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Comment by wood_spirit | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

If people are just going without, then that's generally bad.

They arent going without. Blackouts/brownouts are exceptionally rare in the UK.

That's fine for residential customers. But if there isn't cheap, reliable excess capacity then that inhibits industrial growth. Low economic growth rates cause everyone to go without.

The UK doesn't really rely on industrial growth for the economic growth it has.

Right, that's one of the reasons why UK economic growth has been so anemic.

The UK deindustrialize themselves they stopped making things that reduced the energy that the used to use.

That's not the only way to go without. Cutting back on your electricity usage because your utility bill is getting too high is another way to do it.

Sometimes that's fine if you're just reducing waste. However other times it could mean that you can't keep your house at a reasonable temperature because you can't afford to run your heater/air conditioning enough. That's a form of going without.

Only 9% of the UK is electric only heating [1], so I suspect heating is not a large driver here.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

No it's a catastrophic failure of planning and institutional nerve.

Explain. Nobodys going without power.

UK has some of the highest costs of power in the world. There's a lot of demand destruction there, a lot of industries left. due to high costs.

What were the prices like relative to the rest of the world 20-40 years ago when most of that industry was offshored?

Which industries? If you're going to make that claim be specific. The UK has deindustrialised since the 70s which was nothing to do with electricity costs or availability. Any recent industries leaving are not covered by the stats here so would be pretty irrelevant, which means you're not talking about those, you're talking about something else for it to cover the period between the 70s and now.

4,000 people lost their livelihoods in Hull last month with the owner explicitly citing electricity costs as the reason. More or less every single steel producer, and even refineries, are just gone.

Even parliament acknowledges the effect this has had: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/139767/pdf/

That is the most astoundingly smug and tone-deaf question I have ever heard.

Yeah this doesn't answer the question does it. It's not even what this topic is about. Closing something a couple of months ago isnt moving the needle on the post literally talking about since the 1970s, which is the point I was very clear about making to hopefully avoid someones "well last month X happened" argument which as you full well know is nothing remotely to do with the topic at hand, however sad it may be that people have lost their jobs, which is also not the topic at hand.

Please debate in good faith.

We have expensive, potentially unreliable (if an interconnect fails we are completely fucked so certainly fragile), energy.

Energy is what allows modernity to function, we have made it so expensive that no one can make anything in Britain just in time for hard power and manufacturing to be really important again.

Chemicals, metals, pottery, glass,fertiliser etc are all basically impossible to do competitively in Britain.

Energy has only been expensive recently, and there has been zero issue with power supply beyond silly tabloid fear mongering. So between the 70s and lets say 10 years ago, the argument for expensive power really does not hold true.

There are so many great companies that were in existence in Britain that were as good as any company in the world. And most of them have folded up like a cheap suit. Note: the Brits aren’t alone. The thing that hurts is that Great Britain had access to the North Sea oil and basically squandered it. Their partner/peer across the North Sea, Norway, had a plan and they executed very well to the derision of many economic purists/conservatives even today because they didn’t give the gentry class the share they wanted.

There are many companies that have folded or who are in reduced circumstances in the United States. Many of them were dominant after the war. And they were on top of their game, but despite being on the top, the management team wanted to set themselves up and just wanted to milk the proceeds and primarily stick them into their pockets.

US Steel, Xerox, Kodak, IBM, Intel Microsoft, Motorola Schaumburg, Illinois let’s be honest, most of these companies stagnated at the top, in many areas of modern technology, being on top isn’t the end it’s just the start. of an endless process on a treadmill for as long as you are in existence, as a company. Which is the main reason why Apple had better take the design and engineering of memory in house the treadmill never stops.

The Tory ban on onshore wind is probably responsible for several percent of the price all by itself.

Hopefully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Green_Links will get built and start having an effect before the next election.

Maybe. Volatility I think, ceteris paribus, forces the clearing price up and wind is extremely volatile so there is only so much you can get with having more of it.

But since ceteris ain't paribus, this analysis is woefully incomplete.

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

edit: helpful robot boyfriend plotted it https://i.imgur.com/Hp199vV.png

That link is particularly helpful for UK users, "Content not available in your region".

jevon's paradox says that improved efficiencies would increase consumption

I see a lot of comments here see "per capita" and think "residential consumption" - but the decrease is more indicating of general deindustrialization

If houses get more efficient that doesn’t mean we build more houses? A case where jevons paradox doesn’t apply?

houses using less energy means energy is cheaper for everyone else, f.e. industry

Construction becoming cheaper and higher quality caused us to use way more space per person than 100 or 50 years ago.

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.

About half the homes I've lived in (maybe a dozen?) were built before WW1. Lots of Victorian conversions.

I am in my fifties and have only spent 18 months or so in houses built after 1970 (both of which were, well… bad)

Grew up in a house built in the 50s, university dorm was built in the late 1800s, student housing was Edwardian at the latest except two houses I lived in as a postgrad, then a place built in 1720 or something, current place is 220 years old on the ground floor plus an Edwardian bit, and I suspect the first and second were first built in the late 1800s; nobody actually knows and it looks like it might have been substantially rebuilt.

The ground floor of this place gets cold; the upper floors have conservation-area sash windows but also ultra-modern insulation under the tiles.

I am trying to avoid listed buildings for the next place, but I would be a bit surprised if I bought anywhere as new as the 1970s! Kind of want an old interwar bungalow next.

My house is from the 1870s.

No. The majority of it, still, was built before 1945 (median is 1920 or something)

(The ground floor of my house, which is, to be fair, quite damp, was built 220 years ago; this is not all that remarkable and my neighbours' houses are fifty years older)

1970s houses are pretty energy-efficient by comparison.

But it's worth noting that a surviving 100 year old house in the UK is likely to be warmer than a surviving 100 year old house in the USA; it is not only brick-built but it is also likely to be in a terrace of several houses, so it has some of the heat retention advantage of an apartment.

The "newer" town in my area is a railway town — it is actually a very old settlement but it became a big important town when the railway arrived in the early 1840s. Much of the housing in that town dates back to the 1860s through to the Edwardian era at the latest and is small houses in brick terraces of ten or fifteen houses in a row (usually in staggered terraces of four or five).

These houses are all supplied with natural gas now, and they have increasingly well-insulated roofs (and loft conversion rooms), double and triple glazing, so they have become warmer and pretty energy efficient.

But in the early 1970s, many of them still would not have been on the town gas supply, they would have been burning a lot more coal, and therefore almost all their supplemental heating (cooking, much of their hot water) would have been electric.

(Edited: 1920 is the median)

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