Last week Miliband published his risible "Clean Power 2030 Action Plan", piling on yet more nonsense atop the supposedly supportive NESO report of a couple of weeks ago which ostensibly provided cover for his & Starmer's disingenuous retreat from "100% decarbonisation by 2030" to "100% always meant 95%". That's a lot of reading there, if you're so minded. Don't expect much[1] intellectual consistency, though.
Anyhow, whatever target he finally declares to be what he really meant all along, one of Mili's ideas is for some kind of 'bonus' to encourage developers to use UK supply chains instead of, as at present, importing just about everything including the workforce. I can report that would-be new renewables developers are all very keen to be given this bonus, in whatever shape or form it materialises - to the point where they are putting their plans on hold until they learn the details! Unfortunately, even the fingers-crossed "endorsements" of Mili's breakneck 2030 timetable state that there isn't a nanosecond to be wasted (code for "it's impossible, matey") - so this new cause of delay (among very many one might list) could prove to be a pretext for yet another volte face. Most likely, I guess, the ditching of the UK Supply Chain thing[2]. By way of support for this cynical view: FID has just been announced on Phase 1 of our very first Carbon Capture & Storage project[3] - and the developers have announced a "non-binding ambition" to source 60% of their stuff from UK supply chains. How very amusing.
And of course the same goes for the building industry - in spades! (see what I did there?) 1.5m new houses (sorry - homes: we now learn a significant % will be converted office blocks) cannot remotely be built with nothing but indigenous supply & labour. Nor the building standards that so many activists believe they were promised would be imposed on housing developers - for energy efficiency / heat pumps / solar panels / disabled access etc etc. There's another target ripe for downwards revision.
In amongst all this oh-so-cynical realism, we learn that in the New Year ... Mili is off to China! - that well-known "developing country" (for COP purposes) which is the source of almost all solar panels and much else besides. What, do we imagine, is the purpose of his mission? To tell them they must locate their factories in Sunderland, & stop burning coal? To lecture them on human rights? To demand the return of Hong Kong? To stop sending weapons components to Putin? Do tell us, Ed - what will constitute success for your mission? We only ask because we want to know.
ND
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[1] I was about to say "any / whatsoever" there: but in fact there is a thin strand of consistency detectable. Having not formally decided whether or not to extend the wretched Drax's baleful biomass subsidies beyond 2027, Miliband pays lip-service at least, to the possibility Drax stops generating thereafter. Personally, I'd be very surprised if he held his nerve against the blatant subsidy-farmers at Drax - but this formal reserving of the position is at least a modest positive sign.
[2] See, for example, the sad little story of the Vestas Isle of Wight turbine blade production / job losses. How are those "650,000 good new jobs" shaping up, Ed?
[3] Obviously this announcement of "CCS" at Teesside came with a great fanfare. Look closer, and you'll notice that its primary sponsors, BP and Equinor, are committing only to the new gas-fired power plant at this stage. That's the low-hanging fruit, of course, and in any event, CCS or no CCS, is likely to have a role as part of Mili's "fleet of gas-fired back-up" which he now realises he always meant to retain. We'll believe the commitment to the actual CCS aspects when we see it, Ed ...
29 comments:
AFAIK in just over two weeks it'll be illegal to have a new build with gas fired central heating.
It costs £500 per radiator per year to heat an electric home.
That is just the heating cost.
The lights and cooking, General power, are extra.
6 electric or heat pump radiators on in a home? That’s one in each bedroom. 1 kitchen. 1 Dining room/ living room. 1 bathroom.lets say six.
That’s £3000. But your home will not be warm. Not unless they are on for a lot longer and a higher temperature than gas.
You could not have a few on. We run with 3. Which means mould in several rooms. Have to clean it off once a week.
And we don’t use sone rooms at all in the winter. Like in the 1950’s it’s gather into one room all.
I have a hoodie and fleece on indoors, at all times, November to February.
£5-£6,000 is DOUBLE the cost of gas/electric.
I know.
I have an all electric home.
And it has all the eco insulation.
It just can’t be heated except at great, great cost.
Not that I wish to be a Doubting Thomas, BQ, but have you ever had a Heat Loss Calculation done? I have heat pumps, have the house heated to something akin to a Caribbean island and only (okay, only as in “only”) pay £3,500 for all energy bills a year in a 1,650 sq. ft. (admittedly super-insulated) 1990’s vintage house.
Yes. I have. And pay £4500 on a similar size property. Which is why it is cold. As to heat it to WARM would take it to £5-6,000.
