I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).<p>But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.<p>I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants.<p>If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.
There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.
> There's a weird "degrowth" mindset<p>Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.<p>This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
>This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me.<p>I assume you're in good health, not poor, in a stable living arrangement, etc. The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer. Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
> "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house"<p>The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and most
likely in the world. [0]<p>Roughly 30% of the stock is single-skin, without a cavity. While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons. The same goes for the roofs of these houses; although you will find many companies willing to spray your roof with foam or other forms of thermal sealing, those roofs were never designed to be insulated, causing other potentially catastrophic problems once it's been done.<p>Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses, but no matter; the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps, despite them being incompatible with the existing pipework and radiators.<p>0: <a href="https://files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the-United-Kingdom_Report_BRE-Trust.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the...</a>
Human development is all about removing minor inconveniences. It's how we progress from 0 climate control and lacking clean drinking water to how we live today. Here's a good article on the subject: <a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-royalty-and-dont-know-it" rel="nofollow">https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-roy...</a>
You seem to be missing the human element in your calculation. It's not just power plants and the machines that use the electricity from them. The machines are built for humans, who want their clothes washed today so they can be folded today and ready for tomorrow. They want the dishes washed today so they can be put back on the shelves before tomorrow's breakfast.
And, by the way, grime on dishes gets more difficult to remove once it has sat drying, waiting for the machine to start.
We also want everything in single use plastic containers and to drive big cars a mile down the road to buy groceries, but there's better solutions for those things that people are buying into more and more.<p>I'm not saying human convenience should entirely take a backseat to machine efficiency; to your point, the very existence of these things is to make human life easier. My frustration is that Western approaches to these problems seem uniquely resistant to ever altering behavior for the sake of reducing ecological impact.<p>(Dishwashers were a poor example for me to use anyway, they're remarkably efficient; a better one might be water usage: it's best to water plants in either the early morning or late evening, so the water doesn't evaporate as much, but people often prefer to do so during the day, which coincides with high household water usage for showers/laundry/whatever. though, I routinely run my dishwasher overnight and have never had issues with grime, so long as I prime the hot water feed.)
Then they can pay the higher rate for energy during the day, and if enough people want this it will be practical to build infrastructure to support them. This issue is they want it and they don't want to pay for it.
Why <i>not</i> bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online? Because it's expensive? Or because we let oil companies and land owners make the rules?<p>Making peoples lives worse to save money is a capitalist mindset and I don't understand why so many left wing people believe in it. The promise of socialism was always <i>higher</i> living standards for the working class (99 percent) at the expense of millionaires.
> Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online?<p>I'd argue there's more ecologically sound ways to supply the desired energy demand in combination with shifting some of the load away from peak times. I don't think that strictly correlates to "a lower standard of living" so much as "there's minor behavioral changes that would more efficiently use existing resources."<p>> Making peoples lives worse to save money<p>This is exactly the mentality that I'm surprised by: I suggest shifting high energy use slightly and your reaction is "that will make my life worse." Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight for your towels/sheets/whatever if it meant 50% cheaper power?
Today's leftists seem to not have any coherent philosophy at all. It's not better on the other side. Everything seems to be about grievances and assigning blame rather than rationally discussing practical solutions.
That is definitely the impression one would get if one watched Fox News.<p>If one consumed nonfiction media one might get a different impression.
There's a significant misanthropic sentiment on the left stemming from, among other things, the mid-century environmental movement. It creates for a maddening incoherency, but I guess that's typical of all politics at scale.<p>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.
It's quite eccentric to suggest the left is misanthropic when the right majors in racism, violence, short-sighted selfishness, and contempt for the weak, poor, and unusual - none of which are particularly humanitarian.<p>Making your own planet less ecologically stable is certainly an interesting choice, but probably not the best long-term bet for anyone's kids.
Y’all are equally incomprehensible to us. Drastically reduced immigration, ineffective policies for incentivizing pregnancy, and no cash incentives for having multiple children (the one intervention that has been found to have a real, albeit modest impact on TFR). Degrowth under those conditions is all but certain.
Trump and doge once fired all the nuclear inspectors.
When fertility rates fall below replacement rate, some amount of degrowth is all but inevitable. Probably multiple generations’ worth, assuming things remain at least nominally normal.<p>That few in government are readying for that and are rearranging deck chairs instead is not particularly reassuring.
There's two things that are simultaneously true: 1) improving efficiency of electricity use is often the most cost effective use of a dollar. Better insulation, more efficient appliances, etc. are choices made purely on financial merits. 2) We're going to need to greatly increase electricity consumption in order to decarbonize.<p>People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a <i>completely</i> different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.<p>I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.<p>Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there <i>are</i> politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.
Antivaxxers have always been heavily promoted by bot farms. [1]<p>Degrowthers, who have had some reasonable successes like the Passivhaus movement, are opposed by those same bot farms.<p>[1] <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6137759/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6137759/</a>
Here in the UK the debate around energy is really unbelievably stupid.<p>It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production.<p>Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues.<p>It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad".<p>Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.
