YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Even parliament acknowledges the effect this has had: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/139767/pdf/

That is the most astoundingly smug and tone-deaf question I have ever heard.

But the raw infrastructure was super reliable in the 70s. If anything we've used digital systems to chip away at the safety margins of the original designs

On the other hand I have lived in multiple places of varying sorts and regions of England (from London to a village in the North) so I think most places have reliable power, especially towns and cities. Other people's experience is mostly the same.

I feel as though there are things in that auction data which are obvious to the generators and maybe the network operator but are utterly opaque to the general public and might help understand why things are as they are or aren't how they might be.

- reflective housing is super inefficient (~70% losses on the bounced light off typical material, at the top end expensive stuff still ~23%), still better than just losing the light upwards but not as many lumens on the road as a lab test would show

- Today LEDs are more efficient than sodium

Some math: 100W HPS cobra head lamp prdouces 9.5k lumens, including ballast it draws ~133W from the wall. Lab test shows about 70% of the lamp's light leaves the fixture (with the rest being lost in the housing) leading to ~7k lumens exiting. Roughly 53 lm/W.

LED cobra head lamps get like ~125 lm/W on the low end + fade much more slowly than sodium

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.

If one consumed nonfiction media one might get a different impression.

Absolutely. That thing is loud.

In a london flat we rented, the washer-dryer was in a cupboard in the bedroom. So yes. At least it had one.

Those minor conveniences are a drop in the bucket when it comes to total CO2 output.

Whenever I go shopping, it's insane how much they heat most places, while people are wearing heavy winter jackets.

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.

I'm not sure any of that makes heatpumps technically impossible, but it makes them more expensive and less efficient

Meanwhile the efficiency (COP) of a heat pump drops the higher its temperature differential is. So trying to keep the water loop temperature the same is a non-starter. (The same problem can happen with high efficiency condensing natural gas boilers which have much lower flue temperatures)

(From an American perspective although I'll convert the units) - older radiator systems were designed for water temps of around 80C, room temp around 20C, so that is 60C (60 K/Kelvin, really) delta-T. Whereas if a heat pump wants to put out 50C water for half the delta-T (30K), you then need twice the amount of radiator surface area to transfer the same amount of heat. The system will work fine in the shoulder seasons when not much heat is required, but at the coldest nights design temperature it will not be able to keep up and your indoor air temperature will then drop despite the heat being on.

(Pipe sizing enters into it as well but isn't as straightforward to explain)

I'm sorry but as an outsider to me this straight up just sounds like kicking the can down the road! Let's get it fixed, build more solar, get more power in the grid, deregulate personal solar so its an attractive incentive to get more people generating power, etc.. Rather than "you need to use less" mentality, especially while people literally die to the heatwaves the UK has been getting recently..

It's been pretty clear that globally the grid operators are all very much lazy and would rather increase prices and reap benefits short term than adding more capacity to the grid, even where i live (in Brazil) its very much clear that grid operators too would rather raise your bill and collude to add more taxes if you want to generate your own solar than to get more supply in the grid and make the bills cheaper (we have a minimum bill you have to pay even if you have full self-generated solar AND a thing called a "solar tax" because of course, the sun is the govt's property, gotta pay a tax for using it..).

Several energy suppliers websites have pages dedicated to this very topic.

The current 2035 target originates in the ministerial 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.

England: from 24 March 2027

Scotland: since 1 April 2024.

The legislation doesn't mandate heat pumps specifically, it mandates >=75% lower carbon emissions than homes built to the 2013 standards, which effectively requires heat pumps, solar panels, and significantly improved insulation. Build and running costs aren't measured, it's quite possible new homes will cost more to buy and run, and could be smaller to compensate.

You remember "2035" because in 2021 the government announced it "wanted" to ban gas boilers entirety by that date: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58959045

... but as far as I know, never enacted legislation to ban their sale or fitting in existing houses. And that aspirational policy has been announced as dropped multiple times, at least since last July, most recently today

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.

I think most of these appliances sold today have at least some sort of "delay start" function. We use that to do exactly what you describe. Not even for nght tariff, it's just convenient to time it like that.

OP was making a fair point that not everybody has the same amount of time and energy (or money) to tolerate shifts in their routine, which in the context of a "personal vs collective responsibility" style argument is entirely reasonable.

