Kenny Hay

Wouldn’t they have just ramped up VRE, LNG, coal and maybe have thought twice about killing their nuclear power portfolio?

I think economics is an extremely powerful force in ensuring energy system resilience, especially for rich nations like Germany

The current transition to a renewables system may be the first mass scale primary energy source adoption to occur without catestrophic loss of life.

Key stakeholders (gov, unions, industry) have built on past lessons like piper alpha, but key to this is that renewables is intrinsically safer tech.

This new industrial pipeline is contingent on projects being in the UK electricity market with revenue certainty supported by UK bill payers via a CFD. The failure of the X-Links to be backed by UK gov should serve as a warning of the material risks an indy Scotland would bring to ScotWind, etc.

Any opinions on whether they could go down a PPA route? Feels too big and risky without gov backing now.

I hope so as. The infrastructure upgrades will benefit the country for decades and shouldn’t be shouldered by the current generation of bill payers. If it does then net zero populism risks derailing the whole thing.

Interesting…..another thought is that rich people generally externalise their costs of pollution to the poor, and so have more to lose, or will have cognitive dissonance, if they see themselves as part of the problem

Was thinking exactly the same thing the other day.

Can’t escape the feeling that the data center thing is also a house of cards built on catastrophically over-optimistic assumptions on how much people and businesses are willing to pay for AI.

Net zero is not a perpetual drain on national wealth that your article insinuates.

What the CCC actually says is that a balanced pathway requires net upfront investment peaking at £33bn/yr by 2029, then leading to long term cost savings, with forecast £35bn/yr savings compared to baseline by 2050 due to nature of investments efficiencies of technologies deployed.

It’s good that you reference the CCC and I like a lot of your work, but could you try to educate the public better on what the CCC actually states because £6bn/yr is an over-simplification that would lead to incorrect inferences.

Would be interesting to read!

I have a serious concern right now that the UK government is strangling the O&G industry before the Scotwind and decarb project pipeline delivers meaningful jobs. This will create economic hardship and anti-net zero populism. Labour needs to listen to industry and act.

List from lowest to highest emissions:
Bike
BEV Estate / saloon
BEV SUV
PHEV Estate / saloon
PHEV SUV
ICE Estate / saloon
ICE SUV

In short you are still much better to have a SUV BEV than an ICE estate

God’s country

Yes but that would avoid shitshows like this from happening. For non-recourse debt financed projects you'd expect suppliers to lock in pricing pre-CFD at the request of banks.

I'm more concerned about the underlying signal that this decision sends: that developers will walk away despite the state's sincere efforts to get them to FID. Offshore wind will quickly lose public and political support if ARs are seen as 'heads I win / tails you lose' events.

He also definitely didn’t want the UK to double down on gas without thinking through how that would be weaponised by gas exporting hostile states

As an EV owner I hired an ICEV for the weekend. I forgot how worse they are to drive, the dirtiness and toxicity of a petrol station forecourt, and the high cost of fuel. It felt like a trip back to a technologically poorer time.

Nick Bad Seeds - Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus

Portishead - Third

Cohen - I see a darkness

Bowie - Blackstar

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Tom Waits - Alice

Blur - The Ballad of Darren

Springsteen - Devils and Dust

Mogwai - As the Love Continues

MBV - m b v

Dylan - Time OO Mind

Nick Bad Seeds - Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus

Portishead - Third

Cohen - I see a darkness

Bowie - Blackstar

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Tom Waits - Alice

Blur - The Ballad of Darren

Springsteen - Devils and Dust

Mogwai - As the Love Continues

MBV - m b v

Dylan - Time OO Mind

Maybe we should frame it as net zero vs net death?

bsky.app/profile/adam...

Wrecking the environment is a subsidy that subsidy hating net zero skeptics tend to ignore for some reason

“We warmly welcome you to join us on Team Energy Freedom and Prosperity for Citizens.” is the sort of thing a death cult evangelist would say.

Renewables may be intermittent but they demonstrably reduce gas demand. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a76b...

You’ve missed climate change denier and pretend energy expert Andrew Montford (adissentient) who has spent the past 15 years telling everyone that the wind industry is a pack of cards that is imminently about to go bankrupt. He’s a big fan of ‘affordable’ energy such as … err …. gas and nuclear SMR.

Putting aside our moral obligation to stop recklessly using our biosphere as a sewer, an increasing amount of our national wealth would be frittered away on FF imports. Her pivot away from what has been a cross-party consensus is completely mental.

I can only speak as a Kirk Hill investor, but the key takeaway for me is that the community model has proven resilient to managing agent failure. Although it is sad that Ripple have failed, the model they pioneered works and is why others like Octopus have entered into it.

The promise of psychedelic medicine Nature’s strangest compounds may hold the key to treating mental illness where conventional drugs have failed

“Half of antidepressant users see no benefit. Relapse rates hit 80% after ceasing medication.

A new generation of treatments is on the horizon – led by the work of Dr Ayla Selamoglu at Cambridge University.”

Psychedelic medicine, explained 👇

Indeed, the Kirk Hill MSA with Ripple was terminated a while back and the SPVs have largely moved on. I’m not sure what 1st Energy has actually acquired beyond the old Ripple Dashboard.

Maybe I'm not looking hard enough but demand mobility and elasticity does seem curiously under discussed and analysed compared to supply in the zonal pricing debate.

Brilliant article