And the 'games room' ( its a summerhouse. So, that's fair enough. Single skin. etc. }
Dining room , Are unused in winter.
Only, its 1970s vintage. That's the issue, of course.
All that eco cladding and lost insulation moved us from Epc G to E.
North facing too.
And its the extensions that make it so cold. so much glass!
We are very close to not bothering with another year of it.
I went to see a new build only yesterday.
More expensive. Another £100k. Further from work. Another 25 mins. Smaller. 300ft less maybe.
It will cost what, £15k to move? With the taxes?
House ready for summer 2025. But .. will be the last of the plots WITH GAS.
Means not retiring for yet another 5 years. if ever.
But still. considering. Quite seriously.
Not just the heating. of course. Other factors.
Could put two woodburners instead for £15k. Replace the hot water for a condensing system. £5-£10k was the last quote.
Its open plan. I like open plan. But we have sealed it back a bit.
Went to some friends recently. Similar property.
They have been putting in walls across their wonderful designer kitchen.To retain the heat better.
The house I sold before this was an 1860s townhouse. 6 bedroom. Windows that didn't properly close. Insulation .. non existent. Twin, gable roof. So the center of the house was a flat roof without insulation. Huge ceilings. Huge rooms.
Offices ground floor. And studio.
People in there from 5am until 5pm every weekday.
The bill ?
Same as this three bed.
But it was far more cosy.
"admittedly super-insulated 1990’s vintage house"
Try an 1840s solid wall core (no foundation to speak of) with 1930s solid wall extension and a 2003 addition, the last being the only decently insulated bit. Double glazing and loft insulation but we still need the log burner in winter. Just fitted a new oil boiler, just hope it'll last 20 years as its predecessor did. ASHP would be a waste of good electricity. Shaded by woodland (not ours) so no solar panels even if the old roof could hold them.
Still, when we moved here it was metal single-glazed, and heating was from a solid fuel stove that did "central heating" and kept the bedrooms above freezing. Winter 1996 was pretty chill.
"a significant % will be converted office blocks"
I read an interview with a US real estate man. He said that a few office blocks are suitable for conversion but that it's usually more economic to demolish them. Is that true in Britain do you think?
OT, more car plant closure
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/audi-confirms-plans-shut-brussels-plant-sale-falls-through
Deja vu strikes again. Vestas closed the same factory back in 2009 with around 600 job losses. A few years later, they came back having received enough 'Government' money to make them see the error of their ways. This time they are getting the Government money up front.
Have you kicked the tyres of a new Audi recently (and seen the woeful, cheap materials and patchy build quality) or experienced the non-existent levels of customer care, couldn’t-give-a-stuff attitude from the sales staff, awful reliability and delusional pricing? If not, your surprise at Audi’s travails is understandable.
Anyone unfortunate to actually have bought one of their miserable, sorry excuses for a premium brand vehicle, by contrast, would only wonder why it took so long for the pfennig to drop.
From the document published:
"For the first time, we will have eyes on a programme of clean power investment estimated to be around £40 billion per year for the next 6 years. "
We all know where this £240 billion is coming from. No, not private sector investment, but the taxpayer. Either from increased taxation or (more likely) increases in levies on our energy bills.
How are we getting cheaper energy again?
"How are we getting cheaper energy again?"
You're getting cheaper energy in the same way you're getting men suddenly able to call themselves women, ie you're being gaslit to f*ck by the political class, and if you say anything to the contrary you can expect Plod to be knocking on your door pretty soon.
Matt, I'm not sure of the exact breakdown but in terms of capital expenditure cash outlay, a large part of it - prob the majority - will indeed be private money: BUT it'll be underwritten by us, one way or the other. And most of that on elec bills, as you say.
Thus far, less than £40bn in total has been budgeted from taxpayer funds.
Tim Worstall touches on what may be happening here - counterfeit currency and counterfeit ideology.
His notion is that production of fake $100 bills is important to North Korea and that debasement of currency has percolated down to the humanities (and other) departments of universities. All need the money but have nothing usable to offer in exchange (nukes not being a consumer item). No one is going to hang Kim Jong and no professors have been buried at the tide's edge (traditional punishment).
The notion extends to matters Green. We would all like there to be green energy but supplies are very few and come with major snags - cost, variability and pollution being but a few. In a world of genuine currency purveyors of truly Green tech would find very limited sales, CCS would be laughed out of court.