Given that the alternative is trying to communicate with someone who thinks that the physical-goods aspects of our economy can grow exponentially forever...<p>I'm going to go with the degrowth, or the steady-state economics guys, they are more likely to be closer to the mark of what is actually achievable in the real world.
But, climate change!
> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.<p>I've seen proposals that are less intermittent availability and more incentivized pushing of consumption towards periods of lower demand. We already have all these computers in our appliances, might as well let them do reasonable things ... your freezer probably does a self-defrost cycle triggered by a timer and/or a door open counter, but why not wait up to X hours for off-peak pricing to do it. Or push the set points down a degree or two during off-peak pricing, to reduce energy use during on-peak. Also works for HVAC subject to user comfort, and water heaters if you're careful and avoid high temperatures that cause injury or low temperatures that allow microorganism growth.<p>Of course, that's science fiction... all the communication in appliances is designed to collect data and serve targeted ads. :( So very few appliances know if current pricing is peak/off peak or when it will change.
<i>You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries.</i><p>Firstly, that doesn't sound like a particularly hard thing to accept if it genuinely helps. "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment.<p>However, regardless of that, this isn't new. There have been time-of-day based electricity tariffs for decades that are aimed at incentivising people to do more demanding things at particular times e.g. when industry isn't using the power. For example, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7</a>
"I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment."<p>The environment is going to be destroyed anyway, since the rest of the world will continue to use their washing machine whenever they want. [1]<p>The current European approach to climate change is completely bonkers and will only make Europeans poorer and miserable.<p>[1] <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=CHN~IND~RUS~OWID_AFR~OWID_EU27~GBR" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...</a>
> since the rest of the world will continue to use their washing machine whenever they want<p>No they have even less money than Europe. They'll do the smart thing, which is using electricity when it's cheap.
It already has made them poorer and miserable. The Draghi report was all about how they were poorer due to these things. Of course they decided not to follow the recommendations.
Can you provide a source for either of your claims?
Thiel might have been right about the greens - the degrowth is so anti-human and destructive to society.
The decline in energy from 2003-present lines up nicely with the phase out of incandescent lights in favour of CFLs and of CFLs in favour of LEDs.<p>Lets say a house typically had 5 60W bulbs on for 8hrs a day, now replaced with an 8W bulb. That would be a 2 kWH reduction, which roughly corresponds to the drop shown in the data.<p>EDIT: actually now that I think about it, 2kWh per-household is probably less than 1kWh per-capita. It's still a good chunk though!
Street Lighting. Sodium lamps used 250-500W and LEDs are 50-150W. Councils have been replacing the former with the latter ever since it was possible, as the savings were apparent after only a few years (and, the early investors could sell the old bulbs to authorities who did not have the funds to invest)
Power management (ACPI) in desktop computers also arrived in the late 1990s. Power saving sleep modes have a big impact.<p>Computer fleets across a country do not upgrade immediately so the lag may contribute.<p>And ACPI was just one energy saving initiative of that era.
There is also a substantial saving in household appliances from all the EU laws as well that have pretty substantially cut power consumption, including a lot of computers and devices at idle.<p>The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.
In the summer. In the winter the heat from the bulbs would help heating the homes, offices, stores, etc.
Or you could use all the saved energy to run a heat pump, which is even more efficient.
Heating the ceiling with the light is an extremely inefficient approach to heating a room.
Recently installed a bunch of incandescent bulbs because I had them at the bottom of a drawer.<p>I was surprised how the small amount of infrared from them makes rooms feel more pleasant to be in. It's a warmth on the skin, rather like having a fireplace going.<p>If I weren't paying the electricity bill, I would totally fit them everywhere.
the heat rises out of your baseboard just the same. If you’re heating your house resistive electric, you can just leave everything powered on all winter.
The linked iea data shows that the reduction is roughly 50/50 industrial and residential. So the deindustrialisation narrative is part of the story but improved efficiency at home is also a significant factor.
If you import 12 million people in 20 years, your energy generation, water provision, and housing affordability are all going to fall off a cliff vs demand.
It’s just plain expensive thanks to the shitty price everything by most expensive source method. Of course people minimise use<p>Currently paying 0.33 usd a unit.
Look into a battery + inverter + optional solar on a time of use tariff, you can be always off peak. Payback probably isn't very long.
Solar is great. I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense.<p>In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?<p>There are other reasons to do this, but purely on the financial side, I'd want to see the numbers on this one. Again, this isn't about solar, the claim was about battery + inverter + time-of-use paying for itself.
