with a reflective housing, which nearly all sodium lamps I've ever seen had.
You’re right a lot of this will be domestic lighting changing.
That said, UK manufacturing decline also correlates with this as that’s very energy intensive. Also don’t rule out fridges, old 90s fridges were very energy intensive compared to today.
> Improved efficiency is also supporting reduced use in the industrial sector – as has a general decline in GB industry and associated intensive electricity use
https://energy.drax.com/intelligence/2024-the-year-electrici...
> This is part of a larger trend. Demand has been falling by 5 TWh per year since 2005. Improving efficiency (lighting, televisions, fridges, etc.), fewer homes using electric heating, and deindustrialisation all play a part
https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/?p=2065
Interesting - I had never associated the rate of energy consumption with jingoism, but based on some of the comments here it clearly is.
I guess it’s sort of a “I drive a large inefficient car and that’s a good thing” kind of situation? Excessive unnecessary production is a good thing?
The linked iea data shows that the reduction is roughly 50/50 industrial and residential. So the deindustrialisation narrative is part of the story but improved efficiency at home is also a significant factor.
Dying from heatstroke in the summer is a third.
Industrial output now is much higher in real terms than in the 70s.
It’s just plain expensive thanks to the shitty price everything by most expensive source method. Of course people minimise use
Currently paying 0.33 usd a unit.
Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off.
Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.
One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
Look into a battery + inverter + optional solar on a time of use tariff, you can be always off peak. Payback probably isn't very long.
Solar is great. I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense.
In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?
There are other reasons to do this, but purely on the financial side, I'd want to see the numbers on this one. Again, this isn't about solar, the claim was about battery + inverter + time-of-use paying for itself.
Grid scale BESS (battery energy storage system) in the UK is growing fast, because it makes financial sense. There's one that just expanded from 100MWh/100Mw to 475MWh/350MW: https://www.pacificgreen.com/energy-parks/energy-park-case-s... . It's easy to run the numbers, easier to make a payback calculator with AI. Take a look at the Anker E5000 / Ecoflow Stream 5000, and run the numbers yourself, I'd be interested to see what the payback would be for you.
In the UK, solar is fairly ineffective in the winter as the sun barely comes over the horizon for not many hours a day.
True, but if you get cheap power from solar for the rest of the year, and charge the battery from the grid off peak when there's no solar to charge, you should end up paying less than just the standard rate.
I import more than I export in December and January, but for every other month of the year it’s the reverse by some margin. My annual electricity bill is net negative, and the installation cost will be paid off in 7 years. The numbers would be even better in, say, Spain, but they are perfectly adequate here, despite suboptimal latitude.
Incidentally, the grid only knows about my exports. Self-consumption manifests as demand reduction, so UK solar production and electricity consumption is probably higher than aggregate figures suggest.
This is great, maybe!
There are lots of factors that feed into this: lots of solar, batteries, more efficiency, improved insulation.
Some others: increase of heat pumps, energy poverty, reduction in industrial energy (both due to good and bad reasons)
Ultimately though, its not about how much energy per capita, its about the sources of energy, and how effectively they are used... my heat pump uses infinity more electricity than my boiler, but far more effectively uses the underlying energy source.
Seems generally like a good thing? I know the biggest difference I can think of in my lifetime is just how much better insulated houses are. Not on a par with Scandinavia, but still massively improved from even the peak electricity consumption period in the charts of 2005. I wonder how much that contributes to the overall reduction in demand.
Only 9% of the UK is electric only heating [1], so I suspect heating is not a large driver here.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
Just an observation, but my first thought was how energy demand strongly correlates with economic growth and wondered if the article could be cast in that light. Might be fun to overlay that graph with UK gilt rates
edit: helpful robot boyfriend plotted it https://i.imgur.com/Hp199vV.png
That link is particularly helpful for UK users, "Content not available in your region".
Isn’t most of the housing in the UK from the 1970’s too?
No? It would be pretty remarkable if the majority of all UK housing was built in a single decade. If you meant to say 'from before the 1970s' then that might be a more defensible claim. But old houses can be upgraded with double glazing, insulation, etc.
No it's a catastrophic failure of planning and institutional nerve.
Explain. Nobodys going without power.
UK has some of the highest costs of power in the world. There's a lot of demand destruction there, a lot of industries left. due to high costs.
What were the prices like relative to the rest of the world 20-40 years ago when most of that industry was offshored?
