This is poor reporting by Elektrek. The article compares wind and gas costs but completely fails to explain:
* the gas price in the article includes the government’s self-imposed carbon tax. The actual cost of gas (£55) is FAR lower than the £91.20 strike price Milibad has set for wind. And Miliband has locked in this terrible pricing for 20 years!
* there are huge extra costs for wind power that are not accounted for in this quoted strike price. The grid must be upgraded. Expensive new power generation capability will need to be built to compensate for the intermittency of wind
* the stated power capacity of wind generation is a theoretical maximum, and the actual capacity will be much lower in practice.
> The actual cost has to price in the impact of using it.
Is there real evidence the collected tax revenue is actually offsetting carbon emissions?
There's a lot of fraud in carbon credit systems - where often the sole benefit is feeling and/or looking good.
Is this self-imposed tax actually having a real result - or is it just artificially increasing the price of energy? If the latter, then it's not really fair to claim it's the actual cost.
.. you are commenting on an article about how non-carbon-emitting energy options are beating out polluting alternatives, aided by exactly these taxes, so obviously yes, they are working exactly as intended: price signals for the market to get carbon out of the energy system
The purpose of the tax is not to raise money to plant trees, it’s to raise the cost of emissions so that markets
move away from them
TFA's claim is offshore wind prices are 40% cheaper than gas.
The parent comment stated "actual cost has to price in the impact of using it". Most people would agree on this. However, for both claims to be true, the collected tax revenue must be spent offsetting the impact of that gas usage - not simply reducing gas usage (ie. that consumed gas isn't being compensated for).
If the UK government is spending that tax revenue on anything it wants, then it's not the actual cost, is it?
Sorry I don’t follow. Why would the taxes need to be spent offsetting anything? The carbon reduction already happened, because the taxes made this auction choose lower emission alternatives.
If you then also spend the taxes on some form of offsets (if we pretend for the sake of argument that those work) you would have reduced emissions twice. One time seems plenty to say they are doing their job.
>* the gas price in the article includes the government’s self-imposed carbon tax. The actual cost of gas (£55) is FAR lower than the £91.20 strike price Milibad has set for wind.
Is that unreasonable? Carbon dioxide is an externality, and it needs to be accounted for accordingly. Suppose the government is tendering contracts for milk for school lunches. One farm runs a CAFO[1] that pollutes the local river. The other has cows on a pasture that doesn't. Is it that unreasonable for the government to be like "well hang on, the CAFO farm might be cheaper the grass fed farm, but it'll cost us money to clean up all the shit they're dumping into the river, so we're going to impose a tax on the CAFO farm for their pollution"?
When your country emits more CO2 there’s more CO2 in the atmosphere independent of what anyone else does.
So it’s true each individual country only receives a fraction of the negative impact of their own emissions, but that fraction isn’t zero and therefore should be taxed to maximize economic efficiency. Further joining international treaties to agree to collectively tax carbon at a higher rate representing the harm across all those countries is even more economically efficient.
The government is literally comparing a raw price with a price+tax … and what makes this even more disingenuous is that the government themselves applied this tax. AND the tax is absurdly high!
> new power generation capability will need to be built to compensate for the intermittency of wind
The new wind power is mostly idling natural gas power plants, which can spin up on the rare occasions there's no wind in the North Sea. Then the UK only uses the expensive shipped LNG a few days a year. The much cheaper piped natural gas is already allocated.
Are you maybe comparing cost of gas as fuel with total cost? We will have a short period of low gas prices because there is oversupply of LNG projects coming online but that can turnaround easily. Flips in geo politics and crisis are popping up all the time.
The government is turning a £55 gas price into £147 by adding an arbitrary carbon tax, and therefore making it look artificially more expensive than wind.
If we wanted to make an honest analysis here, we would say "gas is significantly less than expensive than the strike price agreed for wind, but some believe the externalities of gas generation could be signficant"
When you're trying to sell wind power to the public as a "cheaper" source of energy than fossil fuels, you've got to be honest with them if you want to win both hearts and minds.
Gas is cheaper, like-for-like.
We impose special taxes on gas, making it artificially more expensive, in order to manipulate the market into reducing use of fossil fuel.
There. That's all that needs to be said. If you're honest with people they're more likely to trust you, and join you in your endeavours.
The high cost of gas is entirely politically-driven, as Reform UK will prove when they take office in 2029.
> the stated power capacity of wind generation is a theoretical maximum, and the actual capacity will be much lower in practice.
Capacity is constant. You're talking about capacity factor, i.e., average utilization. Numbers from 2018 for Danish offshore wind farms show capacity factors approaching 50%. These brand-new turbines mounted on 150 meters+ towers in the middle of the North Sea will absofuckinglutely beat that.
They set themselves up for a fall when they named themselves "Impeccable Style"
The mix of sans and serif fonts on their website is a mess. There's too much negative space, and it's inconsistent. Too many font sizes, and some that are so tiny they're illegible.
In the landing page before/after example, I think the "before" design looks more appealing.
Author here. I ironically spent a lot more time crafting the commands and skill, and not enough time on the landing page. Agree that I overdid it on "editorial look" to match the cheeky domain name. Thank you for the feedback, I've hopefully now improved consistency and negative space issues.
Disagree on being subsumed into the stagnating EU (far better to align with dynamic English-speaking economies with strong growth, like the US).
The EU customs union prevented the UK striking bilateral global free trade deals, and the legacy of EU over-regulation continues to curtail our innovation. The UK has a solid history of global trade and innovation, and it can acheive more if unshackled from the EU.
