The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity.
Once built, the cost of generating power from renewables is very low, so these typically come in with the cheapest bid. Nuclear might come next.
Gas generators often have the highest costs, because they have to buy gas to burn, as well as paying a "carbon price" - a charge for emissions.
The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of electricity needed to meet demand from consumers. This means that even if gas only generates 1% of power at a given time, gas will still set the wholesale price.
Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017.
Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is designed to generate profit. Norway made a different choice. Equinor is majority state-owned, and Norwegian extraction operates within a framework designed to capture resource rents for public benefit. Britain privatised its way out of that option decades ago in the Thatcher-era and has never seriously revisited it.
Analysis from the University of Oxford[1] found that maximising oil and gas extraction from the North Sea would only save households £16 to £82 per year – and this would rely on tax revenues collected being distributed to households to offset their energy bills.
Dr Anupam Sen, co-author of the analysis, said the idea that “draining” the North Sea would make the UK more energy secure and significantly cut household bills is “sheer fantasy”. “We show that regardless of the remaining lifetime of North Sea oil and gas, a ‘drill baby drill’ approach to extraction would actually cost households more money versus continuing on our path to clean energy.”
The authors stress that savings gained from the clean energy transition are recurring annual reductions in bills which would continue indefinitely, whereas North Sea oil and gas are finite resources that would run out around 2040.
Exactly, and the Tories banned onshore wind, and refused to really invest in offshore wind. We've got the North Sea and its perfect for wind farms we should have had for decades
They didn't refuse to invest in offshore wind. Tories were the ones who started this ball rolling in the mid-2010s by breaknecking the removal of non-renewable energy production without any clear plan.
The issue with offshore wind is that it isn't always windy. If you look at modelling with energy system with a high proportion of offshore wind, you need other sources of energy which often isn't factored into the economic return of the original investment.
We are doing this because, for some reason, we have decided there is political capital in paying out these huge subsidies to large companies to produce expensive energy. I would think that would be obvious when the UK has extremely high electricity prices and renewable production is very high...where do you think the money is going? It is going to subsidise inefficient and expensive supply.
Also, one of the primary issues with the UK is that the political system heavily incentivizes people to blame "the other side" for these issues. The Tories were extremely aggressive in moving towards green energy but people who vote for Labour, because they support green energy, will have to believe the opposite. There are other posts on this chain that also blame the Tories for things that didn't happen. In this system, it is very hard for anything good to happen and is how you end up with someone like Starmer who appears to have almost no opinions on anything other than staying in power and keeping the gravy train going for the lads. Not serious. Expect things to get significantly worse.
Our electricity prices are much higher than anywhere else. I remember reading research last year that the cost of government intervention in so high that if gas prices tapered to zero, electricity prices would not fall. It is going to get much, much, much worse.
Labour and the Conservatives are no different from each other. The Tories back then expected the "free market" to take care of everything. And that "free market" has clearly failed British people given where we are. They were "extremely aggressive" in their words (like BoJo back in 2020) but really extremely passive in their actions. Britain really needs grid-scale energy storage to make renewables work and that is its own big challenge.
This is currently called natural gas. You store it in the ground, and in "day tanks" on land connected to pipes.
Nuclear can also be seen in the same way in relation to renewables.
Batteries are currently much further than I ever thought possible, but still nowhere close to being cost effective enough for most areas.
If you forced every solar or wind installation to have at least 48 hours of nameplate capacity in storage, you would get closer to the true cost of deploying renewables. Right now there is a whole lot of cherry picking going on, where investors are taking the profitable easy stuff, collecting subsidies, and then making the hard expensive stuff someone else's problem.
Right now battery deployments cover the few hour duck curve at best, because that's the only profitable way to deploy them. Hopefully the trend continues though!
Come on bro...next election, it will be different this time.
Tories do not back the free market. You said it yourself, the two parties are the same. Elections are irrelevant, both political parties pander towards orthogonal groups of voters, they tell them they are different, and they get in government and will do the same thing. Reform will do the same thing.
Also, the characterisation of what the government is able to do is extremely inconsistent. Able to lock down the whole country by fiat? Happened in an afternoon. Able to approve a 2-bed house twenty miles away from anyone? Sorry mate, need 26 forms, planning authority, need solar panels, need heat pump, etc. One of the big issues the UK has is with the understanding of government, it is the most bizarre mix of extreme libertarianism and extreme authoritarianism. It is a country where police will arrest someone from criticising a politician or the police AND a country where the police are unable to investigate almost all crimes (fraud investigations are outsourced to banks and private companies but there is action at multiple layers of government to control what happens on Twitter).
Storage is not possible. Everyone knows this. What game is being played here? Which other medium-sized country has large amounts of renewables with as much storage as we require. Electricity prices are already ruinously expensive. The solution is simple: do the stuff that works, that is it. The UK is a tale in being unable to do simple things that work.
Interestingly, the reality is that the "free market" is making this happen and its already here. 'The UK grid-scale battery storage market grew 45% by operational capacity in 2025, with 4GWh coming online during the year, bringing total operational capacity to 12.9GWh.'
Congrats you have storage for about twenty minutes of national consumption. Rough had 9 days and was basically just a hole in the ground in the sea, rather than the manically expensive battery storage which involve massive levels of corruption and legal battles to get started. Genius.
Again, this is the issue. People suggesting that stuff that makes no obviously no sense for political or social reasons. Why? This is a very simple problem too, but there is massive political pressure to find solutions which produce more corruption.
Last I read the strike price for offshore wind was about half of that for nuclear power (Hinkley Point). In other words the "huge subsidies" aren't going to who you think they are.
You don't understand what a subsidy is. Offshore wind subsidies are taken out of electricity bills, not the price. The price you are seeing does not include the subsidy.
The reason why Hinkley Point is expensive is completely solvable. The reason why it is expensive is because it is supposed to be expensive, that is the purpose. An A road near me has required two lanes, so far they have spent near £100m over twenty years and have not built anything. The basic premise of the UK political system is that people have no idea what the price of anything should be because it is all a political fiction.
When the costing was done for Hinkley 10 years ago the price was going to be, iirc, something like 50% above the price of gas which was at record lows. This was regarded as extremely expensive...electricity prices are up multiples and multiples since then. Since then, you have had armies of lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, planners working on the project full-time...and you are asking why it is expensive? Thinking this requires knowing so little about how much nuclear costs around the world and having literally zero idea about infra projects work in the UK (spoiler: there is massive corruption at almost every level, tens of billions in graft every year).