But politicians don't live in a genuine cost/benefit world. They live in an ethereal world where profit is an unknown vulgarity barely of interest even to the Treasury and loss is represented by protests and placards and headlines. Miliband lives in such a world and it would be an unwise civil servant that declares the Emperor has no clothes - especially when there are no suitable clothes for that Emperor.
jim - if Audis are crap that is very bad for Germany, very bad for the EU, and indirectly very bad for us. It's not as if UK manufacturers are pinching the German car market.
Germany is in the end the EU paymaster, being the only nation other than Norway with export surpluses and the only major manufacturer.
Maybe it's just taken 10 years for Merkel's Million Man Mistake to bear fruit, but I think NS2 is a more proximate cause.
Difficult, then, to explain Tesla's success in a Germany which was "stricken" supposedly by the loss of NS2 capacity. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-gets-green-light-german-authorities-first-stage-plant-expansion-2024-10-15/
And, as we've covered ad nauseum here, while NS2's ultimate sad end sealed the matter pretty conclusively, in the run up, the poor little pipeline seemed to be especially afflicted with technical issue after technical issue -- compressor failures, "problems" with parts, "hazardous" safety concerns https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gazprom-off-line-nord-stream-compressor-station-now-deemed-hazardous-2022-09-05/ that, if Russia so demonstrably couldn't look after it's asset base and operations, it might not have been the best thing to rely on.
Oh, and if that wasn't enough, Russia throttling supplies and, eventually refusing day-ahead trades in 2021 meant that DSOs struggled to make linepack and prices headed into the stratosphere in what could reasonably be described as market manipulation https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17816858221084761
So, all in all, when considering Russian-supplied gas, we're probably best shot of it, no?
@Clive: TBH Audi is beyond my price and interest region. My father had an Audi way way back, wretched nuisance of a thing.
I think Germany's problem is the same as Britain's, mass manufacturing has moved east. Add to this the leccy and Russian gas uncertainty has made mass manufacture less attractive. Germany merely managed to delay the process by 20 years without thinking what to do about it.
Which means there will soon be plenty of German speaking strategy and brand consultants on LinkedIn, good luck to them. Still, they retain top end machine tools - for now. Ms Merkel managed to find a use for the million, now not so much.
Those who become hungry and cold become less fussy. Chuck on another tonne of lignite.
Probably just coincidence then that Germany is going down the tubes ... from today "The only good thing about Germany’s just-released Ifo index is that it is the final major macro indicator released this year."
Wolfgang Münchau has devoted an entire book to how Germany’s malaise has been decades in the making and is overly-determined (has many different causes but each one on its own is perfectly capable of generating structural decline).
Of equal interest is how “blood and soil” ethos (my choice of phrase not his) leads to a deep conservatism and inability to adapt in business — alongside a deep mistrust and lack of resiliency in the face of disruptors (like ICE passenger cars being in runoff and China not needing Germany for “the things that make things” for example) and a deep technophobic sentiment. Worse, if that were possible, is an ossified reactionary class succumbing to simplistic historical longing as a fix (“oh, if only we still had cheap Russian pipeline gas…)
What happened to the UK then? The reason I harp on Germany so much is that they had these wierd things like industry and like balance of payments surpluses, that the UK abandoned in the Thatcher/Blair years.
They seemed pretty resilient post-WW2, considering the place had been flattened and a good chunk of the population starved.
I’m pretty ancient. And all my adult life, sage voices (which may or may not simply have been peddling an agenda) have been telling me, oh, no, that’s a really awful, terrible, no good thing, you can’t survive — let alone prosper — on an industrial policy which comprises just finance, legal services, academia, real estate, fashion, arts and entertainment, tourism and so on. And no deficit spending, you have to “pay your way” not let there national debt creep up endlessly. That way lies national ruin. It, whatever it is, will catch up with you eventually.
What you have to do instead is dig stuff out the ground or make something tangible, like useful widgets.
Many, as I say, have said so.
Yet, still, here we are.
Clive ... as Sherlock Holmes said
On Münchau, this interview is easy listening & v. informative.
https://novaramedia.com/2024/12/15/germany-russia-and-the-death-of-europe/
(Cheaper than buying the book, too...)
I’m just finishing up my book on the late 1950’s UK. A period I know almost nothing about. The analysis for UK underperformance is; a little of all the usual suspects.
1. Boom bust economics
2. Too large a military
3. Too much trying to hang on to Empire. ( though, not really. It says it was more about not trying to let all the pink bits of the globe turn into terrible civil wars.)
4. The welfare state
5. Not joining the nascent EU at the start.
6, immigration. Windrush and all that.
But each of those arguments has a counter that disproves the theory.