By the same token, if only the _rich_ have the freedom to make such behavior changes for the sake of conservation it will only ever have a token impact, and in many cases the "correct" level to make an efficiency pitch at is the community: a decent light rail system will always outperform everyone driving their own vehicle to work/the store/downtown in terms of space and energy efficiency.

...but, to get people to buy into such "collectivist" systems, you often have to get them to contend with some perceived reduction in personal convenience: yes, a train doesn't need a parking lot and uses less gas per passenger-mile, but then you're beholden to the train schedule. It's exactly _that_ sentiment that I find frustrating in advocating for sustainable civic design.

To OP's point: whatever that "collectivist" option is necessarily has to contend that standards of accessibility and convenience are not constant across the population. That doesn't inherently mean "the poor should consume more," but that "hang dry your laundry" isn't an option for everyone in the current dominant socioeconomic structure.

Having to install battery capacity in your own house is a step backwards.

If water was unavailable for 4 hours a day, you would suggest putting in your own rainwater filtration system.

no we arent. China added the entire capacity of the US grid in solar in the last 4 years and they are accelerating. That is bananas. We've barely increased total grid capacity in the last 20 years. It should be a national embarrassment. Energy abundance is possible, and one of the greatest ways to improve peoples lives. There are no energy poor countries that are rich.

Half the state of Nevada should be a solar farm at this point if anyone actually cared about climate change, and that would do 10x to imrpve peoples lives than telling them not to use the dryer.

again, the degrowth mindset relies on a fundamental paucity of imagination and will to actually solve the problem.

Well, fracking kind of is, we stopped after we tried it and it caused ground tremors.

Mammoths disappeared without human intervention, for example.

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...

That's a very weak straw manning of their (admittedly not strongly stated) position.

You'd look better if you had a shot at steel manning where they're coming from rather than adopting such a weak and trivial rebuttal.

They installed the entire grid capacity of the US in 4 years and they are accelerating. THere is a path to infinite free energy, but youd rather worry about doing your laundry at night.

In fact, I've only ever met people who wanted more things and a higher quality of life. While many green/degrowth political policies are based around convincing people to consume less, I've met consumers and found that's not what they want. It's why most environmental policies fail, consumers want more things at a lower cost, and are willing to import goods from overseas if the environmental regulations at home prevent them from being created there.

For the future, it means degrowth policies will fail. The only solution to climate change is to develop and grow our way out of it. It will be easier to live on the moon than it will be to convince consumers to accept less than they have now.

No, e-waste is not a serious issue on the scale of climate change. It would be nice to fix it, but either way its impact is fairly minor.

And I don't doubt that most industries will be sustainable within the next 30-50 years.

Government should represent the people. To make it as small as possible just makes the voice of the people the smaller possible.

> They have no business being employers, owning property etc.

What is owned by the state is owned by all citizens. A state that owns nothing is a poor state that needs to borrow money and eventually default and fail.

> more often then not nationalized industries are terribly run

That is not true. Many countries have national corporations that run better and give better services that for profit ones. Look at the USA education system as an example of for-profit failing. The countries that run national corporations badly, are the countries that just plainly run badly, and are corrupt. Their private sector is no better that their public one.

The question is sometimes, were they terrible run or did they just suffer from bad investment?

Because often they got little money but also had universal service requirements.

Badly privatizing these companies made things worse, not better. Just nationalizing monopolizes is a bad idea, as well as just smashing them into 100s of pieces and leaving behind a mess (see railways).

Also those countries that did things well, see Telecoms in the Nordics, or rail in Switzerland often did it state lead.

And ironically, for example rail required more subsidies after privatization. While also losing the amazing research and forward thinking organization that was British Rail.

I would argue improving these national industries would have been far easier and more successful then privatizing them. And ironically often cheaper.

You're doubling down on the misrepresentation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public safety seems like the clear primary motivation here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm genuinely surprised that you view the UK's industrial past so negatively - as the cause and not the solution to slums. It was the national pride and joy at the time and people celebrated it for raising their standard of living (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition). The terraced houses of the 1800's were actually built in part due to government initiative to improve housing for the working class beyond what was possible in comparable European cities. You even state that your own house from the UK's industrial heyday is up to modern standards! That's quite an achievement!

Would you apply this same logic (that industrialization degrades housing) to China - where the replacement of slums by modern apartments is usually seen to be a consequence of the vast industrial capacity?

