Re: energy in UK

On 13/04/2025 06:23, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 13/04/2025 4:16 am, john larkin wrote:

>
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/10/uk_ai_energy_council_meets/

They are on another planet. UK energy prices are sky high to the extent that making steel profitable here is completely impossible.

 The UK still suffers from an old decision to base it's civil service on a misunderstood version of the Chinese civil service.

Unfortunately you are right about that.
Each successive NESO Electricity Ten Year Statement (ETSY) report gets more and more fanciful about how Net Zero will be achieved. The important  technical content also disappears with each successive annual revision. Millibrain is being told it is all going very well.
They have taken to hiding old ones so you can't compare actuality with prediction (unless you have taken the precaution of downloading them).

Chinese orthography is horrible and it took a lot of effort for anybody to get literate and stay literate. Entry to the Chinese civil service depended on proving that you could read and write, and any other expertise was secondary.
 The UK imagined that the candidates were being tested for pure intellectual power. Being able to read and write English wasn't difficult enough to test this, so they tested for competence in Latin and Greek.

They do have a few scientists and engineers in parliament but they are never given any significant roles. The joke at my university was why be a scientist (or engineer) when you can be a scientist's boss. Beancounters and lawyers rule the roost.

Science was despised - the civil service formula was scientist on tap, not on top. When it comes to technical matters like generating and distributing electric power cheaply, the English are still behind the game, because the crucial choices are still made by some classically educated mandarin who doesn't understand the problems in any detail.

It is worse than that. They have fanciful schemes that will get us to net zero but only in their crazed imagination! The small problem of the laws of physics and in particular conservation of energy get in the way.
The UK has an insane imbalance between production of power in the North and consumption of power in London and the South East. The main cables running N-S are routinely overloaded during daytime during winter.
Page 6 of this mess shows the effects of the next decade of "improvements".
Page 33 shows the pinch point at Thermal Boundary 7a
https://www.neso.energy/document/352001/download
The pages that used to show locality and seasonal overloading of the network have been conveniently redacted form the 2024 edition.
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Martin Brown