Re: energy in UK

On Mon, 14 Apr 2025 21:52:35 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
 

On 4/14/25 16:40, john larkin wrote:

On Mon, 14 Apr 2025 11:58:43 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>

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.

>
Radical improvements in fiberoptics, and cheap satellites, have hugely
reduced the cost to transport data. But AI has hugely increased the
energy requirement of computing.
[...]

>
... which again confirms my rule that any resource perceived to be
cheap and abundant will be wasted until it becomes scarce and expensive.
>
Jeroen Belleman

 I can't think of an example of that rule.