Of course, the improved material standards of living from industrialization come at the cost of air quality and pollution - but these are likely solvable problems in the long-term.

The important question is why manufacturing GDP per capita in the UK has fallen below comparable countries (not why it is below its historic peak - an unfair strawman), and whether or not this is for the best and/or inevitable - as you and others have suggested.

You've actually made the case that it is bad and evitable better than I did - all of the countries you mentioned produce more industrial GDP per capita than the UK in 2026, despite being physically smaller (well only if you exclude arctic tundra), and this a large source of their relatively high wealth and improved standard of living. All have different industrial policies to the UK (markedly, since the 90s). All previously produced less than the UK per a capita when they were relatively poorer, and produce more per capita now that they are relatively richer. You suggest there are other more important reasons than industry, but don't bother name them.

Sweden was famously one of the industrial greats (and still is, for its size) - if this surprises you then it's likely you know very little about modern industry, let alone history and policy. With most of the iron ore in Europe, it had an enormous primary steel making industry in the 70s, which also suffered and required state intervention / restructuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_crisis - Sweden now has double the manufacturing GDP per capita of the UK. That's one of its primary sources of wealth and high standard of living.

Switzerland is an outlier for many reasons but also produces far more manufacturing GPD per capita than the UK (maybe 4 or 5x) in 2026. As a late to industrialise region, it famously pulled itself up from a collection of agrarian cantons into a powerful industrialised federation. Again, modern Switzerland is famous for its industrial output.

Netherlands also makes about 2-3x the manufacturing GDP per capita as the UK, and benefits from some outlier effects, but is perhaps otherwise very similar to the UK.

Denmark makes about 3x the manufacturing GDP per capita. The government is highly active industry through all kinds of strategic public-private partnerships, and Danes have broadly rejected corporate control of their industrial economy through a swathe of legal mechanisms and alternate governance structures. The Danish are proud to invest in sovereign industry which improves their quality of life.

All of these countries (unlike the UK since the 90s) continue to maintain industrial policies which consist more or less of moderate protectionism beyond the EU, moderate state intervention in the key industries, state financing for key industries, state funding of research and development and education, tax subsidies, high taxation to support welfare and other labor market interventions which supported industry transitions, support for unions and labor relations, rejected deep privitisation and maintained state ownership of essential industrial infrastructure, safeguarded local ownership of key industries to some extent (through legal intervention, state spending, public-private partnerships, 'fonde', or at the very least laws requiring local governance).

The bottom line is that the UK continues to give it all away for pennies and the man on the street is convinced this is a good thing - even though the countries you reach to for comparison have all chosen a different path! It's striking that you take issue with me for recommending the very things which you celebrate in other countries.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Industry is poverty, slums, and pollution.

No, you're not. We know all this stuff (I studied economics at school, and we are taught all about our industrial history again and again and again from the age of about eight onwards).

You seem to suggest that we're somehow oblivious or ill-educated about this. We are not. We just do not think that it is meaningful to pretend that we are not mostly a services and knowledge-driven economy.

It is stupid to keep prattling on about what was lost to very much physically larger countries with more room for every kind of factory complex, poorer workers, poorer pollution controls, corrupt central-planning autocracies, and worse human rights.

Of course technology does that. Of course the expertise eventually collects nearer the manufacturing. Of course we no longer do that kind of work.

But you are not comparing like with like on any level, and you are actually being ahistorical yourself in misleading ways.

It was in fact not ludicrous at all that the early years of the British industrial revolution, that started in the UK, could meet the demand of an unindustrialised world, was it? It's just about being first and having lots of space to grow into.

In the 21st century we now have a services-led economy. And there are dolphins in the Thames again.

At any rate this feels like it is just more HN anti-British sentiment wrapped up in intellectualism. It's tedious and it ignores a lot more about British history than it takes in, while eliding that contemporary progress elsewhere is dependent on human rights often no better than early 18th Century Britain, on planned economies Britain has never had, and on state-corporate corruption that is beginning to put even our worst product, the East India Company, in the shade.

(FWIW there is still precision optics manufacture in the UK, including Taylor Hobson, a company that has been doing this for 140 years, there is still electronics manufacture, we have several firms that make us the leading manufacturers of small satellites in Europe, we are still AFAIK the centre of excellence of microsatellites, we may no longer have ARM owned in the UK but the chips are still designed here. And I think "except for jet engines" is kind of deserving of a particularly hilarious asterisk)