Grid scale BESS (battery energy storage system) in the UK is growing fast, because it makes financial sense. There's one that just expanded from 100MWh/100Mw to 475MWh/350MW: <a href="https://www.pacificgreen.com/energy-parks/energy-park-case-study/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pacificgreen.com/energy-parks/energy-park-case-s...</a> . It's easy to run the numbers, easier to make a payback calculator with AI. Take a look at the Anker E5000 / Ecoflow Stream 5000, and run the numbers yourself, I'd be interested to see what the payback would be for you.
In the UK, solar is fairly ineffective in the winter as the sun barely comes over the horizon for not many hours a day.
I import more than I export in December and January, but for every other month of the year it’s the reverse by some margin, and my annual electricity bill is net negative, and the installation cost will be paid off in 7 years. The numbers would be even better in, say, Spain, but they are perfectly adequate here.
True, but if you get cheap power from solar for the rest of the year, and charge the battery from the grid off peak when there's no solar to charge, you should end up paying less than just the standard rate.
Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off.<p>Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.<p>One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
Seems generally like a good thing? I know the biggest difference I can think of in my lifetime is just how much better insulated houses are. Not on a par with Scandinavia, but still massively improved from even the peak electricity consumption period in the charts of 2005. I wonder how much that contributes to the overall reduction in demand.
It can be good or bad depending on what's driving the change. Improving efficiency, assuming it comes at a reasonable cost, is generally good.<p>If people are just going without, then that's generally bad.
Only 9% of the UK is electric only heating [1], so I suspect heating is not a large driver here.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/articles/census2021howhomesareheatedinyourarea/2023-01-05" rel="nofollow">https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...</a>
No it's a catastrophic failure of planning and institutional nerve.
Just an observation, but my first thought was how energy demand strongly correlates with economic growth and wondered if the article could be cast in that light. Might be fun to overlay that graph with UK gilt rates<p>edit: helpful robot boyfriend plotted it <a href="https://i.imgur.com/Hp199vV.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/Hp199vV.png</a>
Isn’t most of the housing in the UK from the 1970’s too?
No? It would be pretty remarkable if the majority of all UK housing was built in a single decade. If you meant to say 'from before the 1970s' then that might be a more defensible claim. But old houses can be upgraded with double glazing, insulation, etc.
jevon's paradox says that improved efficiencies would <i>increase</i> consumption<p>I see a lot of comments here see "per capita" and think "residential consumption" - but the decrease is more indicating of general deindustrialization
The incandescent to LED switch is a major factor, but most things have become more efficient, a Sky box uses 30x less power than the 90s.
I mean, what do you expect out of a resource poor island? The only reason the UK was on the map is because it has intelligent, well spoken people that could make deals and exploit the resources of their colonies. That’s not enough when you don’t have colonies. It’s reverting to the mean.
I wonder if they're paying less than the 70s?
In the '70s you weren't guaranteed to get the electricity you paid for:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week</a><p>> From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Services deemed essential (e.g. hospitals, telephone switchboards, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses) were exempt. Television companies were required to cease broadcasting at 22:30 to conserve electricity [...] The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974.<p>But nonetheless: <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-electricity-data" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...</a><p><pre><code> Year Avg consumer price in today's money
1975 13p/kWh
1985 15p/kWh
1995 n/a
2005 11p/kWh
2015 17p/kWh
2025 26p/kWh
</code></pre>
We're currently paying a lot more than usual because:<p>1) we have to pay off operators for the billions of foreign investment they put into new wind and solar farms and grid storage batteries. If we didn't tempt them with a good RoI, they'd invest elsewhere, and we'd still be burning coal. The cost of this is going down year on year: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_energy)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...</a><p>2) we're paying for new transmission capacity and replacing worn out transmission route. The fact we don't <i>already</i> have it, which we could've had by charging more for electricity in the 2000s and building it out decades ago, is why today we face enormous curtailment costs today, as we can't get all this wind power from where it's generated to where it's consumed: <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottleneck-that-explains-britains-power-crisis/" rel="nofollow">https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottlene...</a><p>3) our market arrangement is based on everyone bidding to supply power, and we pay everyone who generates the same rate as the highest <i>necessary</i> bidder. Thus the moment that there isn't enough wind power, or there is but it can't get to the region it's needed (see point 2), in come the gas turbines and given that Russia's trying to destroy Ukraine, gas is <i>astronomically</i> expensive. The sooner we solve our bottlenecks and decommission all the gas turbines, the better.
Isn't this a good thing? I mean, is there a direct correlation between electricity usage and country = better?
Over the 20th century, people switched from fuel based lighting, heating and cooking to electric, and acquired laundry machines, dishwashers, fridges, TVs, air conditioning etc etc. So electricity was a pretty good proxy for a certain aspect of quality of life. It might be a less useful measure in the developed world in the 21st century as we have kind of plateaued on energy-intensive appliances and are more focused on efficiency, and because other aspects of quality of life like pollution, work, mental health etc may be more salient.
We may genuinely have the worst energy market in the developed world. It's going to get cheaper and reliable any day soon - George monbiot told me so it must be true.