Yes, offshore wind has CFDs too. If you are building an offshore wind farm, you are spending lots of money to construct something that isn't a low-cost operator and will likely cause significant economic issues with customer's ability to pay you...therefore, CFD. This is how the government was able to intervene to cause non-economic outcomes.
And yes, as I explain above but which you seem to have not read...there was unbelievable levels of graft involved with Hinkley. EDF is not the victim, the reason why the CFD is there is to pay suppliers to EDF which are: lawyers, consultants, planners, etc. At some point, someone may get paid for building a nuclear power plant but that is a largely accidental outcome. If you compare to what other countries with functioning political systems, Korea for example, it is multiples. The costs and prices are so ludicrous, so out of control that no-one could think they make economic sense...and, of course, they don't. It is just corruption.
Non CfD offshore wind farms probably can be economical without CfD if they had access to very cheap capital. But without CfD the risk is higher and so is the profit margin on the debt which ultimately makes it more expensive to generate the electricity which in turns increases risk of low wholesale prices.
Also, for years CfD rates were actually lower than wholesale price and are currently generating at lower strike prices than average wholesale prices. The problem now is more inflation, capital costs, and commodity prices for materials. But then a lot of other things are more expensive also.
General question because I'm ignorant of UK internal politics: are the Isles' energy prices just generally higher? There aren't any large sources of fossil fuels or natural gas that aren't offshore, right? And the coal got significantly used up by hundreds upon hundreds of years of mining.
I'm wondering if really, the causality is reversed: it's not that the renewables make energy expensive in the UK, it's that energy is expensive in the UK, which incentivized construction of a lot of renewables, because they're an overall cheaper source of energy long-term since you don't have to either pay your neighbors to import them or build rigs in the saltwater ocean?
Yes, there are massive onshore reserves. The Tory government that has been accused on here of pimping the environment immediately banned all exploration.
There is are also two relatively big offshore fields that were taken to a very late stage of development and then stopped because of opposition by local government.
I would research exactly how big the gap is with other countries (and, remember, retail price is subsidised). The Cameron government made the active decision to order companies to shut down power plants with no plans for replacement. To be clear, nothing about energy...this is jut electricity provision. There was no economic incentive, that is why tens of billions were given to energy companies to produce non-economic, expensive power with guaranteed payments.
There was some research done last year iirc: if the UK paid zero for gas, the price of electricity would not stop rising because of the government intervention.
It is reasonable that you assume something rational must be going on here. But that model does not apply in the UK. Politics took over from economics a long time ago.
There are still large untapped known fields in the North Sea within UK waters adjacent to the same that Norway are still profitably using. There is also vast swathes of UK waters that are unexplored, and are currently artificially expensive to do so due to UK taxation on fossil fuel companies.
The price of petrol at the pump is at least 50% Government direct tax - fuel duty, VAT (which multiplies the duty value - very cheeky). Then the other parts - wholesale price, retailer profit, delivery costs, have their tax implicitly priced into that. That probably makes the overall Government take something like 70% of the price you pay.
As for coal, there's apparently about 600 million tons of accessible usable coal left, which at current UK usage is good for quite a few decades if not more.
The current government is banning wind turbines factories and billions of Pounds in investments because "China". It is too easy to blame the previous government(s) when the current one has no strategic thinking or plan, either.
The previous government was in power for 14 straight years. The current (useless) government only came into power in July 2024. Yes, I think the previous government should have some of the blame. Just to add, wind turbine factory investments have failed for a few other reasons too. One local to me fell through because it was no longer economically viable (local competition, low margin, and of course cheap imports)
Chinese company Ming Yang was planning to invest 1+ billion to build a factory in Scotland. They were going to be the local competition. UK government has just officially refused to approve it. This is a government decision based on politics and lobbying from other interests (US gov and EU competitors) and yet another U-turn for the government (as apparently gov was initially keen...).
Because? I just said. I'd rather _China_ don't own 1 billion pounds of our country's energy infrastructure. Are you being coy or are you seriously that naive?
Utterly perplexed you need more of an explanation.
And all those things you mentioned. I'd rather they were all home-grown but I can live with the French having a chunk of our Nuclear - because I like the French.
> Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.
I will give credit to the person who got there before me. :)
Smoothing out price volatility is a big one.
But also it gives you options:
You can buy it "today" when its cheap and store it for when you need it (e.g. winter months).
You can also trade on that basis too. For example you can make a future-dated commitment to buy gas (knowing you have the storage available to take delivery). But if the situation changes and you later find you don't need it, you can sell that contract to someone else (or you can still take delivery and re-sell it). But you can't do any of that without having the ability to take delivery, because the person who sold you that future-dated contract will want both your money and to get the gas they sold you off their hands.
Because if you have enough renewables and storage to eliminate gas from the mix you are no longer paying gas prices. The more often that happens, the cheaper your bills get.
There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex. This is why gas is priced very differently despite it being chemically similar (unlike oil). Anyone who says anything different should be immediately disregarded as someone who should not have an opinion.
This is technically true for oil but there are two other factors. One, importing oil is environmentally-intensive and relies upon the assumption of free and open trade in oil...hopefully, the last few weeks have demonstrated why this is untrue. Two, the assumption is that mix of imports is not changing, because of high energy costs and reduction in North Sea production, UK refineries are shutting down so we are completely losing domestic capacity across the whole space. We aren't importing oil, we are importing refined products, losing domestic chemicals capacity, losing margin. Lower jobs, lower tax revenues, more reliance on imports.
The above take would be somewhat funny if we weren't ten years into seeing the consequences of this. At this point, we could be back to the stone age and you would have the same people screeching that inventing fire is dangerous (I worked in equity research in the mid-2010s...I remember when Cameron was really pushing hard for this, Clegg was saying how expensive nuclear is, etc. people in the industry were saying this would very badly...the issue is that the political cycle is far shorter than the economic cycle, all of this stuff is obvious but people in the UK run on the political cycle so if it isn't the newspapers, no-one normal reads them, next week then it will never happen...same issue with housing, exactly the same thing happened, we are now subsidising retail electricity which is impossible to get out of, I remember specifically this idea was thought of as an insane impossibility but producers were saying it would have to happen, and giving huge subsidies to producers...this is all obvious, obvious things happening are obvious, producers were fine, they get paid the subsidies but consumers are getting shafted AND consistently voting to get shafted).
Also, Roughs storage facility is in the sea...so I am not sure what "real estate" development was done here (the UK has been building 10-20% of the required growth in housing stock for something like two decades...again, the same people will be screeching about developers if we lived in caves). The reason it was closed was due to economics.