Boom bust affected the USA too. And the new EU,. But much less so.
The ridiculously large military, was not that much larger than France’s. And they fought two very, very colonial costly wars in indochina and Algeria. (Badly losing both.)
The welfare state didn’t appear to cause much problem. Almost full employment through to 1963.
Windrush too. People came, because there were jobs here. And too few people to do them. Not because of welfare.
Not joining the EU. Well..we know how that story ends.
The conclusion appears to be. Everything was .. sort of ok. So, let’s just carry on as we are. The lack of management or union, worker or employer modernisation gets the blame.
‘We thought everything was fine.’
But Germany and Italy and France knew it wasn’t. And they had no choice but to adopt new methods and plant.
The UK growth in the 1955 to 1965 period looks very impressive by today’s dismal figures. But it was half the other 7 eu nations.
I'm no economic historian. But in broad-brush terms, when you look at the pernicious union 'militancy' that was the backdrop to my younger years (late 50s - 70s) I have to believe that "commonwealth immigration" was as much to keep wage-costs down as anything else (Enoch Powell, as health minister, certainly contributed to this, along with the textile factory owners etc etc). The alternative was probably a wage explosion before more investment in automation etc could kick in. These macro-misjudgments happen and, in the UK's case, continue to this day - when we don't even have an overweening TU movement (although I suppose that might come round again in certain circumstances - they still have some of the infrastructure)
The Münchau thesis signposted above elaborates another nation's strategic misjudgments. There's this also, from the FT:
https://www.ft.com/content/0a538c85-27fb-400e-ae8b-f13fb6ce4e72
Any analysis of UK economic performance in the immediate post war period must take into account the fact that when a decent proportion of the worlds capital stock has just been bombed to buggery, and plenty more of it lies at the bottom of the ocean, any economy capable of producing stuff will do OK, regardless of how uncompetitive they might be in an absolute sense. When your customers are desperate for anything your product can be rubbish and expensive, and your customer service appalling, and you will still sell everything you can produce (when your workers are not on strike). Of course this Happy Time does not last forever..........
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to-reach-new-peak-and-remain-at-near-record-levels-for-years
"Yesterday's fuel", eh?
"on an industrial policy which comprises just finance, legal services, academia, real estate, fashion, arts and entertainment, tourism and so on".
Absolutely fine, it is the modern economy way. None of that vulgar steelmaking or coal heaving or making cars. Let others do that, we can gently drink lapsang suchong while developing brilliant economic strategies and handing them down from on high.
A few snags though, we have not changed the schooling system to produce thousands and thousands of Dom Cummings replicants. In fact we have deliberately cut back the schools for the common herd. The private schools, the bigger academies and imports providing (not) enough surgeons, doctors, marketing strategists, lawyers, artists and ppe grads.
Those are making out like bandits (not the doctors). But in the neglected parts of the country the place is more like a rathole. We see that shoplifting, stabbing, drug dealing are the modern economy in those parts. The new jobs nirvana has not quite reached those places. And the police chiefs and lawyers read from the playbook 'we take all crime very seriously'. And nothing, they too are the new economy.
Those nasty old industries provided a wage for the masses. Government did not have to bother with education much. Things moved along as Adam Smith told us. In those happy days taxes provided monies such that 'care in the community' could be a thing. The nuthouses, poor houses et al could all be closed and flogged off. Then someone stole our lunch (and we gave it away). Some silver tongued lying later and here we are.
When grammar schools were trashed by privately educated ministers (Crosland, Williams) on grounds of social inclusion, we were in the middle of a run of state-educated prime ministers, from Wilson to John Major. Then the Fettes and Eton crowd had a comeback.
I think I've said before, round my way if the kid gets into Pates Grammar, a reasonably well off parent will save a fortune on school fees and can take the family somewhere exotic to celebrate.
When I was a kid in the South Yorkshire Labour heartlands in the 1970’s, the lefty educational establishment quickly intuited that the working class stock I was from had a great career waiting for them down the pits (deep mined coal) — “there’s enough coal down there to last a lifetime”.
Not much else was offered to us. Perhaps a dangerous, often injurious job in the grossly overmanned and inefficient steel industry. Or, if none of those suited, manual labour in agriculture living in a tied cottage.
Those were the liars. A surprising majority of my age group at the time saw through their “blood, sweat and toil” test of employment purity and couldn’t wait to escape to the heathen, debauched world of retail management, IT consultancy, or, horror of horrors, derivatives trading.
Me? I always consider I had a lucky escape.
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