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Comment by gizajob | Hacker News Reader

If you want to know the result of successive Tory governments and forty years of deregulation and mismanagement, then power blackouts and people not being able to heat their homes is it. The Tory agenda now seems fixed upon ensuring the very rich have everything and everyone else has absolutely nothing.

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I agree with the sentiment but its a bit misplaced here. The energy industry in the UK is still heavily regulated and the government do intervene a lot. The main thrust of this has been to push renewables and nuclear to combat climate change. And the response of National Grid has been to plan for that. For example in planning connections for offshore wind, building interconnectors and incentivising backup capacity. They have a good record in maintaining supply and are well funded.

The trouble is that much of our backup depended on gas and interconnectors. Gas has been effected by the war. The interconnector capacity by French nuclear problems. Those nuclear problems have exasperated gas supply problems.

There are steps the government could have taken. In hindsight maybe we should have kept more coal stations available. And gas storage should have been maintained. And we definitely should have built out more onshore wind. But I don't think the system is mismanaged. And we are probably better placed than much of mainland Europe for this winter. We did build some massive offshore windfarms.

We (the Tories) also privatised North sea oil and gas, giving it away for peanuts, and that chicken has now come home to roost.

Our biggest problem is that we are not rich enough and I absolutely agree that the Tory party hold a lot of responsibility for that. Poor choices on oil and gas are a part of that.

Are you sure that this has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine?

If it is down to the Tories then they have really screwed up the EU as well!

https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/energy-...

The thing is that Britain has an independent oil and gas sector though. We're not reliant on imports, so yeah, the blame can be levelled at the Tories for this one.

That oil and gas sector is still reliant on international gas prices, since it's a global market. I'm not sure if it's even possible for a single country to commandeer its fossil fuel production for own use without sparking a few international conflicts.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-118

> With U.S. crude oil production nearly doubling from 2009 to 2015, Congress repealed the crude oil export ban in December 2015—allowing the free export of U.S. crude oil worldwide.

https://ballotpedia.org/Crude_oil_export_ban

Yep, a country can do it and has done it.

You're not reliant on imports, but unless you outlaw the export of energy you're still subject to the global price of energy. If they can export it cheap enough, energy producers would rather sell it to mainland Europe or around the world rather than sell it for less domestically.

Most of the oil and gas from the North sea is exported, at the same time the Tories suggest more fracking as if extra oil and gas wouldn't also be sold.

Britain is at much higher risk because unlike Germany and several other countries on the continent it has virtually no gas storage capacity. Here in Germany we have at least two full months of reserves. Despite Britain's size it has only 1% of the storage capacity that the continent has, even the Dutch storage capacity is nine times higher. One of the reasons? Britain closed one of its largest domestic storage facilities in 2017 for budget reasons. (750 million over ten years)

Obviously the war plays an important role but Tory economic philosophy is well at work here as well, just like in any other public sector.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/how-uk-ener...

The reason for this though is that we do have a marine gas terminal infrastructure... unlike Germany.

The UK also has large percentage of Europe's LNG ports. The "storage" is in the form of LNG tankers constantly docking and unloading here.

How convenient that every problem is the fault of your political opponents.

> The Tory agenda now seems fixed upon ensuring the very rich have everything and everyone else has absolutely nothing.

It has always been thus.

Before the riches of globalisation somewhat masked the damage.

Maybe just maybe the UK as learnt the lesson?

I highly doubt it. Any lessons will be shortlived, and probably will be forgotten by the electorate before the next election

> then power blackouts and people not being able to heat their homes is it

You forgot food banks, people having to choose in between heating and food, and poverty suicides. Also, clowns - psychopathic clowns. Lots of them...

The US is the most deregulated, pro-market, capitalist developed nation of size and we are doing much better than the UK. Jobs are plentiful and our corporate titans continue to dominate global equities.

Maybe the issue in the UK isn’t as simple as tax rates. But you can always try to pivot hard left, maybe it will work this time. Capital does tend to flee when serious attempts to expropriate it occur…

> The US is the most deregulated, pro-market, capitalist developed nation of size

Well, here in the US, I still buy electricity from the government. Consumer energy deregulation in the UK started in the late 80s and electricity has been sold through private companies for years.

It's not so much energy deregulation that's the problem, more the fact that we gave away the resources of oil and gas for peanuts and now pay through the nose for them, compared to say Norway or Saudi Arabia where they oil and gas stayed as a semi-state-owned resource.

Both Texas and California struggle to keep the power on. They both make memes about it, too.

Correct. The UK doesn’t have a large domestic market or much in the way of resources. The US has both.

There are lots of jobs in the UK right now - in fact there is a labor shortage.

What we don't have is large domestic natural resources, or access to the global market guaranteed by force of arms. We used to have that, but we had to give it up due to the Second World War and also morality (admittedly that part came with hindsight and without prerequisite contrition and apologies).

Sacrificing public health systems and educational programs in order to enforce the largest military empire in human history might also have something to do with it.

Europe on the other hand spent their money on populist programs that kept their leftist politicians elected - and now it’s once again counting on good old USA’s help to keep the invading hordes at bay.

The problem Europe has isn't regulation, it's that it doesn't have the continent-scale easily-accessed shale oil the US has. Also that it shares a border with Russia. These problems are geographic, not something a government can change.

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