For some reason, you deny that producing more gas would be useful but are outraged at a storage facility closing when the primary function of a storage facility is to allow energy producers to arb derivatives markets effectively. I have no idea how this makes sense to you based on all of the above...perhaps you just want to complain about the Tories? I have no idea.
The current tax rate on North Sea production is 75%, there was ample opportunity for public benefit but multiple governments took that money and spent it on benefits. The reason why Norway has worked is because they incentivized exploration (again, something that you imply later would have no benefit...but okay). The policy of the last fifteen years has been to tax the industry heavily and disincentivize exploration. Revisiting this approach is extremely unpopular amongst all politicians which is why production has dropped. Even with this limitation, we have large gas fields that have been blocked (by the Tories btw) for environmental reasons.
This isn't complicated: if you want more oil and gas, produce it and create more incentives to produce it. The reality is that people want to have their cake and eat it: North Sea production is both very pointless but paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea and we have to pay subsidies of 30-40% electricity bills to subsidies green production...which is also very profitable but requires subsidies because of Tory developers or something.
The UK isn't a serious country. What is happening to the UK is a reflection of phenomenally poor political leadership. It is deserved.
> paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea
You are wrong here.
UK oil has a very high carbon footprint.
British North Sea oil is sour (high in sulphur). It is the "wrong" type of oil for UK refineries. So it gets sent to other countries around the world for refining.
UK oil is viscous, waxy, crude which needs to be heated to pipe it. This means it takes a lot of energy to pipe (hello carbon footprint !) and it is not compatible with UK refineries anyway, so it has to be moved overseas (hello carbon footprint !!).
UK crude is nothing like Norwegian crude and massively different from the stuff drilled in the Middle East which requires barely any refining in comparison.
Brent crude is a light, sweet oil. UK oil is extracted from same oilfields as Norways - little difference in quality - and the major extraction from both is Brent crude
I already gave the answer in my original post.... UK crude is the wrong type of oil for UK refineries.
Almost all UK refineries were built back in the day (late 60's/early 70's), before North Sea, when the UK was mostly importing oil from Libya and elsewhere in that region.
All the stuff from Libya and elsewhere is far removed from the viscous, waxy sludge that emerges from the North Sea. It requires a far less intensive refining process.
So if your refinery has been built for a low-intensity process you can't just bolt on the shit-ton of high-energy stuff required for waxy crude.
It isn't the wrong type of crude. Forties pipeline was directly connected to a refinery. That refinery is now shutting down because of high energy costs, high general costs of doing business, and the investment outlook for UK North Sea.
The solution even if this wasn't true is also simple: build more refineries. This is all within our control.
You also said above it takes "energy" to pipe...do you have no understanding of physics? How do you think stuff moves in a pipe. Dear God.
You also said above that Norwegian crude is different...it is not. Brent is a crude blend that includes UK and Norwegian crudes. The chemical differences are relatively small, Norwegian refineries import UK crude (I am using UK crude because, for some reason, you seem to think that is something exists in the real world...it is just Brent).
One of the most confidently wrong posts I have seen on here...and that is after you said that an offshore gas field was given over to real estate development. Lol.
You should consider a career in the Civil Service. You will fit in well.
> That begs the question why aren't we building refineries that can process our own oil
Putting aside the legal and "public appetite" aspects that someone else already mentioned, it all comes back to privitisation in the end.
Given that the extraction was privitised, clearly market theory dictates that you cannot then interfere with where the extracted oil goes.
So if a private company is deciding on refining then it will follow the path of most profit, i.e. build/expand vs use existing capacity elsewhere. Given that most oil companies are large multinationals they will likely also prioritise using their own facilities vs paying a third-party refinery.
And clearly at the time, carbon footprint was not on the agenda of the private companies, either directly or enforced via legislation.
The writing is on the wall that people, especially young people, don't want to be using fossil fuels anymore.
Refineries are expensive (like $10B for country scale) and take years to build.
Which begs the question, how much renewable energy can you get for $10B? And perhaps even faster?
But it's not that clear, because reality has these fractal trade offs and the future is typically pretty opaque. So then will/motivation because an issue too.
I ask the same question about why Canada sends most of it's oil to the US to be refined. The answer is usually the government doesn't allow it and/or no one wants to take a private capital risk in the economic environment.
With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
> Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though.
Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C.
Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.
For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient. This process is accounting for 1–2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions, and 3% to 5% of natural gas consumption.
Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Heating storage (also cold storage) in industrial applications is possible and is done, but in many cases you are limited by allowed temperature range of chemical/physical processes. For example you are limited on the lower side by melting temperature of material and on higher side by high temperature corrosion.
In cement industries models have been developed to flatten the grid's hourly demand curve by minimizing the industrial customer's hourly peak loads and maximizing the shifting of demand to off-peak periods.
> For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient.
I should note that this process doesn't require external heat input (except at startup). The reaction is exothermic and the excess heat is used to make steam that either is used to make power or to provide steam to other processes. It does require pressurization, but that's an input of work, not heat.
It would be nice if the process could be run at lower temperature, but we just don't have the catalysts for that.
> Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Electric resistance heat is very storable and can provide heat 24/7, possibly even 24/7/365 at high latitude with PV.
That's cool but who is going to pay the upfront cost for the heat pumps?
The sources I could find say we currently have 412 heat pumps per 100k people in the UK.
Ordinary people can't just afford to drop 10k for a heat pump + installation for it to pay for itself 20 years down the line.
You have to include the costs of conversion - gas power plant. Also you have some some losses during conversion from heat to electricity, a modern gas power plant can be up to 60% efficient.
This claim is the sort of dangerous ideological nonsense that is so common in Britain, and which has wrecked it. Literally every time socialist policies fail people come out of the woodwork to blame privatization, and yet invariably this made things better despite an often botched process. The American oil/gas industry is fully private and yet they have much cheaper energy: blaming Thatcher is dumb and not the answer.
Gas in the UK is expensive because successive British governments wanted to have nothing to do with it and did everything they could to crush the suppliers. They thought deliberately deindustrializing the country was moral and ethical, for "climate" reasons. So they:
• Imposed massive "windfall" taxes on the industry to the extent that nobody developed new sources
• Then imposed very high carbon prices on it
• Banned fracking
• Stopped issuing licenses for exploration
• Imposed price caps
• Chased all the industry that needed cheap energy away to Asia
• Shut down gas storage facilities, exposing Britain to the global spot price
• Didn't build other reliable energy sources like nuclear or coal
End result: high prices and shortages. There are graphs here that show how much of the British electricity price is artificially created by government:
Other countries didn't make all these mistakes together. And they were mistakes by the government. Really, can you even claim the British energy industry is private when the government takes 80%+ of its profits? Socialist policies always create shortages and high prices. Always.