Which industries? If you're going to make that claim be specific. The UK has deindustrialised since the 70s which was nothing to do with electricity costs or availability. Any recent industries leaving are not covered by the stats here so would be pretty irrelevant, which means you're not talking about those, you're talking about something else for it to cover the period between the 70s and now.
We have expensive, potentially unreliable (if an interconnect fails we are completely fucked so certainly fragile), energy.
Energy is what allows modernity to function, we have made it so expensive that no one can make anything in Britain just in time for hard power and manufacturing to be really important again.
Chemicals, metals, pottery, glass,fertiliser etc are all basically impossible to do competitively in Britain.
Energy has only been expensive recently, and there has been zero issue with power supply beyond silly tabloid fear mongering. So between the 70s and lets say 10 years ago, the argument for expensive power really does not hold true.
It can be good or bad depending on what's driving the change. Improving efficiency, assuming it comes at a reasonable cost, is generally good.
If people are just going without, then that's generally bad.
They arent going without. Blackouts/brownouts are exceptionally rare in the UK.
That's fine for residential customers. But if there isn't cheap, reliable excess capacity then that inhibits industrial growth. Low economic growth rates cause everyone to go without.
The UK doesn't really rely on industrial growth for the economic growth it has.
Right, that's one of the reasons why UK economic growth has been so anemic.
The UK deindustrialize themselves they stopped making things that reduced the energy that the used to use.
jevon's paradox says that improved efficiencies would increase consumption
I see a lot of comments here see "per capita" and think "residential consumption" - but the decrease is more indicating of general deindustrialization
If houses get more efficient that doesn’t mean we build more houses? A case where jevons paradox doesn’t apply?
houses using less energy means energy is cheaper for everyone else, f.e. industry
If you import 12 million people in 20 years, your energy generation, water provision, and housing affordability are all going to fall off a cliff vs demand.
Why would energy generation fall off a cliff if the population increases by 12 million? How does that makes sense?
It’s measured per capita
The incandescent to LED switch is a major factor, but most things have become more efficient, a Sky box uses 30x less power than the 90s.
I wonder if they're paying less than the 70s?
In the '70s you weren't guaranteed to get the electricity you paid for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
> From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Services deemed essential (e.g. hospitals, telephone switchboards, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses) were exempt. Television companies were required to cease broadcasting at 22:30 to conserve electricity [...] The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974.
But nonetheless: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...
We're currently paying a lot more than usual because:
1) we have to pay off operators for the billions of foreign investment they put into new wind and solar farms and grid storage batteries. If we didn't tempt them with a good RoI, they'd invest elsewhere, and we'd still be burning coal. The cost of this is going down year on year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
2) we're paying for new transmission capacity and replacing worn out transmission route. The fact we don't already have it, which we could've had by charging more for electricity in the 2000s and building it out decades ago, is why today we face enormous curtailment costs today, as we can't get all this wind power from where it's generated to where it's consumed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottlene...
3) our market arrangement is based on everyone bidding to supply power, and we pay everyone who generates the same rate as the highest necessary bidder. Thus the moment that there isn't enough wind power, or there is but it can't get to the region it's needed (see point 2), in come the gas turbines and given that Russia's trying to destroy Ukraine, gas is astronomically expensive. The sooner we solve our bottlenecks and decommission all the gas turbines, the better.
Only for three months, and then only due to a labor dispute.
Are those numbers already corrected for inflation?
Electricity in the UK has been reliable my entire life. Lived in the UK for 30 of the last 50 years and can remember four or five power cuts.
Isn't this a good thing? I mean, is there a direct correlation between electricity usage and country = better?
Over the 20th century, people switched from fuel based lighting, heating and cooking to electric, and acquired laundry machines, dishwashers, fridges, TVs, air conditioning etc etc. So electricity was a pretty good proxy for a certain aspect of quality of life. It might be a less useful measure in the developed world in the 21st century as we have kind of plateaued on energy-intensive appliances and are more focused on efficiency, and because other aspects of quality of life like pollution, work, mental health etc may be more salient.
I mean, what do you expect out of a resource poor island? The only reason the UK was on the map is because it has intelligent, well spoken people that could make deals and exploit the resources of their colonies. That’s not enough when you don’t have colonies. It’s reverting to the mean.
Seems like a bit of misconception given it has coal (more relevant historically), iron, North Sea gas, a temperate climate, fisheries and coastline, plenty of arable land and more recently massive potential for renewable energy.
We may genuinely have the worst energy market in the developed world. It's going to get cheaper and reliable any day soon - George monbiot told me so it must be true.