Austerity is absolutely necessary. If we keep giving the NHS above-inflation pay rises inline with what their staff demand, it would consume the entire annual excess wealth from the productive half of the economy in a matter of decades.
What we need are sensible and pragmatic policies like Reform's scaling back of net zero, for example. The cost of Ed Miliband's net zero measures are an estimated £4.5 trillion over the next 25 years, and a gross cost in excess of £7.6 trillion.
That's more than our entire GDP. Just one example is the 20 year wind farm contracts that Miliband has set up, with a guaranteed energy cost that's nearly double the market rate for gas power (and then on top of that we need to pay for wind curtailment, grid upgrades and expensive backup power plants to cover low wind days).
We were promised that renewables would reduce energy bills. That was a total fiction, and the politicians are to blame.
Green energy could be a massive success story, and it could make our bills cheaper, but inept politicians from the Tories and Labour have focussed instead on vanity metrics.
Y'all got any of those bilateral trade deals yet? Brexit was done and dusted by 2019, it's been 7 years now. Where are those deals you're talking about? Where's your trade deal with English-speaking economies like the US? Heck, not even CANZ want to deal with you guys now.
On the NHS, of course, gut the only thing that's keeping the country sane. I can literally not keep count anymore of the number of skilled doctors and talent who have left the UK after years of practice because the pay was becoming untenable with current living needs. Remove the NHS and you might as well call yourself a client state of the US.
On renewables and net-zero, yes, what we need is more reliance on conventional fuels so that we can be ever more reliant on Russia and the Middle East and the US right? Meanwhile economies like China, India and even your brethren in Australia are racing to put in more renewables capacity because it is just so much more cheaper and efficient now. Those guys are forging real paths to energy independence, unlike you lot.
Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note. Wake me up when Hinckley Point C comes online.
We’ve struck an incredible 71 trade deals since Brexit. And there are more in the pipeline. We genuinely have a better global position now than we did in the customs union.
You think the NHS is “keeping us sane”. Two of my family members have been close to death waiting for an ambulance that never arrived / waiting in a crowded emergency waiting room with internal bleeding for hours. I pay about £10K per year in tax to the NHS for a service that is inferior to the private care I receive for approx £1K a year. The whole system is a shambles and gets worse every year. It underpays and mistreats its staff. It is inefficient.
On your point about renewables, I never claimed we needed more reliance on fossil fuels. I think we should be building more nuclear plants. France is a shining example of how to generate electricity. And then, once we have affordable battery storage (in a few years) we will be able to expand wind/solar in a sensible fashion without our stupid politicians making our energy bills the highest in the developed world.
> Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note.
The UK is #1 in Europe for wind capacity and #2 globally for offshore wind (behind China). And we have the highest energy bills in the developed world
I’m in the UK. There is strong anti-ILLEGAL-immigrant sentiment, because hundreds of thousands of undocumented men originating in Africa and the Middle East have illegally crossed the English Channel from France and then made asylum claims, meaning the UK taxpayer is forced (by treaty) to house them and feed them. These are quite evidently opportunists. A large proportion are young fighting-age men, and most are fleeing countries where there is no current conflict.
As a taxpayer in a cost of living crisis I resent seeing hotels full of these chancers.
And I don’t think women and girls are safe with them around, given the staggering sexual crime statistics
Scala is a fantastic language and in fact I'd say it's the language that proves the article wrong.
Java was the language where "write libraries instead" happened, and it became an absolute burden. So many ugly libraries, frameworks and patterns built to overcome the limitations of a simple language.
Scala unified the tried-and-tested design patterns and library features used in the Java ecosystem into the core of its language, and we're better off for it.
In Java we needed Spring (urghh) for dependency injection. In Scala we have the "given" keyword.
In Java we needed Guava to do anything interesting with functional programming. FP features were slowly added to the Java core, but the power and expressivity of Java FP is woeful compared what's available at the core of Scala and its collections libraries.
In Java we needed Lombok and builder patterns. In Scala we have case classes, named and default parameters and immutability by default.
In the Java ecosystem, optionality comes through a mixture of nulls (yuck) and the crude and inconsistently-used "Optional". In Scala, Option is in the core, and composes naturally.
In Java, checked exceptions infect method signatures. In Scala we have Try, Either and Validated. Errors are values. It's so much more composable.
There's so much more - but hopefully I've made the point that there's a legitimate benefit in taking the best from a mature ecosystem and simple language like Java and creating a new, more elegant and complete language like Scala.
I think you misunderstood the article (or only read the first couple paragraphs). The author sets the stage with the statement in the article title (a quote heard from other people), but shows that those fancy language features in some languages are exactly why rich, easy-to-use libraries can be built. And that some of these rich, easy-to-use libraries simply cannot be built in some languages that lack those features.
> Much better solution is to help you junior dev solve the problem
Meanwhile there are five other subordinates and all the overhead that you're neglecting while you fiddle with your dev environment trying to get started on the task, as you've been away from direct engineering for a while.
* the gas price in the article includes the government’s self-imposed carbon tax. The actual cost of gas (£55) is FAR lower than the £91.20 strike price Milibad has set for wind. And Miliband has locked in this terrible pricing for 20 years!
* there are huge extra costs for wind power that are not accounted for in this quoted strike price. The grid must be upgraded. Expensive new power generation capability will need to be built to compensate for the intermittency of wind
* the stated power capacity of wind generation is a theoretical maximum, and the actual capacity will be much lower in practice.
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