The UK (and Europe) could produce much more gas and consequently control prices if they wanted. It is easy to always blame the previous government(s) but the current situation is policy across Western Europe.
Edit: puzzled by the blunt downvotes for stating a noncontroversial fact. Over the last 15 years the US has invested in shale gas while the UK and EU have banned it. Even today the UK refuses expension of North Sea gas extraction. Whatever the reasons (environment, decarbonisation) it does mean that the situation we have now with gas across Western Europe is policy, not an unfortunate consequence of world events...
To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards.
Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet.
I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.
I don't think Trump particularily cares himself. But he's surrounded by weird religious cult who all think that attacking Iran and bringing in war in the middle east will bring on the end times and second coming of jesus christ. I honestly wish this was just a facade for attaining political power, but these nutjobs seem completely earnest in their beliefs.
Combining those god awful beliefs with a set of advisors with room temperature IQs (and I'm in canada where we use metric temps) results in a true inability to forsee any of these issues in advance. Real shame, I can only hope it drives your populace to finally do something about it, but I won't hold my breath.
No, this has nothing to do with either. It is policy in the UK and EU not to produce gas on environmental and decarbonisation grounds, and so in fact high priced are policy.
California is a great example; highest electricity prices in the US (not counting Hawaii, which makes sense) despite significant hydro and fantastic solar capacity. In the last few years California runs 100% renewable on many days (and growing) every year.
Economics 101: prices are not set by what goods cost to create + markup. Prices are set by how much people are willing to pay.
Why is it "people are willing to pay" and not "corporations are brazen enough to charge"? These utilities are necessities and relatively few people have access to cheaper alternatives to them.
Because, under usual circumstances, self-interested corporations compete against each other to get as close to what people are willing to pay for energy as possible.
There’s a reason most universities don’t hand you a bachelors degree in economics as soon as you complete EC101. You should look into EC102 and the rest of the curriculum.
PG&E's prices are not a function of what people will pay though, it's a function of what people expect.
CA wants green energy now (aggressive targets), needs to have fire hardened infrastructure (expensive upgrades), and wants full service to sprawling remote areas using modern infrastructure.
The combination of these is incredibly expensive.
If you don't believe me, buy PGE stock and get your dividend from their "greed". But honestly, the stock is an awful performer, because the actual problems facing them are real.
I know nothing about California so please correct me if I'm wrong.
You mention significant hydro and solar capacity in California. So minimal carbon externality: lung disease and climate change. If you consider that externalised cost into the cost of electricity elsewhere, does not California and other renewable-rich electric grids fare more competitive on price?
E.g. the problem is not the expensive renewables in California, rather, the problem is that the cost of declining human and animal health and climate change is externalised for the fossil fuel.
According to the official tracker (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/clean-energy-serving-... and elsewhere) there were 279 days in 2025 where California was on 100% renewable for _some_ time during the day (could be hours, could be minutes at mid-day).
In total hours equivalent of 77.3 full days over 2025.
California has high volumetric rates, but mostly that is because it has much more distributed generation than any other state, uses far less grid power, so the grid rates are dominated by fixed grid costs. Actual monthly electric bills in California are not remarkable at all. According to the EIA the typical residential electric bill in California is almost exactly the same as Texas: $174.59 vs. $173.94.
Yeah I'm in the UK and for electricity, I'm on the green Octopus Agile tariff, which tracks the wholesale price updating every 30 mins. Given the abundant green energy today, and peak times between 3-7pm, right this second I'm paying £0.02/kWh, but at 6pm, I'll be charged £0.40/kWh. In the coming months with gas supply reduced, and consumer demand steady, it will have a knock on impact to me given it tracks wholesale cost so I'll have to consider moving off the tariff given I'll be paying more overall.
You can read more about gas markets in the Global Gas Market guide by A115 here: https://a115.co.uk/global-gas-market/ (you can download the PDF guide at the bottom without giving any information)
I've read this before and I don't understand how this doesn't become/is untenable.
Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
Also, this would mean that in order to really bring the price down, gas needs to be taken out as a source. But gas is typically the source that balances the grid because its output can be changed quickly. So price wise, you might get a drop but you would lose your ability to react quickly to fluctuations in demand
> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
I used to work in wind energy in the Netherlands, it is only profitable there due to government subsidies. It was/is an enormously complicated system to understand on the whole. I was on the environmental impact side (visualizations) during the permitting process. It's high-risk & enormously expensive during the permitting process (i.e. getting permission to build the wind farm), and beyond that I understand it's a bidding process and again, super complicated on the energy trading side once you're operating. My experience was that the wind farm operators seemed to be doing well financially, but insanely lucrative? I'm not sure about that vs. non-renewables. Everyone I worked with (including myself) believed in green energy as a part of a larger mission to make the world a slightly better place. EU directives on renewables is what pushed the mission forward; the dutch on the whole (surprisingly), do not love wind turbines in their back yard.
:-( I'm sitting here looking at huge wind turbines out my front window and I absolutely LOVE them. I get to live in a solarpunk future where I can get where I need to without a car, my kids run out the door and play without getting run over, and I can see clean energy being made for my home (and that of my neighbours).
I'm sure a lot of the cranky old people near me don't like them, but they hate everything and go out of their way to find things to complain about, to be honest.
Frankly I feel the same as you. I saw my first wind turbine in Newcastle Australia and was completely blown away & wanted to work in wind energy. I've been to Denmark and seen the Vestas V-164 offshore turbine at the on-shore test facility. The rotor area on the V-164 seems as big as a football field - it's the largest rotating object I've ever seen and my mind could barely understand the scale of it. For me, wind turbines are beautiful. I was called crazy a lot in the Netherlands ;-)
In terms of public acceptance, you're probably right. The Dutch in my experience love the old windmills, but modern wind turbines are in a different league in terms of harvesting the power of wind efficiently. Blade design is comparable to the aircraft wing design (seriously complex engineering).
In my post above I talked about seeing the Vestas V164 in person, but I've also been on top of the tallest wind turbine in NL (manufactured by Lagerwey). The higher the nacelle and the larger the rotor diameter equal more power generation (the higher you go the more wind you'll find), but public acceptance has a lot to do with things.
