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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

Electricity use is dropping for a variety of reasons, not least deindustrialisation.

Here's a chart for the UK, it shows the same trend. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

A good reason for the drop of electricity use is the increasing price of electricity due to fuel increasing prices for extractions + investments in renewable energies

And in the UK that also started happening at about the time they deemphasised nuclear (and fossil fuels, wow!) and started to roll out serious wind power [0]. This isn't compelling evidence that renewables are the more cost effective option - we know nuclear was cost effective at some point, it got to 10% of worlds energy largely through market forces.

I'm not sure what 'deindustrialising' means to you, but it sounds pretty scary to me. Those numbers are like not having electricity on Sundays.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production...

You mean the market forces comprised of massive government subsidies and underestimated decommissioning and accident costs?

"'deindustrialising'"

Heavy industry moving abroad, mainly to china.

There's another variable in the mix. North sea gas running out. The UK has gone from basically being self sufficient in gas to importing most of it. I think you need to tease that out as well before you can definitively say its renewables pushing up the price.

I would also point out that Hinckley point C guaranteed prices are more expensive than the latest wind prices.

And I would finally point out that my 100% renewable electricity tariff was cheaper than the none renewable alternatives, and one of the biggest electricity companies has announced its going 100% renewable electricity, with no price increase to customers. Both of which seem to argue against renewable electricity being that much more expensive.

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