I've seen in person how the Dutch can lose their mind over wind projects, I was in Drenthe in 2014 at a public engagement night (where the public sees visualizations of the turbines, and learns how they can benefit and so on...). At Drenethe there were hundreds of locals protesting, cops, drama. Super scary. I was involved on the public acceptance side of things and have come face to face with countless thousands of scared and angry people. I can't imagine what selling a HUGE turbine for their backyard might be like, but going back to your original idea - selling a classic looking windmill would likely be very easy. The tradeoff is that classic windmill would likely generate a negligible amount of energy in comparison. But cool idea anyhow ;-)
I don't think that's true. For one because the size is what makes it efficient/worth it. Second, the old windmills have all been there forever, so no one complains because they don't know any better.
Keep in mind that a typical windmill and a wind turbine are very different in size. Some people are afraid of noise, or shade. Especially if your home will be shaded by the blades, I could see that being an issue as you have flickering light all the time.
Yes, and I think that’s actually intentional, they’re rewarding renewables way over the odds without needing to give politically controversial benefits. The rewards are just an inherent result of the existing system. This is why renewables are growing rapidly in the uk.
Of course we’ll need a way to resolve fluctuations both rapid and slower. Rapid fluctuations are handled by pumped hydro and increasingly by batteries.
The slow fluctuations (day/night all the way to summer/winter and good/bad weather patterns) are much trickier, I think it’s still unclear how well handle them, but it will certainly be partly handled by having an excess of renewables, though we’ll likely need some other solutions too, nuclear is probably one of them.
The irony is that your comment should be entirely inverted. Renewables are not rewarded way over the odds - in fact the ruling party banned onshore wind entirely and i remember them banning at least one offshore wind farm. Luckily it is very cheap to build.
Now Hinkley Point C is another story. It's a hugely expensive boondoggle which is taking decades to construct at enormous cost and the reward at the end is that they are rewarded with a strike price that is 3x that of solar and wind. That is an obsecene subsidy forced on to customers for a power source that cant even do load following and doesnt help with fluctuations in supply and demand.
The slow fluctuations on cold, windless nights or when nuke plants are down for unplanned maintenance are going to be managed with gas.
Maybe one day it'll be gas synthesized with electricity from solar+wind overproduction on a day like today. The roundtrip is expensive, but will still be cheaper than nuclear power on a windy, summer day.
Renewables (and nuclear) have high up front costs and comparitively low marginal cost. Comparing it against something that burns expensive fuel can be misleading (if you want it to be).
One system is taking the money and turning round and handing it to their fuel suppliers, the other is turning round and handing it to the people who loaned them money to build a giant complex structure that would take a decade or more of risk and uncertainty to pay itself back.
Gas bids high because it literally makes no business sense for them to operate for less than the gas input costs. They'd rather sit it out when electricity prices are lower. Renewables will take almost any price once built because wind and sun is free, but won't build in the first place without a path to paying off their investment over a certain timespan.
(This is why more solar has been built in places with good low risk finance than where the sunlight resource is strongest)
CfDs are a competitive bidding process and so give a market price for what developers need their price to be over 15 years or more for it to make a standard return on investment. Developers outside this process need to guess what electricity prices will be, at the times they generate for years to come.
> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative?
This is how markets are supposed to work. It provides an economic incentive for production to increase, which is what we want.
Consider what happens if you develop a farming method to produce potatoes for a fraction of the usual cost, but you can only meet 10% of total demand at your local market. What price are you going to sell your potatoes for when you show up to the market? You (like any free market seller) want to maximise your return, so you'll be able to sell for a fraction under the previous market rate, undercutting everyone else. Your farming method would be extremely lucrative.
Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business. In the electricity scenario, that would mean blackouts.
If you triple the price, you don't have a new gas plant appear out of thin air. And the result won't really be lower consumption either, because most people would have fixed rate contracts (not in the UK so don't know specifically, but this is very common elsewhere)
> Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business.
No, because remember you are only able to meet 10% of market demand. The expensive producers will still get 90% of the business, and the market price for their product will remain basically the same. This is what we observe in the electricity markets today: the price to us is the cost of the most expensive product. The cheaper producers who cannot meet the full market demand still get to sell at the cost of the most expensive product.
> The cheaper producers who cannot meet the full market demand still get to sell at the cost of the most expensive product.
Which would mean it's super lucrative and your same laws of economics will tell you that that means they'll be building like crazy.
My while point was that as soon as you get to a day where no gas is needed you've lost the ability to react quickly because no supplier will just leave a gas plant around just for that
Yes, but here’s the thing: you don’t have a monopoly over your potato farming method. Lots of new farms are built, and the more that do, the more the average price of a potato drops. Your expected return starts to drop. Yours - and everyone else’s - profit margins get squeezed.
Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.
But the people need potatoes and more potato farms! The government issues an incentive scheme to guarantee a minimum price for each potato sold. Potential farm owners bid against each other for the lowest price, but it means they can build a farm and expect to break even.
> Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.
If they all refuse, then they're leaving money on the table. One investor could invest in 10% production only, and that would be very lucrative. It would be exactly my low cost to produce potato scenario.
In practice, they don't all refuse, or all invest. The market finds a balance. In time, producers switch to the new method, because anybody who doesn't leaves an opportunity for someone else to take their business and make more money.
This takes time, though. If we want things to go quicker, then we need to guarantee return on investment for longer, which is exactly what the government does by guaranteeing prices to renewable energy producers.
Not only is it insanely lucrative, but the government enters into "contract for difference" contracts that guarantees a price per MWh that are generally above market rates, taking out most of the financial risk.
They aren't orthogonal - the reason that gas is being used is because renewable can't reliably power the grid! If you look at something like https://grid.iamkate.com/ you can see that in the last 24 hours the gas peak is when the wind dies down and the sun isn't shining, around 6-8pm. Happens to be a real price peak at that time. This isn't some weird and unexpected outcome, we've had at least a decade of evidence with this sort of low-wholesale-high-retail price dynamic.
That isn't gas is expensive, it is simply policy that the UK, rather naively, is trying to run their grid 24/7 based on processes that are not available 24/7. That is an expensive trick to try and pull off. Poor people need a way to signal that they won't use electricity in the evening if they want to be able to afford power is my read on the situation. Not very civilised but if that is how the UK approaches reliable cheap energy as a target then it seems the most reasonable outcome.
Unfortunately for the UK, its geology means there isn't a lot of pumped hydropower storage unlike France, which is the cheapest way to bank intermittent renewables. In the places where there is pumped hydro capacity like Coire Glas, the operators are demanding the government guarantee they would be paid today's (natural gas generated) price to go ahead with construction, which would completely defeat the purpose of energy storage.
And yes, letting nuclear power dwindle was a political choice, spurred by short termist bean-counter thinking:
Seems like a very good case to get storage and power backup in people's homes. Industrial users could install their own gas fired generators. Residential consumers could have simple battery based backup, or even a generator which would double for helping during powerouts.
Bigger question is why they haven't already - these trends have been in place for a very long time and this current phase of the UK energy crisis has been on display for years. Anything legal and cost effective would have been done by now if the market had anything to say about it. Which suggests something odd is afoot. Maybe storage is more expensive than gas, maybe the UK government has regulated the option out of existence. Maybe something else.
Which, importantly, drives more renewables and storage development because it makes the renewables fantastically profitable to run: near zero cost for you, but paid the price set by gas.
Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers.
It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables.
The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.
> The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity.
Without mentioning how Contracts for Difference (CfD) works, this is a slightly disingenuous oversimplification.
This is Telegraph for you.
The cost of electricity is not driven by green levies or net zero targets, but by gas prices, as gas is a backstop when all other sources are exhausted. Therefore electricity prices are pretty much tied to gas.
Obviously, Electricity is a National Security issue.
It's naive to state that the problem is gas prices.
Germany is seeing Steel, Automotive, and other hard science companies leave for that very reason.
The strategy should have been to build an energy architecture that reduces prices while being robust against force majeure events.
You can have dispatchable gas without that pricing structure, but having a grid without that pricing structure can't really function without major nationalization of power generation.
Marginal pricing is one of those things that at first sounds crazy, but when you delve into the topic, it's the only sensible way to have market pricing on electricity generation. The only real alternative would be a fully nationalized grid where the government buys up all the dispatachable power sources.
As long as there's a large variety of producers competing with eachother though, there's not really any good mechanism for them to collude to avoid expanding to 100%, especially when you add battery power providers and private persons with rooftop solar into the mix.
I think more likely than deciding to stop building more renewables, the renewable providers are just going be incentivized to start installing large batteries wherever they install renewable generation, so that they can flexibly decide if the current spot price is worth selling to the market, or whether it's better to just store the electricity that they generate so that they can sell it in 10 hours or whatever when the price is higher.
Which is great, because it creates a market pressure to build more storage, and at the most efficient place for that storage to be created (right next to where it's generated).
I know less about the UK's electrical grid, but at least in Germany, if renewables plus batteries are enough to cover electricity needs for normal day-to-day weather, there is more than enough biogas production in the country to save and store that biogas for the weeks-at-a-time periods where renewable shortfalls happen and batteries won't be enough to cover it.
On any given day Germany generates 7-8% of its electricity from biogas, which means that if instead of burning that gas each day for electricity, we stored it in our network of gas reservoirs, then every 13 days of the year that we don't dip into those reserves, that's a full day of electricity generation in gas that's stored.
____
Even if this is done with fossil-gas instead of biogas though, simply having enough renewables + batteries to cut gas out of day-to-day electrical generation, and using it only for backup would be enough to drastically lower prices for the majority of the year.
This is of course linked to the UKs renewable rollout (and to do with detaips around the UKs energy markets leading to gas dictating the price for noe), but completely misses the fact that the UKs spending isn't just spending but investment.
Will be interesting to see in five years time looks like, we could well see a scenario where the UK has abundant cheap electricity being exported to the rest of Europe. Will be interesting to hear what the sceptics holding some American states fossil fuel based grids up as examples think then.
None of this of couse factors in the fact that fossil fuels cannot be sustained if we want a livable planet. Factoring that in, payimg energy bills three times as high would be a good investment, if it protects the world we depend on, in my book at least.
These net zero targets were actually introduced by the right wing Conservative party in 2019 under Teresa May and passed with broad support across parties.
Now the same party has collapsed in support (for reasons unrelated to this target, which remains broadly popular with voters) and attacks the targets they introduced.
So they voted against the total because it did not include indiscriminate scanning? I am not saying this is not the case, but it does not make sense to me. If indiscriminate scanning does not pass, why not vote for the total even without it, and amend it after it passes and gets normalised at a later point?
It would have locked in the restrictions, which would be difficult to argue later that they should be removed and the package be opened up again. Without any scanning, it’s much easier to continue arguing that indiscriminate scanning is needed. They remain in a much stronger bargaining position towards those who want limited scanning (as opposed to no scanning) than if they had conceded.
Exactly. It is much easier to get people to agree to do questionable things, when there is pressure to "do something".
A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bill harder to pass later.
In this case there is reason to suspect that the real goal of the bill is not catching pedophiles. Instead it is to give police broader powers of surveillance in the name of catching pedophiles, which they will then be able to use for other purposes. This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU. Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
> This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU.
> Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
Lol what?
The UK leads [edit: in Europe overall, obviously not the EU] with approximately 18 per 100k prosecuted for online speech. Germany is at about 4 per 100k. Poland at about 0.8 per 100k. Hungary about 0.1 per 100K.
For any definition of authoritarian that relates to chat control, the UK is two base-10 orders of magnitude more authoritarian than Hungary (7 base-2 orders of magnitude).
This figure in the UK is unsourced and I'm fairly sure is not true (or at least not what you've labelled it), and has been quoted out of context by people trying to stir trouble not reasoned debate. I'll assume good faith here and say the start of the video lays out why the figure is not what you've labelled it to be
The issue isn't how much free speech online is being punished. It is how surveillance could be used to reinforce authoritarianism.
The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn't like.
Hungary is far more inclined to surveil political opponents, put people in their network in jail without fair trial, surveil successful businesses whose bribes were insufficient, find excuses to punish those businesses.
Not only are there not similar reports about the UK, but its better position in international corruption rankings points to a culture that would be less likely to tolerate this.
Any further questions about why there should be concerns about how Hungary would be likely to abuse a law like this?
Germany and Poland are. Does the existence of a non-EU country in a data set about European countries detract from the fact that Hungary doesn't prosecute people for online speech to the same extent as other European (incl. EU) countries?
I'm quite sure they thought about the UK as well, given the practice of prosecuting for lawful speech, jailing or arresting for planning peaceful protests (or threatening to arrest a man with an EMPTY placard), jailing for opposing the genocide or voicing support for the unlawfully proscribed organisation.
That's happens often in parliamentary proceedings: when the other party succeeds in unrecognizably amending the law, the party proposing it will vote against.
Specifically for the European Parliament, this is also why, while it is true it doesn't have the power of legislative initiative, given the ability to amend at will any "law", in practice it doesn't make much of a difference.
> So, in the end a big majority of the conservative/liberal faction (EPP) voted against, and the vast majority of the social democractic faction (S&D) voted for chat control.
EPP wanted indiscriminate scanning instead, not targeted one.
Well, chat control 1.0 is about making an existing practice legal, it didn't create the practice of scanning messages for know child sexual abuse material, though I don't know how long that has been going on before the legislation in 2021 passed (but probably for several years at that point, since getting a new law trough takes a while).
Did it work? One political party (EPP) didn't like the result of the previous vote and so they forced a re-vote.
> After the European Parliament had already rejected the indiscriminate and blanket Chat Control by US tech companies on 13 March, conservative forces attempted a democratically highly questionable maneuver yesterday to force a repeat vote to extend the law anyway.
The measure voted on is "Extension [of Chat Control 1.0]", it was voted 36% "for" and 49% "against" (so result is "against"), and looking at "Political groups", majority of EPP MEPs voted "against" (137 out of 164 votes).
EPP is appalling and I'm revolted that many large so-called "moderate, centre-right, liberal-conservative" parties are happily part of it and indeed actively pushing extremely anti-citizen, anti-human agendas with the help of the far right.
> Despite today’s victory, further procedural steps by EU governments cannot be completely ruled out. Most of all, the trilogue negotiations on a permanent child protection regulation (Chat Control 2.0) are continuing under severe time pressure. There, too, EU governments continue to insist on their demand for “voluntary” indiscriminate Chat Control.
> Furthermore, the next massive threat to digital civil liberties is already on the agenda: Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification. This would require users to provide ID documents or submit to facial scans, effectively making anonymous communication impossible and severely endangering vulnerable groups such as whistleblowers and persecuted individuals.
> Despite today’s victory, further procedural steps by EU governments cannot be completely ruled out. Most of all, the trilogue negotiations on a permanent child protection regulation (Chat Control 2.0) are continuing under severe time pressure. There, too, EU governments continue to insist on their demand for “voluntary” indiscriminate Chat Control.
> Furthermore, the next massive threat to digital civil liberties is already on the agenda: Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification. This would require users to provide ID documents or submit to facial scans, effectively making anonymous communication impossible and severely endangering vulnerable groups such as whistleblowers and persecuted individuals.
> further procedural steps by EU governments cannot be completely ruled out
In a democracy, we don't kill our opposition. If they hold views we don't like, e.g. that security trumps privacy, they're going to litigate them. Probably their whole lives. That means they'll keep bringing up the same ideas. And you'll have to keep defeating them. But there are two corollaries.
One: Passing legislation takes as much work as repealing it; but unpassed legislation has no force of law. Being on the side that's keeping legislation from being passed is the stronger position. You have the status quo on your side. (The only stronger hand is the side fighting to keep legislation from being repealed. Then you have both the status quo and force of law on your side.)
Two: Legislative wants are unlimited. Once a group has invested into political machinery and organisation, they're not going to go home after passing their law. Thus, repeatedly failing to pass a law represents a successful bulwark. It's a resource sink for the defense, yes. But the defense gets to hold onto the status quo. The offense is sinking resources into the same fight, except with nothing to show for it. (Both sides' machines get honed.)
Each generation tends to have a set of issues they continuously battle. The status quo that persists or emerges in their wake forms a bedrock the next generations take for granted. This is the work of a democracy. Constantly working to convince your fellow citizens that your position deserves priority. Because the alternative is the people in power killing those who disagree with them.
This perspective, not unique to the parent, assumes you have to play defense indefinitely, but (as with many beliefs) the assumption is the problem: Stop playing defense and go on offense.
Pass laws that actively enhance privacy, that make it technically (e.g., require E2EE) and legally harder to surveil citizens, that require data minimization, that impose retention limits, that require higher standards for accessing surveillance content (e.g., warrants); pass amendments to constitutions, etc. How do you think current privacy protections happened in the first place?
Going on offense not only improves privacy, it forces the other side to use their resources playing defense and trying to keep up.
The 'one battle after another' defensive perspective is for people who have half-quit (I'm not talking about the parent here, but more generally). It fits the culture of despair that permeates every political grouping but the far right - they have plenty of initiative and creativity, and certainly don't hold back and play defense. You can do that too.
Maybe a more familiar analogy: It also fits the behavior of exhausted status quo market participants, companies that have lost their drive and innovation and are hanging onto their old ways instead of aggressively moving forward.
It seems to me that "no and don't ask again" should be a possible outcome of a vote on proposed legislation.
Without going into full detail on the procedure I'm imagining, such an outcome would bar consideration of equivalent legislation for several years and require a supermajority at several stages of the legislative process to override.
The EU parliament is not a real parliament since it can't choose which laws it has to vote for, and in negociations ("trilogue") it doesn't hold the pen.
Basically, it can oppose new legislations but can't retract old laws.
> seems to me that "no and don't ask again" should be a possible outcome of a vote on proposed legislation
It can't be. At least not in a legislature. Defining what is the same question is itself a political question. And past legislatures being able to bind future ones is just a futurecasting veto. A single crap election could poison the pool on a raft of issues for generations.
The proper way to do this is through constitutional amendments. The fact that these are too difficult to do, currently, seems to be the bug.
Ironically, just like many software users, the EU Parliament is not given the option to say "no", only "ask me later".
Anyone who’s ever been unable to dismiss a nag and forced to defer via "Ask me later" knows the feeling of powerlessness and disenfranchisement deliberately planted by those making UX decisions. .. or the EU constitutional framework.
You have “centralised democracy”, a form of democracy where decisions, once debated and adopted, are implemented uniformly throughout an organisation. They are not debated a second time, and there’s no room for dissenting against decisions already made.
It’s a double-edge sword though: if something you dislike gets votes, it’s never going away.
> They are not debated a second time, and there’s no room for dissenting against decisions already made
Of course they are and of course there is. The "EU passed a temporary derogation" to the ePrivacy Directive in 2021 "called Chat Control 1.0 by critics" [1]. That is now dead [2].
> if something you dislike gets votes, it’s never going away
Weird to be saying precedent is infintely binding in 2026 of all years.
The sentence which you are quoting is referencing the concept described in the previous sentence of the same paragraph. It is not describing the EU’s form of democracy.
Yes, if I don't like something, I can't just ignore it. That is called democracy, and rule of law. Democracy is often interpreted to mean only things I like get passed, but that is incorrect.
Not really. Did democratic nations violate their ideals when they fought Nazi Germany in WWII?
After all, Hitler did come to power democratically. He made it very clear what he wanted to do, and the Weimar government didn't stop him, thinking that they could just have voters see through his act. How'd that turn out?
An empty rebuttal. If the US democratically - by popular vote - decided to annex Canada would that mean Canadians waging war against the US or allies that stepped in to help them were going against the ideals of liberalism? There's no paradox to be had there. It is entirely possible for multiple liberal parties to disagree and end up at war.
Where people like to apply that phrase is when handling domestic affairs in a blatantly hypocritical manner. Such as banning certain speech, publications, or political activities while still claiming to honor the tenants of liberalism. In that context it's nothing more than a fig leaf to cover for one's own lack of integrity.
"> Furthermore, the next massive threat to digital civil liberties is already on the agenda: Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification. This would require users to provide ID documents or submit to facial scans, effectively making anonymous communication impossible and severely endangering vulnerable groups such as whistleblowers and persecuted individuals."
Perhaps this is bad news for "messenger and chat services, as well as app stores" who solicit "users" to exploit them for commercial gain, for example _if_ users are unwilling to accept "age verification" and decide to stop using them. The keyword is "if"
The third parties know it's possible for capable users to communicate with each other without using third party "chat and messenger services" intermediaries that conduct data collection, surveillance and/or online ad services as a "business model". Thus the third party "tech" company intermediaries strive to make their "free services" more convenient than DIY, i.e., communication without using third party intermediation by so-called "tech" companies
But users may decide that "age verification" is acceptable. For many years, HN comments have repeatedly insisted that "most users" do not care about data collection or surveillance or online advertising, that users don't care about privacy. Advocates of "Big Tech" and other so-called "tech" companies argue that by using such third party services, users are consciously _choosing_ convenience over privacy
Perhaps the greatest threat to civil liberties is the mass data collection and surveillance conducted by so-called "tech" companies. The "age verification" debate provides a vivid illustration of why allowing such companies to collect data and surveil without restriction only makes it easier for governments that seek to encroach upon civil liberties. While governments may operate under legal and financial constraints that effectively limit their ability to conduct mass surveillance, the companies operate freely, creating enormous repositories that governments can use their authority to tap into
There's a fairly non-invasive way to do age verification: ID cards that connect to a smartphone app that only provide a boolean age verification to the requesting service. Requesting service can be anonymous to the ID app and the requesting service can only receive a bool.
That most implementation will try to collect far more data is the real concern.
Because if we don't have the keys to the machine, then we don't actually own our computers. If we don't own our computers, then we have no freedom.
Because everything the word "hacker" ever stood for will be destroyed if this nonsense gets normalized. The day governments get to decide what software "your" computer can run is the day it's all over.
In the modern world, this is like saying people under 18 shouldn't have the freedom to be able to read and write. We would be decades back into digital stone age if we had held onto such a preposterous idea in the 80's and 90's. Virtually everything we have now is basically built by people who were hacking on their computers in elementary school and exercising their freedom of speech in terms of writing code freely at the discretion of their own imagination.
Think about how the proposed idea would most likely be implemented. It would be used as justification for manufacturers to sell devices that the end use doesn't control. They already do that; this would give them legal justification.
I'm not sure about op, but as someone who agrees with their comment, yes, I absolutely am. I despise 99% of all digital """services""" that exist. Whether it's cloud, music/movies/series/whatever streaming, subscriptions of almost any kind... They're all extremely dystopian and anti-human. I sail the high seas for almost everything I consume digitally. When I want to support a creator I enjoy, I pay them directly (buy their merch, buy a physical copy of their album, purchase their game and dlcs, or simply directly donate).
In my opinion, corporations being allowed free reign and control over the internet and digital world in general without guardrails was *THE* biggest legislative mistake (although I believe it was done on purpose )in the past century, considering how the internet will most definitely be the defining factor of the era we're currently living in in future textbooks; if we make it that far at least.
I don't think most people understand the sheer magnitude of the damage that corporate slop, control, anti-competitiveness and pursuit of infinite growth at all costs has done to our technological capabilities and advancement.
Hardware is the only area of tech that continually gets better, whilst software continually regresses and gets worse. 90% of "new" code is web-based slop (and now AI generated web slop) that hogs memory and cpu usage, completely undermining all advances in hardware just because companies weren't willing to pay the extra buck to program a native solution that wouldn't force its users to purchase new machines.
If it wasn't for corporate (and many programmers') lazyness, computers from over a decade ago would still be fully functional, fully usable machines that could do the most bleeding-edge of tasks, safe for maybe the most graphically-demanding games and rendering.
And then maybe programmers could focus on actually advancing the science that is writing code, instead of building yet another fucking REST API and React UI. And don't forget to package it all in electron to fuck your users as much as possible, and dodge any need for real engineering.
Companies can just keep offloading costs unto the user, making users buy machines 10x as powerful as the ones they had 5 years ago, just to do the exact same tasks, but 20x slower. But at least they have a nice looking UI right?
Not much yet, that's pretty much what I do, although I run void linux and arch on my machines.
But even Linux isn't safe; what if other countries adopt the OS-level age-verification laws that california is pursuing? very few distros will be safe.
And then all they need to do (and you can bet that's exactly what they'd do) is keep squeezing, taking away freedom gradually until most linux distros require you to submit a digital ID on install. And chances are, the few distros and maintainers that go against that would be completely cut off from the mainstream tech ecosystem (which would make them barely usable in this day and age, at least as long as you live in a city with a job and rent and all).
This may sound like a slippery slope fallacy and it may indeed be that, but I can't think of any other possibility if we just let stuff like this keep happening.
It may seem like we're just giving an inch now but in 5 years you'll suddenly realize they've taken a mile.
"Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification."
Trilogues should be burned down, closed doors meetings with Ministers writing laws from their own services.
The trilogue is the interaction between eu commission, eu parliament and eu council. The commission proposes, parliament and country governments argue and ask for changes. The parliament has the last vote anyway. Maybe you're thinking of something else.
> Ed Miliband’s net zero targets are facing fresh scrutiny after Britain was found to be paying the highest electricity prices in the developed world.
> New data published on Tuesday showed the price paid by UK industry for power was 63pc higher than in France and 27pc higher than in Germany.
> Britain is also the second-most expensive country in the world for household electricity, with billpayers paying twice as much as those in the US.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/britain-paying-highest-e...
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